When It’s Hard, It’s Good

I’ve been reading a lot of Thomas Merton lately and in The Thomas Merton Reader in the essay “Poetry and Contemplation” he is very stern about what poems should not be written.  Be advised:  He speaks of Christian poetry and I am speaking about poetry in general and thus expropriate his idea and apply it more generally than he might be expected to do.

Merton writes of poems written from mere intention-- that is poetry merely willed by the poet-- as being better off not written.  There is a necessary indefinable aspect of poetry without which it is not genuine.  This aspect is at once ineffable, inspired, Providential, unspeakable and without it the poem is inauthentic.  The poem simply cannot exist wholly at the will of the poet.  The poem is beyond the poet’s control and until it achieves that, and the poet achieves the ability to let it happen, the result will be less than desirable.

Fortunately, it is the out-of-control part that makes continued poetic effort possible.  It is because the poet is trying to speak illimitable truth in limitable language that he must never be satisfied and will always know the joy of being unfinished, of being able to say it better.

Do not get me wrong—I strongly advocate practicing writing, practicing forms, writing a lot with or without inspiration because, as I have so often averred, the craft of the poet demands and warrants fully as much practice as the concert pianist who labors over his keyboard hours a day.  But, as with the great pitfall of workshops,  what is thus produced is practice, not the final product.

Without the practice you are unlikely to make the best possible attempt to at least believably indicate the presence of truth in your poems and, without the accretion brought to the poem by the ineffable, the poem will ultimately fail.

As Woody Guthrie shouts:  It's a-hard, and it's hard, ain't it hard, great God…

It’s hard and, by God, it’s great too.

So long for now.

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The Ignorance of the Poet

There is a certain ignorance the poet must achieve if she is to write honestly; and it has various levels.  One is the ignorance of the outcome of the poem at the outset—the “no surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader” Robert Frost tells us about.  This is axiomatic enough to be trite although we need reminding every now and then.  Another is the ignorance of truth as writeable—it cannot be written.

One of my pet peeves is the workshop leader who urges us to “write what cannot be written” and then lets us off as we think that the unsayable is something we’re merely afraid to say and that must be said.  This is therapy, not poetry.  Since the truth cannot be written, does not exist in words, what we try to do is create an experience of the presence of truth.  This is not doctrinal in any way although I do draw from Thomas Merton’s Inner Experience in my phrasing.

When I first read “time held me green and dying/though I sang in my chains like the sea” by Dylan Thomas (in “Fern Hill”) I was gripped by the experience of truth and became a devotee of it on the spot (although I tried not to be for a long time).  I can break down the words and phrasing all I want, interpret the poem all I want but I cannot speak, put into words, the truth of the poem for it lies outside its own words.  This is true with every great poem, the ones that move us in ways we cannot and need not explain and understand.  At best, we can only be present with the poem—but that’s enough, in fact it may be all.

I cannot tell you how to achieve this in your own poems but I can tell you that in order to write you must write a lot.  You must write beyond therapy.  You must write until you are unconscious of your knowledge.  As Matt in The Fantasticks says, “I defy knowledge and achieve ignorance.”

So long for now.

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Witness This!

Although I write little of it myself, I often remark about poetry of witness, poetry that lives as a testament of something that is remarkable as it exists in the world.  I do not speak of poetry that takes a position, that is partisan, but poetry that looks at something and reveals it to us.   I site the poetry of Muriel Rukyser as an example—she is one of the great under-appreciated poets.

What little poetry of witness I have written is about war as I saw and lived it in Viet Nam and now we are engaged in war in Afghanistan and Iraq and with the access to expression so available in this electronic age an abundance of wartime literature is piling up.  Via two different sources I came to a NY Times story about contemporary war writing.  I urge you to pursue the link and the stories referenced.

It is difficult to write poetry of witness for it takes objectivity,  authentic knowledge and poetic skill.  It is not located close to inspiration on the spectrum of things that prompt us to write and so demands more conscious work at expression.   Yet, it is as witnesses that poets can be especially skilled; after all, observation is our thing although it so often is observation of the unseen.  Poetry of witness calls us to expose what is often readily visible but which remains seen by too few.

Much of the great value of this type of poetry is that it puts the poet at the center of society, a place poets have generally abdicated and, nature abhorring a vacuum, has been filled with less tasteful and honest literature.  So, I call poets to read the news, get into the issues despite the barbarous, despite the censure, despite the savagery of the opinionated who want to prevent us from revealing things as they are.

After all, what is your job as a poet if not to reveal?

So long for now.

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Great Wisdom Other Side Reached

There are various translations of the  Sanskrit “mahaprajnaparamita”  and the one I prefer to consider now is “great-wisdom-other-side-reached”.  It may be wrong but I think we all journey toward the achievement of great wisdom and that, in a sense, it resides on another shore.  In my last post, We Each Become the Rebirth of Ancient Light, I referenced the source of art as the attempt to close the gap between ourselves and ourselves.  I believe the Sanskrit phrase refers to the same thing but with a difference.

Octavio Paz in The Bow and the Lyre discusses the Sanskrit phrase as implying that reaching the other shore does not necessarily mark the end of the journey and that as artists, poets, we visit the other shore via the process of making the art.  It is not about a permanent achievement or death.  We find the great wisdom on the other shore, we know it and although we cannot fully contain it within the boundaries of language, our art, phrases, poetry point to it and imply it efficiently enough to bring to others the knowledge that it is there and in them at the same time.

Without that outward connection, the pointing beyond, the certainty of great-wisdom-other-side-reached, the poem is hollow, a vacuum.  It may entertain, be filled with attractive craft, seem deep and complex but without the genuine and felt sense of great-wisdom-reached the poem is an exercise, practice.  The lightning strikes but rarely.

Despite being so, we must write the hollow, vacuous crap.  That is, we must practice the craft daily if we want to be ready and able to visit the other shore.  Herein is the value and cost of workshops:  On the one hand they teach some craft; on the other hand they imply that craft is enough when it is not (although it is necessary).  When not implying that craft is enough workshops, taken too seriously, tend to imply that the workshopped poems are better than they are, good even.  This is nice but not necessarily good.

So long for now.

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We Each Become the Rebirth of Ancient Light

“Man is never identical to himself.”  Octavio Paz in The Bow and the Lyre.  This is source of art, of poetry, which is in large part the attempt to identify the self, to unite with it, to close the gap between  being where we are and where we feel we want to be.  Having said that I can tell you what I really wanted to say:  that through poetry we  attempt to close the gap between what we are and what we are.

To close the gap is likely impossible since language  itself is an artifice—a damned good one but still artifice—in that the word “chair” represents a chair but isn’t a chair and is different  to each one of us although we all generally agree on what it is.  Nevertheless our natural tropism, our “ineluctable modality” of the invisible (a la Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s Ulysses), is to close this gap we find as a given in life.

If we pursue a path designed to close, heal really, this gap and, given that there is a limited number of human emotions and that language is artifice, why the hell do we try?  Billions of men and women have failed before us, even the great ones.  Why do we bother to cry out?  The reason is that we each cry uniquely; our poetic DNA is unique to each of us.  Language may be artifice but, despite our general agreement about what words mean, it is flexible enough to represent the expression of unique individuals uniquely. Language is the tool of individuation.

Practically speaking the route to  individual expression stamped with one’s own poetic DNA is to practice writing a lot.  A real lot.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:  You must write and write and write.  Write poetry every day.

Once your unique voice emerges you’ve finally reached the beginning; and the road goes on forever for “man is never identical to himself”.  But what a road it is.

When You Shouldn’t Write at Christmas, This Is How to Do It

Yes, I got caught up in the season and births and deaths long enough to disappear.  I’m back, briefly, to amend earlier remarks about writing during the season.  When I urged you not to write what I really was urging you to do was to not expect the season to be revelatory, profoundly changing to your work.  You will  not likely write profoundly about the enormous feelings that can cripple the writer.  We just can’t write that well while in the throes of the season.  On the contrary, and contrary to what I said, you can write and write pretty well if you can maintain distance from what you write about.  Good writing may continue through the season.  It just cannot be about the things that are currently arresting.

 

I’ve written seasonal poems every year and learned that such poems can be successful and fully realized within the season but they take a distancing from the waves of emotion I find most immediate during Christmas.  I used to expect that as a writer I would actually see and feel the star of Bethlehem, meet the Magi at the corner of Main and East Main and that my life would be forever changed.  It hasn’t yet happened.  As I have evolved as a writer I have come to realize that the great truths do not come with sonic booms, parades, huzzahs.  Rather, they come with pacing, pondering, work.  The great poems you will write about this season will come with pacing, pondering and work.  The gift of this season is at the sum of all the seasons experienced thus far—and that’s good enough for any writer.

 

So, write without expecting and take joy in the surprise.

 

So long for now, and welcome back.

Saying What Cannot be Said is Not a Psychological Thing Here

I’ve been reading Winifred Nowottny’s chapter on ambiguity in The Language Poet’s Use.  It’s fantastic and explains the nature of poetry’s unstatable side; which brings me to Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” which I have long used as a textbook example of how not to read a poem because most people think it a treatise on independent decision, the profound good of not following the mob, when in fact it is filled with assertions and counter-assertions enough to perplex even the logician.   I have challenged many seminars with explaining the poem to me after I have suffered the pain of explaining it to them.

I here concede that while I am correct in correcting students’ readings of the poem, I have failed in my reading of it as well in that I have omitted the truth that the poem leads us to a sense of unstated and unstatable meaning.  Despite understanding the briar patch of contradiction the poem is it remains inspirational and to many, inspired, to others and even the scholarly perplexity of it leaves the professor moved as are the poor readers who cannot see the tormenting tension in it.  The experience it gives those who want to get off the common path is no less valid than my own prior over-intellectualization of the poem.

Good poetry inevitably leads to an unstatable impact that can only be explained so far and the rest , the poem’s essence, cannot be stated.  All art aspires to the unstatable. Poetry’s difficulty is that it uses words, a written/spoken medium that must transcend itself and translate itself into the unstatable, the un-sayable.

So long for now.

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