Practice Makes Practice

I've been writing this poem for what seems like forever. Every day it is as good as I can make it; I had that sensational moment of knowing it was done about 3 weeks ago (and this was after months of working on it). And then the next day I read it just to make sure, and there was one word that hung me up when I spoke it aloud, so I changed it. Okay, now it was done. The next day I reread it just to enjoy it, and oops, how about if I smooth this out? It was just a  little change, deleting a syllable in a line so that it read absolutely smoothly and now it was done. Until the next day when I fixed something else and then it was done. Really, I believed this each time. But every time I read it again, some small snag caught my attention and I smoothed and smoothed.

It's been done without any changes for about five days now. It feels really done, but it has felt that way before.

I know Malcolm Gladwell said to get really good at something you have to spend 10,000 hours practicing, but I'm pretty sure he didn't mean to spend all 10,000 hours on one poem. I may not be getting any better at poetry, I'm getting really good at writing THIS poem. I think. I'll let you know tomorrow.

E-book Formatting Ideas

Copper Canyon Press has found a way to deal with the formatting of e-books of poetry, by including a line that a viewer should calibrate her device to be able to see in a single line. Once that's done, the poetry book should show up properly formatted. The Stranger blog explains in more detail (but barely more because not much is needed to explicate this elegant solution).

Frag / ments

If you're interested in the fragment as a unit or the juxtaposition of fragments as a technique in writing (think David Markson, or Maggie Nelson's Bluets) you should check out Ben Segal's article "The Fragment as a Unit of Prose Composition" over at Continent. Segal interviews both Nelson and and Evan Lavender-Smith about their use of fragments. Excerpts from Bluets and from Lavender-Smith's From Old Notebooks are provided PLUS fragments from both works that didn't make the final drafts.

Both interviewees recommend other writers who use fragments, and while I recognized most of the works they cited, I picked up a few new names such as Linda Nochlin and Eric Chevillard. Enjoy!

Funktuation

And some suggestions for punctuation marks at CollegeHumor. Check out the andorpersand, the sinceroid, the super ellipsis, and the Morgan Freemark. Punctuation has never been so fun.

And for more punctuation, check out my previous posts News in Poetry and Recognize these Puncs?.

Moxley's Moxie

The first time I read Jennifer Moxley's "Fragments of a Broken Poetics" was when it was published on the Poetry Daily website, under their prose feature which reprints pieces from other journals, in this case from Chicago Review, Spring 2010.

Yesterday I was reminded of the piece when listening to a lecture that Moxley gave at the University of Chicago in which she read the "Fragments" in its entirety (now that's a funny sentence!). (This lecture can also be downloaded on iTunes U under the University of Chicago's Poem Present Reading and Lecture Series.)

Moxley extensive musings about poetry and poetics have evolved into 50 fragments that brush against topics such as audience, semantics, imagination, authenticity, and others. Some fragments seem to contradict others. And the ones that stood out to me this time (pasted below) are undoubtedly not the ones that impressed me the most the last time I read this piece, inexhaustibility of the piece under repetition being a sign of good thinking and often also of good writing.

 from Fragments of a Broken Poetics

by Jennifer Moxley

III

A poet only needs one poem, a poem only one reader. Moving from singular to shared in this instance is a rudimentary economy. It is less affecting than a mortal kiss, more than a passing conversation. The poem will always provoke an acute desire to know its creator, "acute" because hopeless.

X

The poet who foregrounds the surface qualities of the word—sound, texture, look—must be especially scrupulous when building the poem's semantic foundation. Effects should enhance complexity, not replace it, otherwise they risk giving complexity, which already struggles to justify itself, a very bad name.

 

 

XVII

Sleep, to whom Keats partly owes his "worthy rhymes," has long been kin to poetry. Saint-Pol Roux affixing a sign that reads "poet at work" to his bedchamber is the most playful example of this alliance. Both sleep and poetry open a passage to the unconscious, one by nature, the other by artifice. Both create memories of astonishing wakefulness, one through dream, the other through imagination. It is almost impossible to reproduce or transmit such experiences by other means.

XXVIII

Poems demand a concentrated lingering to which we are unaccustomed. This is why they cause discomfort. When we stand still in one place, attempting to document and respect the details, we feel as vulnerable as a small creature in an open field beneath avian predators. Rapid and sequential page turning gives us a sense of progress and accomplishment, relieving us from the double threat of frustration and impatience.

 

XLI

After a point, even the poem can grow bored with its own devices.