The Vagaries of Poetry Readings

A charming list of anecdotes on poetry readings by Donald Hall (the essay is by Hall, not the poetry readings the essay is based on, though in fact some of them poetry readings were by Hall, but not all of them, is that clear, because it if is, I should keep going till it isn't) at The New Yorker blog contains the following (plus more):

"A question period for undergraduates at a Florida college began with the usual stuff: What is the difference between poetry and prose? Then I heard a question I had never heard before: “How do you reconcile being a poet with being president of Hallmark cards?” This inquisitive student had looked on the Internet, and learned that the man who runs that sentiment factory is indeed Donald Hall."

"By chance, I had been an undergraduate at the one college in America with an endowed meagre series of poetry readings. Eliot was good, but most performances were insufferable—superb poems spoken as if they were lines from the telephone book. William Carlos Williams read too quickly in a high-pitched voice, but seemed to enjoy himself. Wallace Stevens appeared to loathe his beautiful work, making it flat and half-audible. (Maybe he thought of how the boys in the office would tease him.) Marianne Moore’s tuneless drone was as eccentric as her inimitable art. When she spoke between poems, she mumbled in the identical monotone. Since she frequently revised or cut her things, a listener had to concentrate, to distinguish poems from talk. After twenty minutes, she looked distressed, and said, “Thank you.” When Dylan Thomas read, I hovered above my auditorium seat as I heard him say Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli.” He read his own poems afterward, fabricated for his rich and succulent Welsh organ. I found myself floating again."

"A week after the readings and lectures of the festival, a recent Pulitzer poet received a thick letter from a woman in South Carolina who had fallen in love. The envelope was heavy with amorous poems, and she told him that there were ninety-five more, but she didn’t have the stamps. She attached a photograph of a mature woman in front of a ranch house, and implored him to fly down immediately. She sent an airline ticket with blank dates."

Donald Hall's email is available at the end of the article, so....

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/10/thank-you-thank-you-donald-hall-on-a-lifetime-of-poetry-readings.html#ixzz2AY32G698

Jericho in the Air

Prairie Schooner has a podcast called Air Schooner, and yesterday I listened to an interview (called "Spiritual Experience") with Jericho Brown, in which he discussed among other things, line breaks:

"...line breaks have everything to do with doubt. That's why poetry is different from prose, because it is infused with doubt. At the moment of a line break, even if it's for a millisecond, you are thrust into doubt. You are thrust into a place where you are not certain what just happened or what is going to happen. Only faith that the next line will land us on solid ground is what keeps up breathing."


Birthdays today (10/26): Hillary Clinton and Mahalia Jackson.

Tomorrow (10/27): Sylvia Plath and Dylan Thomas. How about that? Also Erasmus! And Isaac Singer, Maxine Hong Kinsgston, and Roy Lichtenstein.

My Afternoon

My afternoon, as described (coincidentally enough) by Christian Wiman:

"Poetry requires a certain kind of discipline indolence that the world, including many prose writers (even, at times, this one) doesn’t recognize as discipline. It is, though. It’s the discipline to endure hours that you refuse to fill with anything but the possibility of poetry, though you may in fact not be able to write a word of it just then, and though it may be playing practical havoc with your life. It’s the discipline of preparedness."

 

 Christian Wiman, Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet

A Deck of Diagrams

I'm a big fan of Diagram, the online journal celebrating its tenth anniversary (in journal years, that's impressive!) with an anthology that takes the form of a deck of poker cards. Read here about how 10 of Diagrams has (as you might expect) the kinds of schematics which the journal is so known for as well as contributions from writers such as Jenny Boully (one of my faves), John D'Agata, Albert Goldbarth, Ben Marcus, Lia Purpura, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Mark Yakich, Charles Wu, and Diagram editor Ander Monson.

Visit the website to see a few examples of playing cards, which are fully functional as, well, playing cards.

Enjoy!

Cut It Out!

Here's a brief report about what happened when I used the scissors revision technique that I mentioned on Saturday.

 

I had a poem that has been published in an online journal, but after looking over it for inclusion in my new book-length manuscript, I felt it was weak. There were two (well, 1 1/2 really) consecutive lines I never did like very well, but that I had kept because the form of the poem was couplets, and I needed these lines to fill out a stanza, to keep the form regular. Another problem was that I had overused one of the images by citing it several times throughout the poem (as I have a tendency towards repetition).

I had been reluctant to change the form because the poem relied heavily on the imagery of the moon and the tides, and I thought the regularity (or rather predicability) of tides and moon cycles were well represented by the regularity of the stanzas. This inflexibility on my part kept me from fixing the problems in the poem.

So I took my scissors to the poem. Because I am fond of enjambment, I couldn't actually just cut lines, but had to cut sentences or phrases, which went through lines on many occasions. I realized immediately that I could just cast off those 1 1/2 unwanted lines since form had been abandoned--freedom! As I arranged the snipped lines across a page, I ended up (by default rather than design) with staggered lines in a suggestion of back and forth movement but without regularity of lenth or indentation. Looking at the arrangement, I saw waves of various sizes coming in to the beach and receding, and I saw the moon waxing and waning, and suddenly this new shape of the poem better represented the subject than the previous rigid form ever had.

Additionally, by phsycially maneuvering the lines around on the page,  I was able to better space the repeated images throughout the poem so that they were evocative of earlier parts of the poem, rather than heavy-handed. I also found that there was a line that I wanted to put in two different places, so I scrawled an extra copy of it on a strip of paper and then did in fact put it in both places. By having that new repetition, I was able to echo the other repetition (a kind of call and response), and better balance the repeated imagery I'd been worried about. What I mean is, that MORE repetition instead of LESS was the cure to the over-repetition I had worried about. Now the original repetition was balanced by a new one, and it now served another function with respect to the new one, with a playful interaction between the two.

So this exercise was really useful to me. It took a physical act (cutting) to free me from my mental rigidity. Scissors for success--a technique I'll remember and use again.