Category Archives: poetry

gradschool, L'Internet, poetry

gymnasium

We had our first graduate poetry workshop yesterday. I obviously can’t say much about that in here, either, but I can say that we read this poem, Decorum, by Stephen Dunn, and that anyone who has ever been in a writing workshop or had thoughts about one should read it. It’s very funny.

Today we had another meeting of our other graduate poetry seminar. A point made in it that I thought was share-able with this blog is that some poets require more interpretation than others. We went on to discuss how this is not a judgment of quality; it simply means that the poets who need less interpretation tend to get assigned in classes less and get read by readers more.

This seems like an obvious point, but I am going to share it with my students tomorrow, as a way of explaining why the poems on our syllabus are all so thorny, and the poems which many of them already know and love – The Road Not Taken, or Directive, for example – are not included. (Although maybe it does need interpretation. Never speak too soon with Frost seeming simple to understand…)

Today I implemented an efficiency change I’ve been wanting to make for awhile – I shared all my class handouts, as Google documents, with all my students. This works so much better than me emailing everything to them as attachments. It’s fantastic.

Something else I would like to do for them, eventually – well, two somethings –

1) make some kind of online timeline of all the poets we study, so they can see the overlapping dates of publication and of existence. I think this is a project I could get the students to help me work on. I just have to start it.

2) start building a shared site of poems we love – me, them, everyone. That way they can share their favorite poems with each other even when we don’t have time to discuss everything in class. We could even do this across all the sections.
Hmmm. (I know it should be a wiki. I know. I am familiar. Really.) Sounds like more work. Maybe next week.

Today we (the grad students) were also paid for the first time, and there was much rejoicing. Finally, today, I am going to bed at a decent hour. Yes.

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poetry

a relationship to syntax

… the line exists not because it has a certain pattern of stresses, a certain number of syllables, or an irregular number of stresses and syllables: the line exists because it has a relationship to syntax. You might say that a one-line poem doesn’t really have anything we can discuss as a line, except inasmuch as we feel its relationship to lines in other poems. We need at least two lines to begin to hear how the line is functioning.

– J. Longenbach, “Line and Syntax,” The Art Of The Poetic Line, 28

J.L. is starting to occupy a position in my head of symbolic awesomeness. I find myself wondering, in times of trial, “Does J. Longenbach have to do stuff like this?” or “If J. Longenbach were here, I bet he’d tell (X) where they could (Y)..”

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books, poetry

albatross? albatross.

Book Thing hoard #2, from the Sunday expedition:

1) The Elements of Style
2)Literary Criticism, Plato to Dryden, ed. Allan H. Gilbert
3) The Vicar of Wakefield and Other Writings, Oliver Goldsmith (a hotbed* of prurient and/or offensive chapter subheadings. Looks really trashy.)
4) Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, by Frederick Nims
5) A back issue of Parabola: The Magazine Of Myth and Tradition

This weekend, I revised the same poem twice. This isn’t a lot of revision, by anyone’s standards, but each version was so different that it felt really exhausting. We (Les Poets) then held a pre-workshop workshop. Only a few folks came, so we had a lot of time for each poem. I got excellent comments. I am going to have to revise the entire thing again.

In other news, I am trying to gauge the enthusiasm of the cohort to have some kind of reading-the-RIME-OF-THE-ANCIENT-MARINER-aloud party, and people have been a little lukewarm. I guess it’s not the greatest poem ever written, but I really want to read it aloud. I believe that the last time I did this was senior year of high school, with the poetry/philosophy group I had with T, M, M, A, D, W, and others.

* in TA orientation, someone referred to Garland Hall, a central admin building, as a “hotbed of activity,” and it sounded so potentially lascivious.

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gradschool, poetry

the poetic contraption

…the best poets who fought for the legitimacy of free verse in the early years of the twentieth century were not trying to make us choose between apparently different kinds of poetry; they were attempting to open our ears to a wider range of poetic possibilities. Following them, a poet like Justice learned as much from Williams and Pound as he did from Shakespeare and Keats, and one of the most important lessons was that the language of a particular poem may or may not demand the whole tool kit. If rhyme is jettisoned from a poem, what tactic must flex its muscles in order to keep the poetic contraption in the air? Meter. And if meter is foresworn? Line. And if line is abandoned? Syntax. And if syntax is abandoned? Diction. Sometimes it will be necessary for a poet to remember every tool in the kit; at other times it will be equally crucial to forget them, though nothing can be forgotten if it has not first been remembered.

– James Longenbach, “Line and Syntax,” The Art Of The Poetic Line, 24

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Baltimore, film, gradschool, poetry, writing

it must be some sort of diabolical mind control

On Wednesday and Thursday of last week, I had individual meetings with about two-thirds of the students in my class. I’ll meet the rest next week. We talked about their artistic tastes and their writing experiences. It took a lot of time to meet with all of them, but I hope it will be worth it in terms of establishing a good workshop relationship.

On Friday, we discussed Elizabeth Bishop’s “In The Waiting Room” and Seamus Heaney’s “Digging,” and got into a spirited discussion about enjambment.

And thus far I have obeyed the Department of Health and Safety mandate of taking at least 24 consecutive hours entirely off from all kinds of work each week: from Friday at 2 pm till Saturday at 2 pm, all I did was watch movies and hang out with friends. It was wonderful. We went to the Evergreen House, a very creepy museum and house belonging to a Baltimore railroad baron’s family, and saw screenings of the animated TELL-TALE HEART and the live-shmaction THE RAVEN projected outside, as part of a Poe exhibit. We also saw an old edition of Poe with illustrations, and one of his signed letters. The man’s handwriting had more flourishes than a fencing match.

And then I also watched TANPOPO, which I would watch again this very second. You couldn’t pay me enough to sit through THE RAVEN again, except for the magician’s duel section – which I would like to get an isolated clip of. Clearly, Dr. Scarabus’s powers extend far beyond the walls of the castle.

We were hoping someone would read Poe’s The Raven aloud, but no one did – so that situation was rectified later in the evening through recitation. I have never read so much poetry aloud as I have here, with these people. It’s great. The Raven, as a poem, is perhaps just slightly too long – but, my God, there are great lines in it.

Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!

I also read Annabel Lee last night, and, as usual, it blew what remained of my mind. Did you know it was one of the last complete poems composed by Poe? I did not.

I am now sort of back on the clock, now. I have a new first draft going. It has to use imagery – we have assignments for workshop – and, as you all know, imagery is my weakness. So this was good for me to try. In writing the draft, I found some stuff I would not normally have found.

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gradschool, poetry, quotes

the simultaneous creation and disruption of pattern

This is from a section where he’s comparing the lines of several different poets – but he pulls back to make some larger statements which I love.

Both Whitman and Williams are creating a particular relationship between line and syntax, and both poems depend, as all poems do, on the interplay of what changes with what stays the same – the simultaneous creation and disruption of pattern. […]
…everything I’ve said about the fluctuating relationship of syntax and line in Williams’s free verse applies equally well to Shakespeare’s blank verse. Attention to the line tends to undermine a narrow preference for one form or another of poetry, for if you can hear what line is doing to your experience of the syntax in a free-verse poem, then you can hear what line is doing in a metered poem.

– James Longenbach, “Line and Syntax,” The Art Of The Poetic Line, 18

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poetry

your attention please,

for the awesome: I am about to begin a series of quotes from one of the required books for my grad poetry seminar, The Art Of The Poetic Line, by James Longenbach. I’m going to spread them out so that if I am a little MIA what with starting classes, there will still be poetical observations to be found. This book is one of the most useful technical poetry books I have ever read, and very entertaining. I have been carrying it around with me all the time.

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Baltimore, gradschool, poetry

diseases of the poem-organ

After completing WriSems boot camp, I am much more comfortable using the words “poetry” and “poet” to refer to myself. We had to identify which genre we were in so many times that the words lost some of their preciousness. I went to a party with a bunch of med students, and got to be part of this conversation:

“What’s your specialty?”

“Gastroenterology. What’s yours?”

“Poetry.”

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