Imagery – the use of vivid or figurative language to represent objects, actions, or ideas. It seems obvious, right? But I couldn’t think of this at all today in boot camp when we had to come up with a def. for imagery. All I had was “A group of words that is supposed to make you think of something else.” Sigh.
Category Archives: poetry
what goes around, comes around
Today was Day 2 of the WriSem department orientation / boot camp. The grad students are all giving short fifteen-minute presentations on poems or short stories from the syllabus of the undergraduate class we teach. I go tomorrow – mine is Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Sunday Afternoons.”
Last night, I dreamed that I was giving my grad student reading, and that instead of reading poetry, I read some AC/DC lyrics in a slow, poetical voice. It was fabulous.
She was a fast machine,
She kept her motor clean…
Conceptual Poetry? Conceptual Poetry! It can’t be a coincidence that after stumbling out of today’s orientation (so much literature…so much literature..) I had a two-bar stretch of Round And Round stuck in my head.
I knew right from the beginning
That you would end up winning…
I can only assume that this is all a last-ditch effort on the part of my brain to avoid finishing a poem I consider good enough for workshop, which starts next week. Other similar avoid-the-issue-entirely ideas I have had this summer have included setting a junk-mail letter from Stanford into lines and bringing it in, or showing up with a blank page. Not good ideas. But fun to contemplate, in the same way that you contemplate setting a mattress on fire.
His employment at Harvard was terminated
1. In September 1938, Very, a tutor of Greek at Harvard, had a mystical experience; he told his students that the Holy Spirit was speaking through him and that the end of the world was at hand. His employment at Harvard was terminated, and he was sent briefly to an asylum, though many considered him sane. Both of these poems date from his visionary period.
– Footnote on Jones Very’s poems “The Dead” and “The Lost,” from the No5thed.rton AnPoetrythology (1044)
“Why can’t “I” be imagined on the page?”
Why do I feel pressure from peers to remove the narrative “I” from my poems? Why am I encouraged to remove the narrator’s intensely personal details? Why can’t “I” be imagined on the page?
[…]
As a gay person, I don’t believe I have the luxury of removing “me” from my poems. And, frankly, I’m tired of worrying about being relegated to the margins of contemporary poetry for writing about the body, for writing with emotion, or for using the narrative “I.” Recently I saw a news article about a politician in Alabama who is introducing a bill to the legislature with the hopes of removing all public funding from libraries & universities that have books with gay or bisexual characters in them or that promote homosexuality as a valid lifestyle. My first thought was: This is absurd. Just because we aren’t talked about doesn’t mean that we don’t exist. Then it occurred to me: If we aren’t talked about, do we really exist?
– Aaron Smith on Sharon Olds, from The Very Act Of Telling: Sharon Olds and Writing American Poetry. He is speaking about his response to Olds’s poem I Go Back To May 1937.
nothing less renumerative
“…I spend most of my time writing poetry, for example, and there is nothing less renumerative.”
Vikram Seth, in the GUARDIAN. Did you know he was writing a sequel to A SUITABLE BOY and not tell me? You have to tell me these things.
I have the greatest respect for Seth (I am kind of a superfan of his – and I took a seminar with him, once, and I know that he walks the walk) but poets have to stop acting like they took out the patent on poverty. In that particular competition, poetry may have a full house, but theater has four of a kind.
more pigeonholes
I have been answering the question “What poets do you like?” a lot, so I made a cheat sheet for myself. If I could have only one poet, now and forever, it would be Auden, though.
I didn’t include Eliot in this list because it’s like saying “Shakespeare.” I feel about Eliot the way that one of my colleagues feels about Bishop – there is no me without him.
If I could get everyone who looks at this post to check out only one of these people, and be Awed, it would definitely be Atsuro “they broke the mold” Riley. So cool. Like this earth-shatteringly good poem, HUTCH. Read that one first, and then read CLARY. It’s very Faulkner. He has a book coming out in 2010 – he should have all the hype Pynchon does. He wins.
This is the short list. There are many more.
BUZZWORDS
narrative, accessible, dramatic, dialogue, monologue, persona, rhyme, free meter*
OLD DUDES
Sophocles, Aristophanes
John Donne
GM Hopkins
John Clare
W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden
Langston Hughes
Robert Frost
Edgar Lee Masters, Dylan Thomas, anyone who ever wrote a monologue-based verse play…
LESS OLD DUDES
Phillip Larkin
Mark Strand
CK Williams
EVEN LESS OLD DUDES
Atsuro Riley
M.att.hew Dickman**
Brian Teare
Marshall Mathers
NON-DUDES
Sara “I’m better than you think I am” Teasdale
Sonia Sanchez
Wendy Cope**
G. Calvocoressi
E. Freytag (going to knock all our socks off. Already has.)
Okay, and there’s this contemp woman who wrote this poem in POETRY a few years ago where the last lines were “while I think of John Clare / and decide to find out if I could be lucky in death,” I may have the verb tenses wrong, and she was so good, and I have forgotten her name and can’t find her or the poem. But she should be on this list too. This is a problem I often have – I remember last lines but not first, and you can’t search by them.
I guess I could call them and ask.
* I just made that up! I like it.
** don’t hate me cause I’m popular. Hate me cause I’m good.
Things I write poems about
Theme Index: (Dara Weinberg, 1982 – ?)
Theater
Travel
Sweat
Rain
Rot / decay
Missed Connections
Sublets/roomshares
Apartments For Rent
Men Seeking Women
Women Seeking Men
Furniture For Sale
Free
jobs: writing
Conversations W. The Poem
Family
Los Angeles
Nature (but only in relationship to Los Angeles)
Cars
Cali
Guitar-driven rock music
The Greek Dramatists
Overheard Dialogue
Did I Say Theater Already?
(thank you Rachel for the list idea.) Very narrow, isn’t it – and limited to the topics in my own life. Knew this, but realized it more strongly when I saw how much better the fiction writers were than the poets at trivia. Doing fiction leads you into research, to knowledge. Poetry – at least contemp., at least most of it – often leads you to your self.
This is a problem, isn’t it? There should be more poems that lead you to knowledge, to news, like a novel – nouvelles – news.
But I am learning that coming into writing with the attitude of “I should be doing X Y Z” is ineffective. The only way to write is to write the poems you have to write.
Still, I am going to give myself extra points for every poem that expands the topic list.
no, not the IPhone app.
So it is Wikipediaed: couplet, tercet, quatrain, quintain, sextain, septet, octave. Throws me off a bit…I would have guessed quintet, sextet, and octet instead of quintain, sextain and octave. Also, I want names for one and nine-line stanzas.
I have to learn the names of everything, now, to teach. This is a pain. It’s not that I don’t like stanzas, or meter, I just find that calling them by their proper names removes both my enthusiasm for them and my ability to execute them. I love lines that have eight syllables and four beats, but use the word “tetrameter,” and my interest in them shrivels up.
I do like the names of form structures (sonnet, sestina, etc.) for some reason. But I don’t like theme categories (lyric, narrative).
Anyways, this is beside the point. It is not about what I do or don’t like, any more, it’s about being a teacher of poetry stuff who knows what they’re talking about. Terms, terms, terms. It is only within the last two years that I have memorized the difference between simile and metaphor – and it’s about as shaky as my ability to go back and forth between stage left/stage right and house left/house right.
it wasn’t a disaster
I think you could probably replace (Write it!) with (Wait for it!) in the E-Bish villanelle. Did I mention that in the writing class I observed, the students were trying to guess what a villanelle was, and one of them called it a “tritina” – like a sestina but in 3’s? Awesome guess. Someone should make up a tritina.
Anyway, this is the rewrite I’m proposing:
Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
The art of losing’s not too hard to master
Though it may look like (Wait for it!) disaster.
You have to read it with a lot of emphasis.
A: Can you make the ‘wait’ more operative in ‘wait for it’?
B: (horrified) Are you giving me a line reading?
A: Uh…no. I’m telling you the line reading.
Actually, playwrights/poets/writerthings italicizing/bolding/underlining words that they think should be emphasized almost always leads to bad line readings. It trips up the natural rhythm of the line. It inevitably makes the delivery sound very fake. I’ve never seen it work. In fact, “(Write it!)” is the exception that proves the rule.
But “(Wait for it)” is much better. It now only remains to add the phrase “Oh, snap!” to a famous contemporary poem.
Yes, And.
The Harry Potter / Laurel, MD / DC / Capitol Fringe / Our Mutual Friend extravaganza was fabulous. And then I came home and I did what I always do when things are going well, which is cook enough food for the whole week, all in one day.
Today, I got to observe a section of the creative writing class I will be teaching in the fall, and then had lunch with the teacher, one of my cohort (fiction, not poetry.) It was really helpful.
And then I found the practice rooms and the rehearsal rooms. So large, so beautiful. A night-black Yamaha grand, in a room bigger than some rooms I’ve lived in, with dark blue walls and a dark yellow curtain on one side.. It could have been the rehearsal room for a PBS special.
I played scales like a trash compactor collapsing – starting at the two opposite ends and meeting in the middle and then going back out. And then I played and played and played until my hands started hurting.
You know what I realized about piano, today? I have always had such a hard time personificating/anthropomorphizizizing the piano. It’s too big, and too mechanical. It’s not a he, or a she. It’s not a living creature, to me, which makes it very difficult for me to connect with it. I think at the times when I have quit piano, I have been caught up in this. I have felt like the instrument resisted connecting with me as I wanted it to.
But I realized, today – maybe it took playing a grand again to realize it, so enormous – the piano is not a human. The piano is a location – like a basketball court, or a track, or a theater. You can love it, but you just have to realize it’s not a person.
To love playing it, the person you have to love is the composer, or the singer, or your self. You can’t love the instrument, any more than you can love a football field. You can only love the music. The game. You just have to get out there and run, every day, and eventually you love yourself running.
And I wrote a poem today that I like. It is about theater. I think that everything I write is going to be about theater. This will stop me from having this same conversation about “Am I doing X or Y?” all the time. I am doing both.
Dara Weinberg 