A few years ago I got an email through this blog from the poet and visual artist Bill Knott, telling me that he'd read some of my work online and wanted to know how to get a hold of my books. Because of the time difference between the US and Japan, by the time I had woken up and checked my email and had time to reply to him that I'd gotten so much of his poetry for free over the years that it would be my pleasure to send him my poetry books, he'd already found a way to purchase my work himself.
Later he wrote me to tell me he'd read and liked my books, as opposed to so much of what was out there these days, and he encouraged me to continue with my work. Knott was a teacher at Emerson for years, and despite his self-proclaimed status as an outsider, he had a lot of in-depth contact with many poets over the years, offering support to many. But for me, having taken no classes or degrees in poetry and having precious few contacts in the poetry world, his reaching out was a kindness and a validation that I sorely needed. Sometimes I wonder if my poetry exists at all-- like Don Marquis who said "Publishing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for an echo"--sometimes I wonder if I exist artistically at all, but through an exchange of emails over a few weeks, Bill Knott made me feel that I did, even as it was clear he felt his own legacy was ephemeral to non-existent. Bill Knott was my petal's echo.
Read more about Bill Knott's life here. And this tribute here. Despite his reputation for being cantankerous, he was truly a good-hearted man and a gifted poet. I read his poems first in high school, and was intrigued by his pseudonym with its backstory. Later, through the internet I got to know his visual work as well.
His very famous poem on death is the first of his I ever read, ironically:
Death
Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest.
They will place my hands like this.
It will look as though I am flying into myself.
Bill Knott
***********
Today, I'd like to share this other poem of his:
Sleep
We brush the other, invisible moon.
Its caves come out and carry us inside.
Bill Knott
**********
Come inside, outsider.
Friday, March 14, 2014
Friday, March 7, 2014
Poetry and Wisdom
Recently I heard an established poet say that poets may have a special feeling for language, but they don't have any more wisdom than the average person. Which is true. It's language that has more wisdom than the individual (poet or otherwise).
Language is and was made by people, collectively, and as such it contains the collective wisdom of the ages. But it isn't in there obviously, largely because by making miniscule decisions about how to speak or write throughout time, individuals didn't notice that they were encoding wisdom in language. And yet they were, each time they made decisions about word choices.
Poets, by paying attention to word choice, sometimes tap into that wisdom, not because the poets themselves are wise, but because language is. Take the easy example of words that sound similar. Look for a theme here: vestal virgin, vagina, vulva, Venus, virile, vixen. You found two themes, right? And you're probably thinking, Wait, you forgot valentine, or ovulate, va va voom, venereal, or vamp, and the list goes on and on.
And having words sound similar is one of the least subtle clues that language gives us about words that belong together (or don't belong together--there can be so much power in those combinations too). Many times the compulsion to place two words next to one another is something we can't explain even to ourselves, and yet we know there is something powerful in the arrangement. And that's the job of poets, to be exquisitely sensitive to how words should be paired, or arranged, for the most effect. Even when / even though we can't say why the words are in the right order, when we're lucky, it's obvious to us and to everyone that we've found an order that holds something, some kind of wisdom or power or meaning that we can't paraphrase, something that is embedded in the language itself, put there by people who lived long before we did who themselves did not know what they were putting in the language anymore than we know what we are extracting. But they were compelled in their choices to put it there, and poets are compelled in their choices to chase it.
And if we could say what it is, in other words, it wouldn't be poetry.
If we could say what it is, we wouldn't need poetry.
Language is and was made by people, collectively, and as such it contains the collective wisdom of the ages. But it isn't in there obviously, largely because by making miniscule decisions about how to speak or write throughout time, individuals didn't notice that they were encoding wisdom in language. And yet they were, each time they made decisions about word choices.
Poets, by paying attention to word choice, sometimes tap into that wisdom, not because the poets themselves are wise, but because language is. Take the easy example of words that sound similar. Look for a theme here: vestal virgin, vagina, vulva, Venus, virile, vixen. You found two themes, right? And you're probably thinking, Wait, you forgot valentine, or ovulate, va va voom, venereal, or vamp, and the list goes on and on.
And having words sound similar is one of the least subtle clues that language gives us about words that belong together (or don't belong together--there can be so much power in those combinations too). Many times the compulsion to place two words next to one another is something we can't explain even to ourselves, and yet we know there is something powerful in the arrangement. And that's the job of poets, to be exquisitely sensitive to how words should be paired, or arranged, for the most effect. Even when / even though we can't say why the words are in the right order, when we're lucky, it's obvious to us and to everyone that we've found an order that holds something, some kind of wisdom or power or meaning that we can't paraphrase, something that is embedded in the language itself, put there by people who lived long before we did who themselves did not know what they were putting in the language anymore than we know what we are extracting. But they were compelled in their choices to put it there, and poets are compelled in their choices to chase it.
And if we could say what it is, in other words, it wouldn't be poetry.
If we could say what it is, we wouldn't need poetry.
Thursday, March 6, 2014
What I Did Instead of AWP
I didn't go to AWP. In fact, I have never gone.
It isn't that I didn't/don't want to, although being the introvert I am, I suspect that even had I gone/if I go, I would have spent/will spend a lot of time feeling overwhelmed.
Still, I'd like a chance to be so overwhelmed someday, when I don't live so far away that cost and travel time would burden my family. Someday.
Here's what I did instead of go to AWP:
1) Got excellent news concerning not one by two of my poetry manuscripts. Will tell more later, when appropriate.
2) Went to book club where we discussed And the Mountains Echoed, which was complex and interesting and yet didn't leave me wanting to read the other two Khaled Hosseini's bestsellers.
3) Got a haircut that I hate and still haven't figured out how to cope with.
4) Had tea with my closest Japanese friend during which time she told me she is moving.
5) Heard from my closest non-Japanese friend that she may also be moving.
6) Got a check for two poems that will soon be appearing in the Vermont College of Fine Arts' journal Hunger Mountain.
7) Took my son to a 4 1/2-hour awards ceremony in which children sat in a different section than their parents, so I was all alone, the only 'foreigner' in a sea of Japanese. I confess that at one point, for about an hour I put my iPod ear bud in one ear and ignored some of the endless drivel of the ceremony. Son received a medal for his academics.
8) Worked hard on three poems for my new project.
9) Baked desserts for my family, after not baking during the two years I was working on my newly-completed masters.
10) Cleaned out my bookshelves and got rid of over 100 books, but it didn't make much of a dent.
11) Wrote syllabi for the new school year starting in April.
Not quite the same as AWP, but no complaints here!
It isn't that I didn't/don't want to, although being the introvert I am, I suspect that even had I gone/if I go, I would have spent/will spend a lot of time feeling overwhelmed.
Still, I'd like a chance to be so overwhelmed someday, when I don't live so far away that cost and travel time would burden my family. Someday.
Here's what I did instead of go to AWP:
1) Got excellent news concerning not one by two of my poetry manuscripts. Will tell more later, when appropriate.
2) Went to book club where we discussed And the Mountains Echoed, which was complex and interesting and yet didn't leave me wanting to read the other two Khaled Hosseini's bestsellers.
3) Got a haircut that I hate and still haven't figured out how to cope with.
4) Had tea with my closest Japanese friend during which time she told me she is moving.
5) Heard from my closest non-Japanese friend that she may also be moving.
6) Got a check for two poems that will soon be appearing in the Vermont College of Fine Arts' journal Hunger Mountain.
7) Took my son to a 4 1/2-hour awards ceremony in which children sat in a different section than their parents, so I was all alone, the only 'foreigner' in a sea of Japanese. I confess that at one point, for about an hour I put my iPod ear bud in one ear and ignored some of the endless drivel of the ceremony. Son received a medal for his academics.
8) Worked hard on three poems for my new project.
9) Baked desserts for my family, after not baking during the two years I was working on my newly-completed masters.
10) Cleaned out my bookshelves and got rid of over 100 books, but it didn't make much of a dent.
11) Wrote syllabi for the new school year starting in April.
Not quite the same as AWP, but no complaints here!
Saturday, February 22, 2014
On A Metaphoric Bender
Aimee Bender on the Skylight Books podcast this week discussed exactly what I needed to hear.
First she read a story from her new collection The Color Master, and if you have time you really should listen to it.
But then she started answering questions and fielded one that led into a rumination of the use of metaphors (beginning at about 29:50 to the end). She said that a metaphor shouldn't have a one-to-one correspondence with the thing it is standing in for, or with the magical element. It needs to be more intuitive (from the unconscious, from a feeling of being drawn to use the items in the metaphor) to be infused with an emotional life. "The magic is a kind of access point into the emotional life of the story," she said.
Quoting Donald Barthelme, she said, "Art should both invite and repel interpretation." A one-to-one correspondence between symbol and meaning defies this mystery. Kills the mystery even. Bemder said where you are drawn to the meaning but don't completely understand the meaning, the emotion will be in there, as infused by the symbols you have been drawn to.
Later she said that once you (the writer) begin to see the symbol as a symbol, there are a few ways to fix this. One is to throw a random element in "to get the brain off its analytical mode." She doesn't believe that anything is chosen at random, but rather that everything is selected from the buried unconscious, and that "to kind of know what you are doing and kind of don't know what you are doing is a very productive space to be in."
Another fix she cites is one used by George Saunders and Haruki Murakami, one in which "as soon as you smell the meaning, you put it in the story." That is, you acknowledge to the reader that x is a symbol for y, yes, they saw it and you saw it too, and now the reader is ungrounded because they no longer know what will happen next, because you have to do something different next, having just acknowledged the symbol. "The story refreshes itself," she explains. The story is free to become bigger than that one symbol.
She says it better than I did, and with examples. Plus she's charming. So go and listen for yourself.
First she read a story from her new collection The Color Master, and if you have time you really should listen to it.
But then she started answering questions and fielded one that led into a rumination of the use of metaphors (beginning at about 29:50 to the end). She said that a metaphor shouldn't have a one-to-one correspondence with the thing it is standing in for, or with the magical element. It needs to be more intuitive (from the unconscious, from a feeling of being drawn to use the items in the metaphor) to be infused with an emotional life. "The magic is a kind of access point into the emotional life of the story," she said.
Quoting Donald Barthelme, she said, "Art should both invite and repel interpretation." A one-to-one correspondence between symbol and meaning defies this mystery. Kills the mystery even. Bemder said where you are drawn to the meaning but don't completely understand the meaning, the emotion will be in there, as infused by the symbols you have been drawn to.
Later she said that once you (the writer) begin to see the symbol as a symbol, there are a few ways to fix this. One is to throw a random element in "to get the brain off its analytical mode." She doesn't believe that anything is chosen at random, but rather that everything is selected from the buried unconscious, and that "to kind of know what you are doing and kind of don't know what you are doing is a very productive space to be in."
Another fix she cites is one used by George Saunders and Haruki Murakami, one in which "as soon as you smell the meaning, you put it in the story." That is, you acknowledge to the reader that x is a symbol for y, yes, they saw it and you saw it too, and now the reader is ungrounded because they no longer know what will happen next, because you have to do something different next, having just acknowledged the symbol. "The story refreshes itself," she explains. The story is free to become bigger than that one symbol.
She says it better than I did, and with examples. Plus she's charming. So go and listen for yourself.
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
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