On Publishing

On Publishing

At the store where I work, a spiritual book and tea shop, we host events every Thursday.  A few weeks ago we hosted a poetry reading with two Native American poets; Kim Shuck and Duane Big Eagle.  It was an inspiring evening of poetry.

In talking with Duane Big Eagle both before and after the reading he informed me that he does not publish his poetry.  I know that some of his poetry has been anthologized, and he seems willing to let that happen.  But he has not made any effort to have a collection of his poetry published even though he is fairly well known in California and his poetry is admired.

I have run into this before.  It isn’t common, but I have seen it with a few poets; this reluctance to publish.  The quintessential example is Emily Dickinson.  Bill Albert is another example that I discovered recently.  He died in the late 80’s and his haiku were published by friends who gathered his haiku into book form.  Albert himself never made any effort to publish his haiku either in book form or by submitting them to haiku journals.  The Chinese poet Han Shan (Cold Mountain) is another example; his poems were gathered together by others and published after Han Shan died.  If you look for poets who were reluctant to publish you can find them here and there.

Talking to Duane Big Eagle gave me an occasion to think about my own mixed history with publication.  Early in my writing of renga I submitted some of my solo renga for publication.  Some were accepted by various haiku magazines.  Some were rejected, but the rejections were always very helpful and detailed.  I still have some annotations by Robert Speis on two renga I submitted to him; he rejected them but took a lot of time writing marginal notes which I read and learned from.  I also, in the early 80’s, submitted some haiku that were published.  And I was anthologized in a few books of haiku and renga.  And finally, when I began writing tanka I submitted some to a few journals and they were published (Denis Garrison was particularly encouraging.)

Then I began to pull away from submitting and pretty much stopped doing so altogether.  I don’t recall making a conscious decision in this regard.  The shift in attitude seems to have simply happened on its own, and I went with it.

Partly, I think, the pull away from submitting my poetry had to do with my own changing esthetic.  As I moved away from a free verse approach to haiku and renga I found the syllabic approach more and more rewarding.  But at the same time I had the realization that I was heading in a direction not shared by the journals and organizations noted for publishing this kind of poetry.  I began to see publication in them as, in a sense, entering alien territory.  That’s an exaggeration, of course, but I began to feel a sense of distance and estrangement from haiku and tanka publications and organizations.

I began to notice what the effect is of having a syllabic haiku published in a haiku journal dedicated to a free verse interpretation of haiku.  The effect is that the syllabic haiku simply looks like a free verse poem.  This is because the relationship to the other haiku does not mark it as distinctive.  Thus free verse haiku has a corrosive effect on syllabics; though free verse haijin won’t see it that way.

To see what I am getting at, if you take a collection of syllabic verse that all share the same form, say the published volumes of the cinquain journal ‘Amaze’, as you move from poem to poem they all share the same form.  This is true even when there are variations on the form.  And the reader picks up an underlying shared sense of rhythm and shape that all of the cinquain share.  There is a relationship between the poems that is deeper than their surface depictions; a communal commitment to a particular pulse.  You can find this in sonnet anthologies as well.

This deeper dimension is lost in modern haiku anthologies because the communal commitment to a shared syllabic shape is not present.  So even if the anthology, or journal, agrees to publish a few syllabic haiku, the effect of a communal sharing of, and commitment to, a deeper, underlying pulse and rhythm, is lost.  If you read a haiku collection by Edith Shiffert, to pick just one example, the shared pulse acts as a stream like current carrying you from haiku to haiku.  But if you take a single haiku from her collection, and then place it in an anthology of free verse haiku, that current that carries the reader from haiku to haiku is simply not there.  I began to feel the absence of this pulse, this current, as a loss of meaning.

These thoughts are in hindsight.  At the time I just felt less and less at home in the free verse haiku and tanka journals.  Tanka journals in particular struck me as simply collections of free verse poetry with no discernible connection to the actual history of tanka as formal verse.  This has developed into a feeling that syllabic haiku (and other syllabic forms that free verse poets have taken a liking to) needs its own space and journals; because when a syllabic haiku is placed in a collection of other syllabic haiku the relationship between the haiku, the shared shape/pulse/rhythm emerges with clarity.  And the fact that this sharing is a communal commitment, and not just an accident (which is what it seems like in a free verse haiku context), and the centrality of that communal commitment, becomes clear.  The result is that the reader senses that the form itself is meaningful, which is not clear when a syllabic haiku is surrounded by free verse haiku.

There is another aspect about poetry journals that makes some poets reluctant to participate; and that is that they are ephemeral.  And most of them have a very tiny readership.  And this readership is often scattered geographically so that you don’t really get a sense of community from their presence in the pages of a journal.  For some, it is unsatisfying.  I even wrote a sonnet about exactly that feeling.

Eventually, I would access print-on-demand technology, and this made it possible for me to publish my work in a way that I find satisfying.  I think this is true for many poets today.  The gate to publication is no longer controlled by those who have a particular esthetic commitment; in the case of haiku, publication is no longer controlled by official haiku organizations that have an esthetic commitment to a free verse interpretation.  This kind of access has tipped the balance away from such organizations and allowed poets to put forward their poetry even if that poetry is based on an understanding out of sync with the official gatekeepers.  I think that is a very good thing.

Anonymous

Anonymous

In the first imperial collection of Japanese Tanka, known as the Kokinwakashu there are a large number that are anonymous; meaning that we do not know the author of the tanka.  Here are two examples:

220.

Now that autumn hues

tinge the bush clover’s low leaves,

will they not perhaps

find it hard to sleep at night –

those people who live alone?

798.

If your affections

were to scatter like blossoms,

would I alone grieve,

wailing as a warbler sings,

to see the end of our love?

(McCullough translation)

According to McCullough about 40% of the poems are anonymous (Brocade by Night, page 176). 

The oldest collection of Chinese poetry, The Book of Songs, (aka the Classic of Poetry, or The Book of Odes) is entirely anonymous.  This collection of poems is one of the Confucian classics and appears to consist, to a great extent, of folk songs and ritual poetry, all unattributed. 

It is more difficult to find anonymous poetry in collections of western verse.  Perhaps this reflects differences in cultural attitudes.  It is a fairly common observation that the west is more individualistic than the far east and the dearth of anonymous poetry in western collections may be a manifestation of that.

But in some of the more extensive anthologies readers do come across anonymous poetry.  In The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Fifth Edition there is an early section of “Anonymous Lyrics of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries”.  But this is a very small percentage of the anthology; nothing like the 40% of poems found in the Kokinshu or the 100% anonymous poetry in The Book of Songs.

I bring this up because I want to touch on an incident that happened in 2014 in American poetry that, I believe, tells us a lot about how we approach poetry today.  I tend to avoid remarking about the various squabbles among contemporary poets and poetry institutions unless they directly impact syllabic verse and its place in English language poetry.  First, it is inherently unpleasant and, second, it is almost always unproductive.  For these reasons I refrained from remarking on the incident at the time it took place.  But now that more than a year has passed and it is no longer a ‘current event’, I’d like to make a few remarks.

The incident occurred when the American poet, Michael Derrick Hudson, found that he could not get his poems published.  So Hudson adopted a pen name, Yi-Fen Chou.  The result was that poems that had been repeatedly rejected were now accepted for publication, including one poem that had been rejected 40 times and was now accepted by Best American Poems of 2014.  This anthology was edited by Sherman Alexie, who is Native American.  Alexie admitted that he gave the poem extra credit for its minority source.  To Alexie’s credit, when the truth came out that the poem was written by a white guy using a nom de plume, Alexie retained its place in the anthology.

There was a lot written about this incident, mostly focusing on the political and ideological aspects.  Conservatives considered it an example of SJW thinking run amok.  Progressives, in contrast, viewed the author as engaging in a strategy of oppressive deception.  But what I would like to focus on here is what it tells us about how we, today, tend to read poetry.

To shed light on how we read poetry today, I want to consider is how we read an anonymous poem.  When we do not know the author, how do we engage with a poem?  How do we find an anonymous poem meaningful? 

In a way this is not a difficult question.  If we think of a poem as an artifact then we can make an analogy to other artifacts that we use in our ordinary lives.  I don’t know who made the mug I am drinking coffee from, but that does not hinder me from using it, admiring it.  I do not know who developed the particular type of rose in my neighbor’s garden, but that does not create a barrier to my appreciation.

In a similar way, I can admire a poem without knowing anything about the author.  The poem can speak to me, inspire me, offer me insight even though I do not know anything specific about the author or the circumstances which caused the poem to be written.

Take poem 220, quoted above, from the Kokinshu.  The poem comments on loneliness and isolation and uses late autumn as a seasonal expression of loneliness.  This poem speaks to us because loneliness is a common human experience and resonates with the fall season in a way that makes sense to us even though we are living in a very different culture and centuries removed in time.

Similarly, poem 798 is about the fear of losing the affections of someone we love.  Again, this is a common human experience; one that almost anyone can relate to (the exceptions being those who have never been in love).  This poem might have been written by a woman, by a man, by someone young, or someone older, by an aristocrat, or by a peasant.  Those details do not really matter because the experience transcends the specific autobiography of the author.

The tendency today is to read poetry through ideological categories; but I think that is a mistake.  Such a tendency imposes on the poem the specific intellectual apparatus of a time and place.  For example, the Confucian Book of Songs was often interpreted by later Confucians through the lens of their own Neo-Confucian ideology.  The result was to take a simple poem, what was probably a folk song, and turn it into an elaborate allegory on duties to the State and Emperor.  This kind of ideological apparatus, to my mind, actually creates a barrier to understanding the poem; rather than allowing a poem to speak to us directly we force the poem into our own preconceptions.  Beginning in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries scholars divested themselves of this Neo-Confucian apparatus.  It took a lot of work.  But it was worth it.

Ideological analysis always, always, always, diminishes our capacity for understanding art.  And I think that is as true today as it was in the past among the Neo-Confucians.  In the 20^th century the ideologies that dominated were Fascism and Marxism.  In the 21^st century the dominant ideologies seem to be Progressivism and Radical Feminism.  Running at a distant third place is an ideological Traditionalism.

The interpretation of poetry through an ideological lens dominates most University English Departments in the anglosphere at this time.  This is a primary reason that I recommend that young people interested in poetry not major in English literature or pursue an MFA in poetry.  There are exceptions and if you have found a specific teacher, or even an English Department, which has not been completely taken over by an ideological agenda, then ignore my suggestion.  But for the most part I suspect that my observation is correct.  My feeling is that a young person’s love of poetry will be badly deformed at most Universities today.  I say this because I regularly read contemporary literary criticism and it is as marked by ideological bias as the Neo-Confucian interpretations of the Book of Songs.  This is obvious to those who do not share the ideological biases of the authors.

How do we break free from this tendency to read poetry ideologically?  I believe that a significant step in that direction is to read the poem as if it were an anonymous poem.  For example, when you read Stopping by Woods by Robert Frost, never mind that it was written by someone we know about.  Read the poem as if the author was unknown.  Assume you have no idea if the poet is male or female; white, black, or asian; rich or poor.  And then get a feeling for what the poem is saying.  In other words, bracket the authorial specifics.  This bracketing of the authors specifics opens up the universal message of the poem.

You see, my view is that what all of us share is more significant than the specifics of our biographies.  And what is it that all of us share simply by virtue of being human beings?  We all share mortality; we are impermanent.  This is a central fact of human existence and poets have been speaking about this, and how it impacts our lives, in a multitude of ways that help us come to terms with this truth. 

We all share the experience of parting with those who are our friends and those we love.  Again, poets have illuminated this experience in many ways that resonate with us across time and culture.

We all interact with other human beings in ways that are both helpful and stressful.  We all have obligations that we are expected to fulfill.  And we are all limited in our abilities which can give rise to frustrations of various kinds or appreciations for our own and others’ talents.

Because these aspects of our lives are universal it is possible for an anonymous poet to speak to us about them, and to illuminate their meaning, even though they may be of a different race, class, sex, gender, and speaking a different language.  This is what ideological approaches to poetry miss.  And to my mind what they miss is the heart of what poetry is about.

A Brief Note of Thanks

This year has been very productive for me.  I’ve published a number of poetry books and read a lot of really well done work.  In the last month I have received emails from people telling me how much they like this blog.  And there have been a number of authors who have noted my blog in their own books, usually on their acknowledgement page.

It is gratifying to have this kind of feedback.  Poetry is such a marginal activity in the world today. Like most poets I don’t make my living through poetry; I have a full time job to pay the bills, and other obligations besides.  Writing poetry and talking about poetry on this blog is the way I spend a lot of my free time.  So it is good to hear from others that this blog has touched them in some way.  I think poets need to take care of each other, support each other, advise each other, and, yes, critique each other.  I see this happening more and more online and it is a good thing to see. 

So, thanks to those of you who have emailed or written, linked or passed on by word of mouth information about this site, encouraging others to look over my essays, poetry, and reviews.  It means a lot.

Best wishes.

Poetry Reading

October is my favorite month of the year.  And this year October began auspiciously with me doing a poetry reading on October 1^st.  I read from Hiking the Quatrain Range; my collection of quatrains in various forms.  I read from two groupings.  The first group was based on the Chinese quatrain tradition of the seven-syllable line.  The second group I read from was Englynion based on the Welsh tradition of quatrain poetry.

It was a good audience; attentive and appreciative.  One person asked about my use of rhyme.  This was after I had read a sequence of quatrains based on the Chinese tradition where the standard rhyme scheme is A-B-C-B.  I explained that traditional Chinese poetry is rhymed syllabic verse.  I commented that most westerners are not aware of this because translations of traditional Chinese verse rarely map the formal characteristics of Chinese poetry onto their English translations.  Furthermore, until very recently, in their introductions they fail to inform readers of these formal characteristics.  It took me a long time to uncover these formal characteristics, and even more time to see their potential for English language poetry. 

There are exceptions to this general observation.  Red Pine does attempt to transmit some of the formal characteristics of traditional Chinese poetry.   Here is an example from Red Pine’s translation The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain:

298

Buddhist monks don’t keep their precepts

Taoist priests don’t take their pills

Count the sages who have lived

All are at the foot of hills

(Page 251)

Here Red Pine has retained the standard rhyme-scheme (pills/hills) in the English translation.  In addition, he has retained a basic line count; in this case it is 8-8-7-7.  The original consists of 5 count lines, but there is a basic similarity in the translation; when reading the translation there is a steady pulse like in the original. 

It is very difficult to translate the formal characteristics of Chinese poetry into English; I get that.  But there is a heritage of English translators who do not even try to build this formal bridge.  Because of this many westerners have the impression that traditional Chinese verse is close to modern free verse and that is a misguided impression.

Not many western poets have attempted to map the formal characteristics of traditional Chinese poetry onto the English language.  Robin Skelton is one.  I am one.  I am unaware of others, but I suspect that they exist.

For both Skelton and myself attempting to transmit a poetic form from one language to another is a rewarding challenge.  For me it feels like connecting, as best I can, with another culture.  It broadens my understanding of how different people have understood poetry and opens new possibilities for my own creative expression.

It was a rewarding evening.  And people bought lots of books; always a plus.

Update

This is a short note to readers of this blog regarding my slow rate of posting recently.  I have been working on a few projects which have taken priority.  One is a commentary on the book A Guide to True Peace, which is a manual on Quaker contemplation.  It was published 200 years ago but is based on material that goes back to the 1600’s.  I have been spending a lot of time doing research and tracking down the original sources for many of the passages in the Guide.  I love this kind of research; nothing makes me happier than sitting on the floor surrounded by dusty tomes (or books from reprint houses), tracking down the history of a passage and how it has changed as it gets used over the centuries. 

I am in the final editing phase and I hope to have it completed by the end of next month.

I have, at the same time, been working on a 100 Verse (Hyakuin) renga.  Like most of my renga it is a solo work.  Writing a solo 100-verse renga is time consuming.  The thing about a renga that long is you have to keep in mind topic placements and spacing and many other factors for it to come out right.  In addition, my hope was to incorporate the type of rhyme scheme I have sometimes used in shorter renga where the last syllable of the last line of verse X rhymes with the last syllable of the first line of verse X + 1.  I finally finished it on Monday; and I was able to incorporate the rhyme scheme through the whole of the renga, and, in addition, discovered some additional rhyme usages in the process.  It still needs a little tweaking, but basically I am satisfied with it.

My hope is to return to more regular posting in October.

Thanks for your patience.

The Way of Form and the Way of Nature

The Way of Form and the Way of Nature

The natural world unfolds in cycles that we recognize by the periodic appearances of forms.  Every month there is a full moon.  Every day there is a sunrise.

The seasons are marked by cyclical appearances.  It is the appearance of these seasonal markers that speaks to us that the season is changing.  In late winter the quince bloom.  In early spring the plums blossom and birds begin to build their nests.  In autumn, the fur of animals becomes thicker and in some cases changes color.

Formal verse follows this way of nature.  We recognize a particular form because each time it appears there are certain markers that tell us that the poem is in a particular form.  We know a flower is a tulip because tulips replicate certain formal features each time they appear.  We know a tree is an oak because each oak replicates, or instantiates, certain features that cue us into recognizing that this tree is an oak even if we have not seen that particular tree before.

In a similar way, we know a poem is a sonnet because it has certain markers, or features, that let us know that the poem is a sonnet.  We know that a poem is a tanka because it has a certain syllabic shape.  We know a poem is a triolet or villanelle because of the refrains that mark those forms.

This kind of repetition is following the way of nature.  Each full moon shares certain features with other full moons, but each full moon also has its own unique displays: some are brighter and some are dimmer; some are obscured by clouds and some appear in a cloudless sky.  In a similar way, formal poetry replicates the features of a form yet, at the same time, displays unique aspects that previous instantiations of the form did not have.

Cyclical appearances emerge due to causation; they are dependent appearances.  Plum blossoms appear as the days are getting longer and somewhat warmer.  The plum responds to these changing conditions by blossoming.  As the days get shorter and colder, animals respond by their fur growing thicker and many birds respond by migrating to warmer regions.

The forms of poetry depend on human beings for their regular appearance.  The crucial causal dependency of poetic forms is human interest.  If human beings are interested in a form then some of them will take pen to paper, or keyboard to computer, and compose in that form.  Like natural phenomena appearing when causal conditions are conducive to their appearance, poetic forms also appear when causal conditions are conducive to their appearance. 

Interest in specific poetic forms seems to ebb and flow.  There are periods, for example, when English poetry was heavily focused on the sonnet, and other periods when the sonnet was not so central to poetic creativity.  The sestina has a similar ebb and flow, with periods of complete lack of interest in this form followed by energetic involvement in its possibilities.  This ebb and flow of interest replicates the ebb and flow of natural phenomena.  Just as there are seasons of flowering there are also seasons of a particular form.

From this perspective, poetic forms are not so much human creations as they are creations of nature wherein nature uses human beings as a causal basis for their appearance.  Poetic forms are human creations in the sense that human beings are a necessary condition for the forms to appear (along with many other causes and conditions).  But in another sense poetic forms are nature, or the cosmos, or the network of causal relations and dependencies, or the web of existence, or creation, using human beings so that certain types of forms will be materially embodied and be present in creation.  Creation uses soil, rain, sunlight, etc., so that certain flowers will appear at certain times.  Creation uses human beings, along with those aspects which human beings depend upon, so that certain poetic forms will appear.

When composing in a poetic form there is often the experience of an expanded sense of sharing and presence.  At first this feeling is a sense of connectedness with other poets who also write in the form, with other people who appreciate the form, a sense of contact with an extended human community.  But this sensation of plugging into something larger, something beyond individual expression, has other dimensions, which are more subtle and, at the same time, more persistent.  If the poet pays attention to this sensation of an expanded presence what opens up is a shared sense of the way of nature and creation itself.  Formal poetry leads us to an understanding of the way of creation; but not through an intellectual understanding of the way of nature.  Rather this understanding of the way of nature is learned through participation that way.  Through composing a formal poem the poet enters into the same manner of creation that creation uses when the moon becomes full, when leaves turn color in the fall, when the tide ebbs, and when the sun rises in the morning.

The Sociology of Form

The Sociology of Form

I have been struck by the lack of celebrations in the American poetry community regarding the 100^th anniversary of the Cinquain.  The form first appeared in print 100 years ago in a posthumously published collection of its creator’s poetry, the poetry of Adelaide Crapsey.  It is a distinct contribution to the world of formal verse and since its appearance numerous poets have found it a congenial vehicle for poetic expression.  Yet, I have not heard of any sponsored celebrations of its presence.  For example, I have not heard of any University conferences devoted to the form, nor have I seen anything like a Norton Anthology devoted to the Cinquain.  There has been a Norton Anthology devoted to English Language Haiku, called Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years, published late last year.  But nothing by Norton or any other publisher for the Cinquain.

I think it is instructive that the HIE anthology emphasizes free verse haiku.  Though there are examples of syllabic haiku, the preponderance of entries take a free verse approach.  In addition, the editors in their essays are clearly sympathetic to a free verse approach.  Overall, the haiku anthology fits neatly into the esthetics of modernism.

This has given me an opportunity to pull together some stray thoughts I have had about what I think of as the ‘sociology of form’.  Specifically, I am referring to the type of people who seem to be attracted to the syllabic forms that have recently emerged in English language poetry.

The first observation is that the appearance of syllabic forms seems to me to be very much a reflection of popular interest as opposed to the interests of the elites.  I mean here that, with some exceptions, MFA programs, University English Departments, and similar institutions of the elites, are not the source of these syllabic forms. 

Adelaide herself is exceptional in this regard.  She was highly educated, went to Vassar and taught at Smith.  She also engaged in highly analytical examinations of English prosody.  If she had lived longer I suspect she would have been a significant presence in the academy.

But Adelaide is unusual in this regard.  The syllabic forms that have been created in the 80’s and onward seem to emerge from what I think of as a more working class background.  The rictameter was created by two cousins interested in poetry; one a fireman.  The tetractys was created by a British poet who wrote a large body of work, but was not of significant fame.  Both the fibonacci and the lanterne seem to have appeared in several different places at the same time, but were not created in an official or University context.  In general what I have noticed is that new forms are offered by those with a significant, and long term, interest in poetry, people who write poetry, people for whom poetry is an important presence in their lives, but are not of national or international status.  I am thinking of people like Etheree Armstrong Taylor and the creator of the Whitney.  They often do not have MFA degrees or are otherwise accredited.  They usually lack the kind of networks that help new poets break into print.  It seems, from what I have observed, that they may have a local following (at the County or State level), but have not entered into the national or international scene.

From the perspective of the University and official poetry magazines, like Poetry Chicago, the emergence of these syllabic forms is marginal or overlooked completely.  This is understandable.  Free verse dominates MFA programs and University literature departments, with a few significant exceptions.  But those exceptions are devoted to traditional metrical poetry.  I am not aware of a program at the University level that emphasizes a syllabic approach, or focuses on syllabic forms in English.  (Readers, please correct me if I am wrong.)  On the other hand, and this is significant, syllabic forms are taught in elementary schools.  For example, both the syllabic haiku and the cinquain are regularly taught to children.  Sometimes these forms are taught for didactic purposes (like clarifying grammar).  Sometimes they are taught in a highly simplified way because they are fun to do in the way that a game is fun to play.  One consequence of this is that many people have learned about these syllabic forms in congenial settings which bodes well for the future of these forms.

What I see in the emergence of syllabic forms in English is what I refer to as a ‘yearning for form’.  I think human beings enjoy creating form.  I think that is why people like to garden, compose tunes and sing songs, why they find carpentry satisfying, why they like to bake bread, etc.  I see the shaping of words into significant forms in the same light.  I think there is a spontaneous need for form and that this need gets instantiated in poetry with the creation of form.

For over a century the elites have emphasized free verse for English language poetry.  But my suspicion is that this runs against this almost biological need for form.  There is something truly satisfying about composing a well crafted poem in a form that others have used.  There is a feeling of connection and community when one enters such an approach.  There is also a sense of overcoming a challenge.  This aspect is similar to why human beings like to play games.  From hockey to chess, people like to be challenged by rule bound situations to see if they can live up to the challenge.  In poetry, this manifests as an acceptance of the rules for a form and then instantiating them in one’s own poetry.  Part of the thrill of writing, and reading, a sonnet, for example, is simply that one has been able to absorb the parameters of the form, to internalize them, and follow them out and still, amazingly, created something that others will enjoy.

From the reader’s perspective, formal poetry creates a sense of expectation on the part of the reader which, when met, is pleasing.  It is like knowing that a waltz will be have a certain time signature and then hearing that signature when listening to a new waltz.  Or it is like hearing a new song that uses a traditional song structure with verses and refrain.  In poetry, formal verse gives the reader an assist; the poet is taking the reader into account.  And, to a certain extent, flattering the reader by assuming the reader knows aspects of the form. 

This spontaneous appearance of syllabic forms in English has happened without official sponsorship.  From the perspective of official poetry organizations it is something that has happened under the radar.  In some instances it has happened even though official organizations have disapproved of it.  Specifically, the ongoing production of syllabic haiku has happened in spite of a concerted effort on the part of official haiku organizations to undermine the approach.  This indicates to me that the attractiveness of form is inherently compelling and can’t be ignored for too long.  My feeling is that the emergence of syllabic forms in 20^th century English poetry is an awakening to a dimension of poetry, the formal dimension of poetry, which had been dismissed and sidelined or ignored by elites.  What is intriguing is that this emergence of a formal dimension is taking place in a reconfigured context.  The movement of free verse had, and has, a strong ideological component to it.  This manifested as a dismissal of the relevance of the past for present day poets.  This created a break with the past in order to explore new ways of approaching poetry. 

One of the unforeseen consequences of breaking with the past is that the formal dimension of poetry can be uncovered in approaches that were not central to traditional English poetry.  One of these approaches is formal syllabic verse.  Formal syllabic verse is traditional in the sense that it accepts rules and regulations, relies on counting to shape a line, and views form as a positive means of expression rather than an impingement on individuality.  Formal syllabic verse is non-traditional in that it does not rely on metrics in the shaping of its forms.  This difference probably seems minor to a free verse poet because free verse poets do not want to be constrained by things like counting and both traditional metrics and formal syllabic verse constrain the poet through the mechanism of counting.  But I believe the difference between formal metrical verse and formal syllabic verse is audible; there is a different sonic presence and pacing between the two.  And it appears that some poets who are intrigued by the possibility of form in English verse are often attracted to the sonicscape offered by a syllabic context.

Syllabic poetry is still very new to the English poetic world.  But the fact that most of the interest in syllabics has emerged in a marginal, and unofficial, context says to me that it is emerging from strong roots.  Already we have seen a number of attractive blossoms.  The garden of English syllabic verse forms has only recently been planted and already that garden is attracting numerous visitors.  In a way, it is a hidden garden.  It is on the edge of the English speaking poetic world.  But when you have some time, come and take a look.  It is fresh and inviting and poets who visit this garden invariably find themselves enriched.

Love of Words

Love of Words

Over the years I have developed friendships with a few potters.  One thing I have noticed about them is how much they love clay.  They love to get their hands on the clay as it is spinning on the wheel.  There is a look of concentration and happiness, their faces light up, as they turn an amorphous lump into a cup or vase. 

I know some gardeners who have the same relationship to their gardens.  These friends who are gardeners are only really happy when working in the soil, planting, weeding, cultivating. 

I see poets as having a similar relationship to words.  Poets take the amorphous cacophony of words and shape those words into significant forms.  Poets are lovers of words. 

Philosophers also love words; but I think there is a difference.  For philosophers the focus is on meaning; and by meaning I mean definition.  Philosophers analyze meanings of words, linking them to other words on the basis of their conceptual content, distinguishing them from other words based on analysis and logical criteria.

The focus of the poet differs.  For the poet the sensual surface of words is central.  It is not that meaning is ignored, but other factors come to the foreground for the poet.  For example, poets will link words by rhyme, assonance, alliteration, metaphor and simile, and other sensual similarities.  The philosopher, in contrast, does not consider these kinds of connections.

I recently discovered Wilfred Owen, the W.W. I British poet.  I find his poetry remarkable.  He developed a type of rhyme, which some refer to as ‘pararhyme’.  In this type of rhyme Owen links endwords for the lines of his poems such as moan/mourn, years/yours, wild/world, hair/hour/here, etc.  These examples are taken from his poem ‘Strange Meeting’.  The idea is the consonants remain the same while the vowel shifts.  The effect is remarkable and alluring to the ear.  I see this as an example of what I refer to as ‘love of words’ and a focus on the sensual surface of words.  This kind of linking, or weaving, of words, this shaping of words in accordance with their sonic surface, is what attracts poets and what we find attractive when we read a poem.  I have the same feeling when I read Emily Dickinson and notice how she will link certain words together based on subtle sonic similarities.

For the poet words are attractive as objects in the way that flowers are attractive as objects.  The botanist will classify flowering plants according to physiological distinctions.  But the gardener does not need to know these distinctions; the focus of the gardener is on their display, the sensual surface that the gardening will result in.

In a similar way poets focus on the sensual surface of words to create what we might think of as a garden of words where each word is a blossom in the garden.  This is what makes poetry attractive to people.

By ‘sensual surface’ I don’t mean ‘shallow’.  The sensual surface of a garden, the sensual surface of a poem, instantiates and offers to us beauty.  It is the same kind of beauty that I observe in a sunset or in a landscape.  The sensual surface of a poem functions as a kind of luminous gate to the realm of beauty.

Beauty is difficult to define and I won’t try to do so here.  When we are in the presence of the beautiful we feel uplifted and this feeling of exaltation, which may be mild or intense, is unmistakable.  This feeling makes poetry worthwhile and attractive across the centuries, across cultures.

In Ennead 1.6, which is devoted to a discussion of beauty, Plotinus writes,

Beauty addresses itself chiefly to sight; but there is a beauty for the hearing too, as in certain combinations of words and in all kinds of music, for melodies and cadences are beautiful; and minds that lift themselves above the realm of sense to a higher order are aware of beauty in the conduct of life, in actions, in character, in the pursuits of the intellect; and there is the beauty of the virtues.

(Plotinus: The Enneads, Stephen MacKenna translation, Larson publications, 1992, page 64.)

For Plotinus beauty exists in the world as an emanation of the One; that ultimate reality that transcends being and out of which all things come, upon which all things depend.  Beauty is the immaterial making itself known in the material.  Beauty is the sign (like an oracular pronouncement) that there is more to existence than the fleeting and ephemeral.  As Plotinus says,

We hold that all the loveliness of this world comes by communion in Ideal-Form.

          (Ibid, page 65.)

One way of looking at this is that from a strictly logical point of view, beauty is not necessary in the material world.  I mean to say that there is a logically possible world in which beauty does not exist, yet all the parts of the world would still follow the laws of material existence.  In a sense, beauty is an add-on to the world.  I don’t mean this literally; rather I am offering this as a thought experiment.  The idea here is that beauty comes to us from another, non-material, dimension.

In this way the sensual surface of a poem is linked to the ultimate; what Plotinus will refer to as the Good, the Beautiful, and the One.  Plotinus will say that this ultimate reality is, in itself, ineffable; that is to say it is beyond any names and beyond any forms.  This is because the ultimate is partless.  Words function as names for parts and will, therefore, always be somewhat off the mark. 

From the perspective of the emmanationism of Plotinus, some words are closer to the ultimate than others.  We can say that the Good, the One, and the Beautiful are ‘next to’ the ultimate; though they are not the ultimate itself, they occupy a position that is near the ultimate.  As long as we comprehend that they are not the ultimate itself, but are next to it, such usage does not generate difficulties.

The beauty of a poem speaks to us of the ultimate beauty of the One because the beauty of a poem depends upon and participates in the beauty that the One is.  And if we follow beauty to its source, we find ourselves in the presence of the Divine.  I believe that this is why poets in the past had a kind of exalted status; because the shaping of words into patterns of beauty can open the gate to this eternal presence.  Such beauty assists us in realizing that there exists a dimension to our existence that we have forgotten about.  Distracted by the concerns of the day, the need to earn a living, the demands of other people, the anxieties we have, both personal and social, we forget about the source and the presence of this dimension.  Beauty reminds us that this dimension is still there.  Beauty beckons us to enter into this dimension.

“. . . The Good, which lies beyond, is the Fountain at once and Principle of Beauty: the Primal Good and the Primal Beauty have the one dwelling-place and, thus, always, Beauty’s seat is There.”

          (Ibid, page 72.)

Ordinary Poetry

Over at Andrew Sullivan’s Blog, ‘The Dish’, he recently posted an excerpt from an article by Adam Kirsch that appeared in the New York Times.  I don’t have a subscription to the NYT, so I can’t access Kirsch’s full article; so I’m just going to respond to Sullivan’s excerpt which you can find here:

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/11/22/the-words-that-wont-change-the-world/

This is a topic that poets, and some cultural commentators, make fairly frequently.  It is the observation that the place that poetry occupies in our world has changed, that poetry and poets used to occupy a central place both in popular culture and in high culture but that at this time and in our contemporary culture poetry is now marginalized.  As Kirsch notes, poets today, if they are not delusional, realize that what they write will not be widely read and will have almost no impact on the social sphere. 

The last poet I know of who was prominent in popular culture was Edna Saint Vincent Millay.  She had a huge following, considerable sales, and was an object of press adoration and attention.  But she was the last poet to occupy such a position.  And, as far as I know, Millay did not use her position to advocate for political causes. 

My own feelings about this are complex.  First, I think modern poets have a tendency to aggrandize their vocation.  This sense of self-importance is a kind of nostalgia for a past where the poet and poetry were elevated to an almost apotheosized status.  Works like Homer’s ‘Illiad’, or the Confucian ‘Book of Songs/Odes’ had huge and lasting cultural impact.  And in some countries, like Japan, there are actual temples devoted to some poets.  It is easy to see why modern poets would want to retain some of this aura of exalted status.  At times I share this desire for the special place that poetry used to occupy at the center of cultures.

However, I think it is, overall, a good thing that poets now occupy a place at the margins.  First, it offers the opportunity to cultivate humility.  I love poetry; I write it, read it, study it, and do what I can to keep up with trends (a nearly impossible task, by the way).  But I recognize that my love of poetry does not differ from the love that a gardener has for gardening, or the love of a baker for baking, or the love of a quilter for quilting, a knitter for knitting, or the love of baseball, soccer, tennis or chess for those who are devoted to those activities.

I have mentioned before on this blog, but I think it is worth repeating, and it is relevant to Kirsch’s observations, that my own view about poetry is that poetry is the craft of shaping words.  Pottery is the craft of shaping clay.  Composing music is the craft of shaping sound.  Gardening is the craft of shaping plants.  Carpentry is the craft of shaping wood.  Quilting is the craft of shaping cloth.  And so forth.

I don’t think poets are particularly insightful nor do they have some kind of special access to a broader understanding than ordinary people do.  Look at it this way: if gardeners asserted that they had special understanding and that this understanding applied to political and social spheres, I doubt people would go along with this.  A particular gardener, like the agriculturalist Wendell Berry, might have insightful things to say; but as a class, just because someone is a gardener, or cultivator of plants, does not in itself generate insights that are broad in scope.  This is true for pottery, carpentry, and quilting as well.  The thing is, you rarely hear of carpenters or quilters making a claim that their craft gives them a claim on how society should be ordered, or what political and social reforms should be undertaken.  Carpenters and quilters have opinions about these topics, and they might be insightful opinions worth considering; but if they are of worth there is no obvious connection between having these opinions and the specifics of their craft.  In contrast, poets tend to think of themselves as peculiarly insightful, especially visionary, and deeply aware beyond that of ordinary people.  I don’t think that is psychologically healthy for poets; it leads to an overestimation of one’s significance.  It tends to lead the poet to think that their thoughts about social issues are more insightful than those of the carpenter down the street, or the quilter next door, or the baker at the local bread shop.  My own experience is that my own political and social commitments (and like everyone, I have them) are about as well thought out as anyone else’s thoughts on these topics.  Poetry does not give me a means for being more profound in these arenas.

The sense of self-importance that poets often have of themselves and of their craft, to my way of thinking, as I mentioned above, can be unhealthy.  There are extreme and famous examples of this.  The most notorious example I know of is Ezra Pound whose preoccupation with his own significance took him to very dark places.  It is a tragic story; one that most poets are aware of.  But even though poets in general are aware of it, they don’t seem to draw the obvious lesson from this legacy.  And that lesson is that poets are not peculiarly gifted when it comes to insights beyond their vocation of poetry itself (and they might not be insightful about even that).  I realize that this is a tough lesson.  It is simply human to want to think of ourselves as above average and special.  And our culture asserts the significance of our uniqueness in countless ways (New Age teachers are especially adept at this).  I believe the antidote to this is to comprehend poetry as a craft that is like other crafts.

As a craft, poetry can lead to exalted experiences; both for the poet and for the reader of poetry.  But that is also true of carpentry, baking, quilting, and gardening.  The beauty of a well crafted poem, to my mind, resembles the beauty of a well crafted cup by a dedicated potter, or the beauty of a well baked scone offered at the local bakery, or the beauty of a quilt done at the latest quilting bee, or the beauty of a song I just heard someone sing.  To my way of thinking, beauty is a door to the transcendental; it takes us out of ourselves and, in a way, out of this world.  This can happen.  And when it does happen it is a profound and transforming experience.  But poets do not have a monopoly on this; it is, in my opinion, part of the meaning of all the crafts that people engage in.  It is an experience, and a result, that poets share with the baker, the quilter, and the candlestick maker.

Personally, I am content with placing poetry at the level of a craft.  I like thinking of shaping words as the same as shaping clay or shaping sound or shaping wood.  Looking at poetry in this way connects me with the rest of humanity whereas thinking of poetry as peculiarly exalted severs these connections, turning my craft of shaping words into some kind of oracular avocation.  I am not an oracle.  Like everyone else, I am doing the best I can in difficult circumstances.  And when I compose poetry as a craft, I find myself connected with the very human ordinariness of the baker, the gardener, the carpenter, and the quilter.  I find that a good place to be.

 

 

David Crystal on Contemporary English and Its Possible Futures

David Crystal is a British linguist who has written engagingly on various aspects of the English language.  I came across this video on youtube and I thought readers of this blog might find it interesting:




I was really struck by Crystal's observation that there are 400 million Indians who speak English.  That is a huge block of English speaking people.  And as Crystal notes the dialect that has developed in India has its own shape and norms.  And I suspect that these norms will influence how English is spoken and comprehended in the English speaking world at large.

From the perspective of prosody, and how English language poetry is shaped and heard, I think there are a number of applications, or tendencies, that are already reshaping English language verse.  I have written before about how I suspect that the emergence of syllabic verse in an English language context is at least partly due to English becoming a global language.  Add to that global context the relative lack of accentual contours in some of these populations, like India, and this creates a precedent for a non-metrical approach to English language poetry.

This is particularly true, I think, for formal verse in English.  What I sense is a kind of shift from the accentual to the syllabic.  A good indicator of this is, I think, the way Syllabic Haiku has become so widespread and how it has assumed a place in popular culture.  The widespread usage of Syllabic Haiku, of a form that counts syllables in three lines of 5-7-5, has created a numerically large group of people who have approached English language verse in syllabic terms.  What this means is that someone who has the experience of composing Syllabic Haiku will not have difficulty understanding a syllabic approach to the sonnet, even though that approach differs from the traditional metrical approach.  The basic mechanism of counting syllables is the same in both cases.

As Crystal notes it is difficult to make claims for the future.  Even so I think it is clear to all of us interested in language, and specifically English, that the contours of the language are changing.  And I suspect that the contours of our poetry will change as well.

Changes and Possibilities

Dear Friends of Shaping Words:

As regular visitors to this blog must have noticed, my rate of posting for 2014 has been slight; especially if one compares it to previous years.  It is not that my interest in syllabics has waned.  It has more to do with not being clear as to the direction I want to take Shaping Words.  There are several possibilities.

Part of the decline in posting has to do with having said what I want to say in certain areas.  For example, regarding syllabic haiku in English, I have, for the most part, said what I wanted to say in defense of this type of haiku.  I don’t want to simply repeat myself.  This gets tiresome; both for me and for the visitors to the blog. 

 On the other hand, there are larger issues and perspectives on poetry today that I have not spoken to.  The challenge, though, at least for me, is how to express these views without sinking into the standard online rhetoric of snarky dismissals with those who have a different view.  It is a matter of balance and respect, which seems to be difficult to pull off online.

So I am considering several possibilities of refocusing.  My idea is that the change would be one of emphasis rather than of topic.  It is not clear to me, yet, how this will manifest, but by 2015 I think it should be clear.

Best wishes,

Jim

 

Street Poet

Street Poet

A few weeks ago I was taking my lunch break.  I decided to walk over to Whole Foods to get something from their hot food bar.  Whole Foods is about three blocks from where I work.  As I was walking I spotted a young man standing in front of a store.  As I passed he asked me, “Do you like poetry?”  I responded, “I’m totally poetry.”  He said, “Would you like to hear one of my poems?”  “Sure,” I replied.  This sounded good.

He then asked me what topic I would like for my poem?  I hesitated, and he jumped in with a list: nature, work, politics, religion . . .  I said, “God.  I want a poem about God.  I’m a Quaker.”  I added the ‘Quaker’ bit to let him know where I’m coming from.  On the spot he recited:

the strongest force

i can think of is love

and I believe that it’s not

from a heaven above

it resides in each

& all of our hearts

i’m saying that god’s

not separate or apart.

mispelt god

is good within us all

add an ‘o’ to god

& deities fall

seein something beautiful’s

like lookin into a mirror

cause within you is a love

that’s radiantly pure

i once learned, now believe,

that evil has momentum

please embrace all you can

our good that i mention

you can help somebody out

create some righteous art

knowin god’s within

not distant or apart.

Tim Hale

Not bad, not bad at all. 

It turns out Tim is a street poet who has been on his own for some years now.  I’m not sure, but I think he’s in his 30’s.  He handed me a chapbook of his poems with the poem he recited in it.  And I gave him some money in return.

I love running into street poets, but it’s been a long time since I encountered one.  The last time I had a real encounter that included interaction, conversation, and some poems, was Julia Vinograd in Berkeley.  Love her work.  In some ways, Tim and Julia are cut from the same cloth.  Living on the fringes, unconnected with any poetry establishment, lacking MFA credentials or other tokens that get you published in the right journals or invitations to the right conferences.

Tim and Julia have very different styles.  Julia composes free verse, but with a deft touch to her lineation and a distinctive voice that is unmistakable.  Tim writes metrical verse; it appears to me from reading his chapbook that his poetry is strongly influenced by popular song; always a good sign. 

At another level, though, Tim and Julia are birds of a feather.  They both write from their encounters with life and express a point of view which is largely absent from more established poets. 

Here’s one more of Tim Hale’s poems:

The Kinship of Homeless

I slept between boats

Made money off poems

That summer in Seattle

I never was alone

I hung with the homeless

Took care of each other

I was closer to them

Than I am my own brother.

We dumpstered some steaks

Some forty-plus dollars

And fed them to dogs

Who roamed without collars

We gathered and shared

Meals every night

Round fires we’d rambled

‘till dawn brought us light.

There were dreamers and lovers

Addicts and thieves

We share with each other

Our deepest beliefs

About pain from the past

How life had been tainted

Or how life’s just a canvas

Waiting to be painted.

We talked of possibilities

That never really end

How the heart that’s broke the most

Would eventually mend

While some work for power

For gain and for gold

Our possessions were little

But rich was our soul.

Know moments our choices

‘tween love and ‘tween fear

If you open yourself

There’s family near

We weren’t each other’s siblings

Father or mother

Though all of us were family

In Seattle that summer.

I just went over to youtube and found a number of posts about Tim.  If you are interested you can take a look.

So there is poetry everywhere, and good poetry too.