The Fundamental Tension in Art
Within the realm of poetry, and art in general, and life in general, there are two forces at play: perhaps they can be called order and chaos, reason and emotion, id and superego, the primal and the civilized. In the context of aesthetics they are often referred to as the Appolonian and the Dionysian, based on the Greek gods.
Roughly, the Appolonian drive is tied to order, craft, reason. In poetry, this applies to formal verse, verse grounded in concepts and societies and focused on the experience of a people. The Dionysian, in contrast, is focused on the experience of the individual, emotion, ephemera. It is associated with much wilder leaps of metaphor.
It is easy to consider these two forces as opposites. Forces that only exist is tension, and I think that is fairly accurate. Many myth systems are less about good and evil, and have dichotomies based on creation and destruction, or the previously mentioned order and chaos, where there is no good or evil applied to these concepts. They are merely the forces underlying everything.
Poetry, or at least good poetry, relies on tension. Tension gives the poem dynamic energy. Tension between rhymes, between meanings, between line and syntax. Perfectly crafted formal verses may be appreciable based on its technical merits, but it is dull without more wild elements. The strangest of the Surreal can be so fanciful as to be unintelligible, but when it is connected to life, crafted to include considered repetition, is going to be superior.
Poetry cannot follow one impulse or the other. It exists between the two forces, constantly being pulled this way and then that. The struggle, especially as an artist, is to find the particular balance between the two that is ideal for you.
Flexing the Poetry Muscle
I find that the only time I desire to write poetry on a consistent basis is when I am reading it on a consistent basis. Spring semester I took two lit classes in addition to a poetry workshop, and I have no real desire to pay attention or think about anything at the moment.
So I haven’t been reading poetry, and therefor not writing any, save what I wrote for class.
My question for you all is: how do you flex your poetry muscle? Do you just let it lie unused until you’re ready for it? Do you "write every day, no matter what?" Or is time spent not writing, time "refilling the well?"
Intellectually, I think I should write, but I can’t seem to find any poetry when I write. Philosophical musings (such as have been posted here), yes, but not poetry.
It’s impressive
And no, I’m not referring to anything I’ve done.
I’m sure most of my regular readers (those not driven here by a link to one particular quote) are aware that, when I don’t lose track of time and freak out, I contribute to the Read Write Poem website as a prompt author and as a contributor of a monthly column on prosody.
Keep that in mind while I divert this post into a completely new channel.
Today was my one final for this semester, so I’m done with school for now. The last few weeks have been crazy with papers and research projects and portfolios, oh my! Top that off with corporate life and setting up website transfers and I’ve been distracted. As I was driving home from Iowa City I thought to myself “self, what shall I do to reward my survival and maintenance of sanity?” I responded: “Well, you survived at any rate. But you’re talking to yourself, so the sanity is questionable.” “Quite right, quite right. I know; I shall buy nilla wafers and frosting and eat nearly pure sugar (frosting with sprinkles, yay!).” And I ended up watching The Golden Compass, which I had bought some weeks ago (armored bears!) and which has been unopened. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the Nilla wafers and frosting. And then it still wasn’t time for bed-though it is getting close now-so what else to do?
Jumping back to the previous channel: A couple of weeks ago I had written a prompt to use jargon in a poem. I like to bring something kind of crazy to my prompts to get people out of comfort zones; I think we learn a lot about ourselves as writers when the net is taken away. What we write I think is more honest when the artifice of a long-standing style or theme is compromised. At any rate, I had not read the posted poems! So I rectified that. And it is impressive how creatively people have used jargon in poetry. I’d like to thank everyone for giving it a go. I only want to highlight one, because a line from it just stuck with me.
from Chemical Acrostic by watermaid
Entropy is an existential state.
Well watemaid, if my blog traffic ever gets back up, you may get some click-throughs!
Hopefully I can will take more time to devote this site and to my writing now that classes are out. There certainly should be a lot of catching up for us all to do.
EDIT: I have a lot of blog’s in my google reader and my blogroll is still gone, so I’ve added a link at the end of the sidebar to my google reader’s shared items. It’s just a few things right now, but I’ll be adding posts from various sources to it. If you’re interested in seeing what’s interesting me, that’s one way to get a glimpse. Or you can ask.
On the Technique of George Seurat
Ekphrasis
For my poetry workshop, we were supposed to write an ekphrastic piece. I knew the piece of art I wanted to write about, but I had some difficulties getting a good concept. After talking with my instructor a bit (and having to turn in the portfolio tomorrow), I wrote this:
On the Technique of George Seurat
It’s at the end of a long gallery. You can’t help but to stand in the doorway, just for a moment and look at Seurat’s masterpiece. It fills the entire wall at the far end. The time he must have put into it…
We stood, just like the thousands before us and the giggling teenage girls being quietly shuffled along by the art historian whose MA should qualify her for a job better than tour guide. We stood and looked over the parquet floors to see that little park in Paris.
The working-class man with his dog, the upwardly mobile strolling with parasols and gloved hands, strangers all, and inhabiting that moment together as they shared some purpose for being on that island.
(Seurat! What would your painting of this hall be? Would you catch the giggles of the girls or would prefer something less fleeting?)
We stood for our moment to take in the painting, stepped inside the gallery and sat on one of the benches. Ever the instructor, you told me about Seurat’s life, his influences, his technique. You suggest I take a closer look. I stand, look at you, expecting you to join me. A slight shake, “no.” My solitary footsteps, then, echo.
(Seurat! These frames lining the walls surrounding the work of your peers: would your keen eye see green in the shadowed recesses of their gilt scrollwork?)
I can’t see the whole thing as I near it…. I have to focus on smaller and smaller sections…. and Bernadette Peters really does look like this woman in the front…
Sunday in the park with…
The people start to get fuzzy, not blurry, their edges bleed into the trees and the trees into them…
Sunday in the park with…
“He used a technique we call pointillism. Instead of fields of color, the entire image is composed of dots of discrete colors. At a distance, they eye blends the dots together and you see the colors as if they were unified.”
Sunday in the park with…
Your voice blends into the moment in my mind and I see the dots: blues reds pinks even yellow in the dress… bright dots of spotlights… (Seurat! Seurat! How did you see all these colors? How close to the dress and the tree did you have to stand?) the small dots of atoms I will never see and the large dots of stars and the distance is dots of nothingness and your face, half shadowed above the bench in the distance…
On the interstate that night, you’re asleep in the passenger seat. As the headlights of oncoming traffic flit past, I see your face lit for just a moment. Ahead, the intermittent red of taillights.
Bohemian Villanelle
I wrote the piece below for my workshop class and is a “found” poem by the criteria the instructor set forth. Because of the formatting, I had to post it as an image, which I set so you could click it and see the full image which is slightly larger than the one below.
It’s been a while
I haven’t been posting much anything here for a while. This semester at school has kinda killed any creativity I might have thought I had at some point. Like it or not, most of my writing is brought on by reading. Specifically, reading things I enjoy. Haven’t done that in a while. Modernist texts- blech. Marxist, feminist texts- blech. Reading with theory in mind- blech. I hope today finds everyone in teh intarblogwebs well and not stuck in the tubes. I have had to write some terrible pieces for my poetry workshop class, I may post those at some point so you can /point and /laugh at them. For today’s amusement, a short poem I wrote during my poetry workshop class while I wasn’t paying any attention to the nice grad student who teaches it. Sorry.
(Fragment)
Torn foil and cork still on the screw-
One bottle- one glass-
the dissipating residue of sweet German grapes
Down a short hallway a muffled figure in a bed that has only one pillow.
Open Door Poetry
It looks like just yesterday Borders launched “Open Door Poetry” on its site. An enjoyable video journal featuring Donald Hall, Taylor Mali, Oveous Maximus, Valzhyna Mort, Paul Muldoon, Patricia Smith, Mark Strand, and Buddy Wakefield: a broad blend of spoken word and academic voices, not just older and established poets, but also the new voice of Belorussian poet Valzhyna Mort.
They have also started a group on Gather: opendoorpoetry.gather.com.
A note: I prefer Taylor Mali’s “What Teachers Make” from the Def Poetry Jam performance. The one in the Open Door Poetry seems excessively reserved, a bit toned down, from his earlier performance of it. Considering what work of his I’ve been hearing on IndieFeed Performance Poetry more recently, his style does seem to have been more reserved, more contemplative.
resolutions
Read Write Resolve
resolutions
resolutions
to resolve
to re-solve
to solve again
translation:
the awareness
born of champagne
that we will always
make the same mistakes
Images seem really hard right now. As does quality. So, just because this is not stellar, don’t think the rest of the poets at Read Write Poem aren’t writing stellar poems. Some of them are, actually, talented. Go, read their poems about resolutions. Have some champagne, you know, that bottle still in your fridge.
I suppose this means I’m a “self-published” poet
During a conversation with a friend the other day (who, sadly, is not a blogger - no link-love) my desire to teach poetry was briefly discussed. Due to my desire to avoid interaction with children, this absolutely means I must have a PhD and teach at the collegiate level and I remarked that I would prefer to teach at the graduate level because that means I would be working with people who might actually care. She suggested this would require me to be a published poet and I should get to work on that. I don’t mean to go into a discussion of whether I am, in fact, good enough to do any of those things, but rather, focus on the culture of poetry, they “why” of poetry.
As I imagine most of you do, I read daily- many, many books of poetry as well as many fine blogs showcasing poetry. In addition to the purely enjoyable experience of language, it is the conversation of ideas that I truly love. I’m not just a poet, but also a philosopher. I voraciously consume information in this media-rich world: science, culture, news, law, technology… all of it is interesting. Again, not just the simple experience, but the interplay of ideas driving the ephemera of expression. I would say that I have a love of ideas and most especially the ideas of poetry. The relation of images, narrative, language- the evocative and illustrative nature of a communication that transcends prose; the attempts to discuss experientially. The act of poetry reminds of a scene near the end of “Pushing Tin,” where Billy Bob Thornton takes John Cusack to be blown like dolls in the wake of a landing jet to experience something that words cannot convey. This, to me, is the essence of what poetry does with words.
I write to participate in that conversation of ideas. I grant that I don’t write things that will drastically change the world and, honestly, if I can touch just one person and bring something of interest to their day (as cliche as that may sound), then I consider that a success, perhaps a small one, but a success nonetheless. This is why I want to teach poetry to people who care about it, to bring this conversation to more people, to people that may not have realized it’s out here to be a part of. And to do that, I must be published.
I’ve never seriously considered seeking publication. Among other reasons, I’ve never been at all certain that my work is good enough, not necessarily just to published somewhere, but in terms of my own satisfaction with the permanence of a poem, with having something fixed, immutable, and out of my control. Faced now with this notion that publication is required, I have a bit of a dilemma. In order to publish (admittedly, this is a bit of a simplification) I have to treat poems as commodities, keeping them secret, set aside, portioning them out to people in the hopes of seeing them in print. I don’t have the freedom to put the poems out there, out here, and let the ideas freely spread. Most publications would consider poems posted here to be published. I disagree with the rational behind that sort of viewpoint.
The argument that people would not buy journals if they could read poems for free isn’t a very good argument. It is an extreme minority of poets that make a living as poets and not as teachers, performers, or vice presidents of insurance companies. Couple that to the fact that most journals pay poorly, if at all, and the journals, the magazines, are clearly the ones trying to get benefit for nothing. Authors are getting nothing but “publication credit” and two contributor copies. But what, it might be asked, about name recognition. Surely putting your name in front of the audience counts for something? Historically, yes. There would have been no other way to get to the audience but through periodicals. And yet media has come a long way from that point. Communication is not limited to the print / mail paradigm, yet that is the paradigm that the poetry journal is based on. Along with the many other benefits the internet provides, it allows communities to be built as if place had no effect. In both providing universally (or nearly so) available content and content that is available asynchronously, the entirety of communication, the entirety of marketing, has been changed to reflect this new method of interaction. “Publication credit,” it seems, has not. By their count, I would have self-published 97* poems or poem-groups in 2007 on this blog. I somehow doubt that would carry much weight on a CV.
Some journals, many of which are online, do not consider a personal blog to be “publishing.” I consider this a much more reasonable viewpoint: a greater acceptance of the shift in community from the face-to-face interactions to what I might flippantly call facebook-to-facebook interactions. In the same manner someone printing broadsheets for friends or a workshop would not be considered publishing, neither should personal blogs because they serve the same function-a direct communication with peers, friends and colleagues. And, much as the poet gets marketing value from being published, so too are journals getting marketing value from poets talking about journals. Marketing gurus Seth Godin and Hugh MacLeod spend a lot of their time talking about how traditional marketing, the producer telling the story, has fallen in the face of the internet. It has been replaced, in much the same way content production has been, by conversations between people. As Seth Godin would say, something being “remarkable” enough to talk about; something becoming a “social object,” in Hugh Macleod’s lingo. There is something to be said for the cachet of the elite garnered from the poetry journal but what is it effective for? Is it effective for the poet? I would suggest no, econonomically or in the realm of ideas. Readership of poetry is abysmally low in any form of print, most journals don’t even market to a general audience, but only through other journals. At my local Borders, they carry Poetry, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, and The Columbia Review. The last two, I’m certain, because they are relatively local. My local Barnes & Noble does not carry any. Any poem I hypothetically had printed in something like the Beloit Poetry Journal or AGNI would be read by the bare handful of people living in my area that happened to have subscriptions, or to the bare handful of people who read this blog that may happen to have subscriptions to poetry journals. It would not realistically get my name out there very well; there would be no “social” to the “object.”
Meanwhile, slaving away with no desire but to communicate, I’ve had about 3000 page views since this blog opened at the end of July (not counting the nearly 500 just searching for the quote from “Across the Universe”). Not many views. It’s probably a much smaller number that had any real interest. It’s probably a drastically smaller number that care or read more than once. But unlike print, it isn’t just about how many people subscribe, it’s how many people fit into that “social” sphere.** While print journal subscriptions generally shrink, all I have to do to get more, and more involved, readers is to be more remarkable. Provide a better product for the people who are looking for it. More and better poems, more and better commentary, more and better involvement. More and better ideas in the conversation. I cannot help but think this is the better view. Don’t misunderstand, I read a few journals myself and I hardly ever read anything of length online; there is something to be said for the tactile involvement of a book, the texture of the paper under the texture of the poem. That is a level of involvement that I think will keep print around for a very long time.
The dilemma is not just whether I should be published or not. It is a fundamental question of how I should treat poetry, how I should be involved in Poetry, and, by extension, how we should all be involved with Poetry and it with us. There is no simple answer and I don’t know which way I’ll end up going: selling out for the CV or not. For the time being, I’ll be holding off on posting much poetry here, my own anyway.
* Yes, I had to count.
** For more on this thought, I suggest reading Hugh MacLeod’s how big is your audience? [revisited]
Silly PostScript: This was about three hours in the writing and there may be typos or poorly worded sections that I missed. If you see any of them, let me know.
The Making of a Poem #4: A New Year’s Sonnet
A New Year’s Sonnet
or
A sonnet in which the poet ponders writing the suddenly changed date of the new year.
For the next few weeks, upon occasion,
I will forget and believe it is last
January again. Then, scratch of pen,
The mistake corrected, proper order
Restored. But what is this renumbering?
Has one day so changed it deserves a new
Name, unique from the one before? Snowfall
Today new snow, each kiss claimed from fresh lips?
The lips of last year were pleasant enough
For a midnight kiss. The days ripped from the
Wall and scattered like the snow-buried leaves
Of every autumn, marking that midnight
Just a little farther away. Might want
To check that date, this isn’t last year. No….
You may, if you paid any attention, have noticed the lack of silly things like rhyme and meter. Yeeeaaahhh…. …. I decided not to hold myself too strictly to traditional rules for Sonnets. Poetic forms change over time, change their formal elements, change their cognitive elements, change according to new languages and cultures as they spread. I don’t think we live in the same culture and use the same language such fascinating writers as Shakespeare. Ergo, keeping to the same strictures they wrote under is somewhat silly. They had no problem adapting forms and language to suiting their needs. From the Italian, the English chose to write in iambic pentameter instead of hendecasyllables. They opted to use a different rhyme structure to accommodate the relatively rhyme-poor English. They changed the themes of the sonnet from Petrarch’s love besotted obsession to a more general use. Eliminating the volta in favor of a rhetorical couplet.
I opted to eliminate the rhyme. I don’t care much for rhyme. I removed the metrical nature of the sonnet. I used a decasyllabic form because that fits natural language better (IMO) than iambs. I returned to the Italian octave / sestet division. My sonnet pays homage to some aspects of the history of the form, but is unafraid to stand on its own formal, slouchy, untied-shoe feet. And that’s just how it’s gonna be.
