Lectures & Notes

Trigger, Treasure, Shadow

2011-03-24T14:53:00.000-07:00

A now-dead poet named Richard Hugo wrote a little book many years ago called The Triggering Town. One of the main points of Hugo's book is that writers (poets, but we can apply the concept to all creative writing, I think) often create good poems by having it in the back of their minds that their "triggering subject," the idea they start with in a poem, is not really the true subject of the poem they are writing, and that the writing itself will lead, if one is fortunate and sufficiently inspired, to the "generated subject." So, as I have emphasized elsewhere on this site, writing is a process of discovery, and we should not hold too tightly to our initial ideas as we write, but keep ourselves open to discovery.

Billy Collins, former Poet laureate, wrote an essay called "My Grandfather's Tackle Box: The Limits of Memory-Driven Poetry," in which he cites Hugo, but also goes into further detail about the problems of staying too close to memory and not allowing imagination room to take over in the poem. The "generated subject," in Collins' language, is the "treasure," which one finds via the triggering subject's "map."

(I offer those alternate metaphors because I think your effort to internalize the concept depends on being able to invest in the right metaphor; and having considered Hugo's mixed metaphor of "triggering" and generated," you might find Collins' "map and treasure" more compelling. But really, the way to possess an idea on your own is to give it your own metaphorical frame. What is it for you?)

Collins, in his essay, goes on to discuss a particular poem that he feels is too caught up in the literal business of memory, failing to launch itself beyond mere memory into the space of imagination; in other words, that is in Collins' earlier words, the "map" does not lead to "treasure." Or according to Hugo's main metaphor, the trigger doesn't fire. Here are some of the more useful words from Collins' critique (without the poor poem he's politely leveling):

"There is no call to read the lines again," Collins asserts; which, I think, indicates that a good piece of writing does indeed demand re-reading, or what I sometimes call "reading backwards" -- we get to the end, and trace back to where we encountered moments of meaning in the work that are transformed by our experience of the whole.

"Even a poem based on a past event can give a feeling of immediacy if it manages to convey an awareness that it exists in the present tense of its own unfolding -- an awareness, ultimately, of its own language." Now, this is an assertion that does a few things. First, to create a simple matrix from it: a good piece of writing that works from specific remembered experience will of course present something of the past, but it will also create something of the "immediate," or the felt present. It helps, I think, to have a matrix positioned in your mind as your write; a continuum between one thing and another, to create a space within which your thoughts can seek their ultimate form. Think of it as the need for both a positive and a negative pole, as with electricity.

But also, in Collins' words above, there is a kind of figuration going on: the poem is a thing with consciousness, and not merely a reflection or transcription of consciousness. At least, it seems that way to me. That is shamanistic silliness, on one level, but I think most people with creative spirit tend to animate things ad relations in the world around them. It is non-rational, but it is a legitimate activity of the mind. And here, it is not merely a figure, a metaphor or personification, but a necessary sense that in a poem (or other inspired writing), we spark into existence something distinct from our own minds, though contained within our own minds. The poem or writing seems to have an awareness of itself; going beyond what Collins says, the writing communicates with itself, which, to return to the matrix concept, is what happens when conceptual relations multiply as we work, and many nodes of response are established, overlapping, creating a network of reverberations within and beyond the writing. Allusion is one way a poem or other text sends and receives signals from beyond itself; but as I think Collins means, it is also something deep down in the words themselves: the etymologies, the sounds of consonants and syllabus, the stresses, the pauses, the rhythms, and so forth. A creative work taps into the archetypal dimension, and much of what it touches is not even known to the writer or reader; that's why a good work beckons us to read again, and again, and to share it with others, whose readings will resonate with ours, but also expand and compete with our own understanding.

Here, Collins gos even further with the animation of the poem:

A poem about a past experience can transcend the mere circumstances of its triggering event through many different kinds of maneuvers. The poem may turn down an alley into another part of the poem's town; it may develop a disproportionate interest in some feature of itself; it may get sick of its own reminiscence and throw up its hands.

...so, a poem even has hands! (We already knew it had feet, from studying prosody). But in particular, Collins emphasizes another key part of Hugo's conception: that within the poem, or within our efforts to create the poem, there is a dynamic space (the matrix, or the town if you prefer some comfort and familiar sights), and the creative act is an intrepid exploration of that space -- going somewhere in the poem, even when it starts in an act of memory, that we have not visited before. "No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader," as Robert Frost said.

When writing, then, find a way to "turn down an alley"; the main road might be your memory of your father or mother, of a frightening experience, a lost love, etc.; but find where, in that memory, there is a secret trapdoor, pathway, crawlspace, wormhole, closet, treasure chest, or whatever metaphor works for you. You might still, on one level, be writing about your triggering subject; but you'll perhaps find a way to escape a mere replay of the memory; you'll find the immediacy of experience, in the writing itself, which will make it more likely that the reader will find it, too.

Donald Barthelme Reading List

2011-03-09T22:03:00.000-08:00

Students sometimes ask for reading lists; here is one given to me by a teacher, the renowned fiction writer Donald Barthelme. It's dated -- he made this in the early eighties. Also, it's weighted toward his aesthetic tastes, and perhaps to some extent toward writers her knew personally. But opinionated lists are very good to work with, as long as you don't take them as absolute.

I'll add other lists later --

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AT SWIM TWO-BIRDS, Flann O'Brien
THE THIRD POLICEMAN, Flann O'Brien
COLLECTED SHORT STORIES, Isaac Babel
LABYRINTHS, Borges
OTHER INQUISITIONS, Borges
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, Garcia Marquez
CORRECTION, Thomas Bernhard
NOG, Rudy Wurlitzer
GIMPEL THE FOOL, I. B. Singer
THE ASSISTANT, Bernard Malamud
THE MAGIC BARREL, Bernard Malamud
INVISIBLE MAN, Ralph Ellison
UNDER The VOLCANO, Malcolm Lowry
BECKETT ENTIRE
HUNGER, Knut Hamsun
I’M NOT STILLER, Max Frisch
MAN IN THE HOLOCENE, Max Frisch
SEVEN GOTHIC TALES, Isak Dinesen
GOGOL'S WIFE, Tommaso Landolfi
V, Thomas Pynchon
THE LIME TWIG, John Hawkes
BLOOD ORANGES, John Hawkes
LITTLE DISTURBANCES OF MAN, Grace Paley
ENORMOUS CHANGES AT THE LAST MINUTE, Grace Paley
I, ETC, Susan Sontag
TELL ME A RIDDLE, Tillie Olsen
FALLING IN PLACE, Ann Beattie
IN THE HEART OF THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY, William Gass
FICTION AND THE FIGURES OF LIFE, William Gass
THE WORLD WITHIN THE WORD, William Gass
ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF, Norman Mailer
CLOCKWORK ORANGE, Anthony Burgess
JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT, Celine
THE BOX MAN Kobo Abe
INVISIBLE CITIES, Italo Calvino
A SORROW BEYOND DREAMS, Peter Handke
KASPAR AND OTHER PLAYS, Peter Handke
NADJA, Andre Breton
CHIMERA, John Barth
LOST IN THE FUNHOUSE, John Barth
THE MOVIEGOER, Walker Percy
BLACK TICKETS, Jayne Anne Phillips
COLLECTED STORIES, Peter Taylor
THE PURE AND THE IMPURE, Colette
WILL YOU PLEASE BE QUIET PLEASE, Raymond Carver
COLLECTED STORIES, John Cheever
I WOULD HAVE SAVED THEM IF I COULD, Leonard Michaels
COLLECTED STORIES, Eudora Welty
THE 0RANGING OF AMERICA, Max Apple
COLLECTED STORIES, Flannery O'Connor
MUMBO JUMBO, Ishmael Reed
SONG OF SOLOMON, Toni Morrison
THE DEATH OF ARTEMIO CRUZ, Carlos Fuentes
BOOK OF LAUGHTER AND FORGETTING, Milan Kundera
THE RHETORIC OF FICTION, Wayne C. Booth
HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES, Joseph Campbell
HENDERSON THE RAIN KING, Saul Bellow
THE COUP, John Updike
RABBIT RUN, John Updike
PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEWS
HOW WE LIVE, edited by Rust Hills
SUPERFICTION, edited by Joe David Bellamy
PUSHCART PRIZE ANTHOLOGIES
THE WRITER ON HER WORK, edited by Janet Sternburg
MANIFESTOS OF SURREALISM. Andre Breton
DOCUMENTS OF MODERN ART, series edited by Robert Motherwell
AGAINST INTERPRETATION, Susan Sontag
A HOMEMADE WORLD, Hugh Kenner
FLAUBERT, Letters
SEXUAL PERVERSITY IN CHICAGO, David Mamet
THE CHANGELING, Joy Williams
THE NEW FICTION, edited by Joe David Bellamy
GOING AFTER CACC1AT0, Tim O'Brien
THE PALM-WINE DRINKARD, Amos Tutuola
SEARCHING FOR CALEB, Ann Tyler
THANK YOU, Kenneth Koch
COLLECTED POEMS, Frank O'Hara
RIVERS AND MOUTAINS, John Ashbery
TRAGIC MAGIC, Wesley Brown
MYTHOLOGIES, Roland Barthes
THE PLEASURE OF THE TEXT, Roland Barthes
FOR A NEW NOVEL, Alain Robbe-Grillet

Suggestions for Your “Reports”

2011-02-20T19:22:00.001-08:00

In a couple of weeks, I’d like you to submit your Midterm Reports. So, a few times this week, I will post suggestions for how to approach this, adding to what I’ve suggested on the Syllabus:

First, what I don’t really want: a high-school or (really) middle-school sort of report that lacks insight, effort, or personal connection. This doesn’t need to be more than a couple of pages, but it should be a tool you use to dig deeper into the possibilities of writing and the culture of writers. Use it to connect yourself more to those things in some way, and such that it will be of value to the rest of us.

I have posted here to “Lectures & Notes” during a previous semester a list of movies that in some way relate to poets; you can watch any of these, or any film about a writer in general (that’s a list I’ll start compiling one of these days), and this version of the “Poetry and Poets on Film” is a bit out of date as well – several films have come out that I will add in later. But you might start here, and watch one or two – two allows you to compare strategies or effects. From one, do more than merely summarize the plot. Some suggestions:

Research the poet in some quick & easy way – Wikipedia is fine for this sort of quick, hit-and-run research (read a biography if you have time, though). How well does the film present a true sense of the poet’s life and personality?

What role does poetry or the poet’s life seem to play in the film? Is it of significance to the plot, is it clichéd or innovative, is it related to death, seduction, self-discovery, a mystery, or some other theme or device of the narrative?

How is poetry read or performed in the film?

Find reviews of the film; to what extent do they discuss the use of poetry in the film?

Here is the list:

http://lundayengl2307.blogspot.com/2009/09/poetry-poets-in-film.html

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If you are more interested in fiction, one way to connect film to novels, obviously, is to read a novel and then watch the film version. Which is better, or are they not comparable? Does the film add to your sense of the novel? What do they leave out from the book – or add in? How does it fit your imagined sense of character, scene, and situation? If there is more than one film version of a novel, which is better, in your view?

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If you do a report on a writer’s life, although the report is brief, take time to compare two or three different biographical accounts. For more established writers, you can easily find memoirs, autobiography, biographies, and biographical notes in critical works. USE PRINT – don’t just sit and Google! Walk, ride, drive to a library or bookstore; dig around. In the different versions, are there discrepancies? What matters are highlighted or minimized? What matters in the writer’s life story seem most relevant to our understanding of his or her work?

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Do a brief survey of criticism of a writer; for this, you can, if you want, stick to library databases and open-Internet searches. Find reviews of books that appeared at the time the book was published; compare, perhaps, to critical reviews published further along in the writer’s career.

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A useful research project: dig deep into the web and find writers’ blog sites that seem interesting. Give us a blogroll: a list of the best you found. Annotate, perhaps: tell what seems good about each one. Or: what “memes” do you discover? That is, what issues do literary bloggers seem to discuss with frequency?

Or, look at writers’ web pages (could be blogs, but also simply static pages): what materials do they tend to post there?

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Another useful report: what are the best resources for writers on the web? Other than what I’ve been listing, that is: rhyming dictionaries, writer’s software, reference sites, craft sites, discussion forums, or anything you think many writers would be able to use.

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or – the same “Writer’s toolkit” idea – but of print resources.

More ideas later this week…

Valentine's Day: Love Poems

2011-02-14T10:04:00.000-08:00

Read some of the poems linked here, on the Poetry Foundation web site; as one of your exercises, consider borrowing strategies from one or more of these poems in writing your own love poem.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=238572

Poems to Oprah

2011-02-11T10:09:00.001-08:00

If you have a poem you're proud of, or one you like by someone else, consider sending it to O magazine:

http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Maria-Shriver-Will-Guest-Edit-O-Magazines-April-Poetry-Themed-Issue

Mark Twain, "A Restless Night"

2011-02-01T14:08:00.000-08:00

The following tome is available as a free download from Google Books -- or, in newer printings at your local bookstore. I post it here so you can have a look at one of my favorites, "A Restless Night," which is a good model for an additional Exercise: call it your "insomnia story" (or poem), or more broadly, an improvisation on a singular theme: what's wonderful about this one is that Twain gets so much out of one little concept. Take up a simple gesture, problem, encounter, etc. -- go inside, and see how many ways you can twist and turn it. What other scenarios would work with this: "first dates," "homeroom," "the dentist," "playing hooky," "on the bus," "in the elevator" -- make a list until something strikes you.

It's worth noting that most of American humor (sitcoms, movies, humorists like Dave Barry or Erma Bombeck) comes from Twain and stories like this one. Look at old Lucille Ball sitcom episodes, or even contemporary TV fare, and you'll see the Twain DNA in it.

"Howl" Excerpt: Invention

2011-02-01T10:07:00.000-08:00

In the following clip from the recent film based on poet Allen Ginsberg's famous poem "Howl," the poet's life, and the obscenity trial that helped broaden the poem's audience, Ginsberg talks about how a particular line came to him. We can take it, I think, as exemplary of one way creativity works: form preceding content, or more particularly, a pulse in the yet-to-be-written line or passage that seems to lead the poet toward the words themselves.

This is not the only way poets invent, but it is a common occurrence. It might sound counter-intuitive to new writers, but I think the impetus to such experiences is the intensive reading that I have already argued for in my lecturing: read, read, read, widely and deeply, out loud, silently, listen to others read, and then, when you write, voices and the patterns of language, will rise in you. Better, sometimes, not to know what theme you'e aiming for; just listen to the pulse. But first, you have to jolt it into being by listening to its permutations in poem after poem.

After watching this clip, you might read an earlier post about the poet Robert Frost, whose argument about the sources of a poem is very similar:

http://lundayengl2307.blogspot.com/2009/10/sound-of-sense.html

A Very Long Post on a Very Big Topic

2011-01-28T12:31:00.000-08:00

As we get this semester under way, I want to talk about Creativity itself, as a psychological and aesthetic concept. However, to get to “Creativity,” I will first talk about other concepts that I feel will support what I want to argue.

Why talk specifically about Creativity in a Creative Writing course? Why not just launch into being “creative”? Because I believe, from my own experience and study, that it is helpful to take a cognitive approach in our efforts (though perhaps modified from what contemporary psychologists mean by Cognitivism) – in any area of endeavor. That is, it is helpful to think about how we think, because greater awareness, “meta-thinking,” more of a focused self-consciousness about what we do, can improve how we do it – even though it is perhaps also true that sometimes we want to NOT think too much about what we’re doing: sometimes, we should probably have more of a “Zen mind” – not-thinking, or at least not thinking too much, about what we’re doing.

That itself is an important cognitive principle, for me: experience is marked here and there by paradoxes. Rules of thumb, corollaries, principles – there are always exceptions, and context, occasion, circumstance always matter. Few things are absolute, as I see it.

JS Sargent, "Apollo & the Muses"

I’m being deliberately philosophical; bear with me, and we’ll get to some more concrete, practical points later (well, in the second part of this Creativity series, I hope!).

“Zen mind” or intuition, second nature…yes, often we need to let loose and see what comes. Another approach to what lies behind those concepts is to redefine “mind”: we tend to think of it as concomitant with the brain itself, which anatomy tells us is inside the skull. However, the brain is the center of the nervous system, which goes everywhere (like the blood and lymph systems), so in a way, the whole body “thinks” – and by our senses, and by our words and deeds, we leave the mark of our thoughts far and wide – some of us (Napoleons and Einsteins, etc.) more than others.

To digress: “leaving one’s mark” is one goal of the artist, I suppose. Art, writing, and so forth are ways that people leave their traces: the old poets wrote extensively about how their poems were a way to become immortal – or to immortalize their poem’s subjects (often women the poets desired – and so, that trick or immortality was essentially a seduction device).

The body thinks. When I tried learning piano many years ago, it was hard to get the left hand to do one thing, and the right hand to do another thing, and to make both things come out sounding harmonious. That’s what training and practice were for: doing scales over and over, learning a little theory and hoping it would sink in, learning proper posture and hand position… but it felt as if my hands had to learn their roles, so that my conscious mind could go elsewhere – or, perhaps, shut down altogether, while the unity of my playing took over: a center, not in my brain or hands, but balanced between me, the keys, the music, the listener – all of it.

The body thinks: years ago, I tried to teach my son to memorize passages from literature. We started with Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address.” (Why do rote memorization? – to cram yourself with wonderful words, and hope that it steeps you in brilliance; again, paradox! Being smart, thinking critically, creatively, or originally, depend on the opposite: copying others.)

After some practice in his own room, my son came into my little home-office to show what he could do; he faltered a bit, went and practiced some more, came back, and pretty much got through it without mistake, but also without a lot of fluency or expressiveness.

What was lacking? I noticed, when he recited, that his mouth and his above-the-neck area generally (he squinted his eyes, he tensed his scalp, it seemed) were very busy, but the rest of his body – and the impromptu “stage” area around him, the performance space – were not involved. So, I thought about what really was involved in learning something “by heart.” Recordare is the root word in Latin: to record; but that cord part is also related to cardio, or the heart. “Heart” is metonymic, perhaps: of the whole body, the whole form, and of feeling, generally; and also symbolic, of the soul.

page from an emblem book

So, looking back at the great Age of Memorization and recitation – the nineteenth century, one might argue – I noticed that people studied such things as elocution (how to properly pronounce words), "chironomia" and variations (how to use your hands when speaking and gesturing), oratory, debate, and so on. Theater, too, was very popular; and going to lectures at lycea was the rage, for a time, in nineteenth-century America. That is, people knew that memorization was an activity involving the whole body: if you took a certain stance when reciting, if you thought about how to frame and punctuate your words with your gestures, if you scripted the intonation, pacing, pitch, and volume of your words, and if you imaging the performative space itself – where you were standing in relation to audience, to any objects or props, and how that performative space corresponded to spatial reference within your words (a battlefield, for instance, or the divided nation at war, as in the address Lincoln gave), then memory was greatly enhanced – and also, for the audience, memorability was enhanced.

How is this related to Creativity?

First, memory and imagination are possibly the same thing, somewhere down into the brain and how it functions. To remember is to imagine; we might attempt to re-vision a memory from the first impressions of an experience, but every time we remember, we reconstruct; and something is a little different, each time. That’s partly why memory is so tricky, but I think it works in our favor, overall. We might often remember incorrectly, but we are also capable of seeing things that aren’t there yet – hallucinations, which are usually troubling, but also visions of a better life and a better world: you’re getting a degree because you’ve envisioned yourself in a specific career, perhaps.

That’s part of it; but I start with memory also because the writer needs to know some things: he or she needs to pack into memory a wealth of learning about the world. The writer or artist needs to observe, absorb, question, follow up, connect, discuss, reflect, and courageously confront knowledge that seems wrong in some way, or deal with contradictions (Walt Whitman: Do I contradict myself?/Very well then I contradict myself,/(I am large, I contain multitudes.); to be unafraid of the unknown (because the more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know), and to be unafraid of paradoxes and other forms of inconsistency (R. W. Emerson: “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”).

So, by “memory” I mean the processes of learning and taking possession of what we learn, so that we can draw upon it as we engage in creative acts – not only in writing poetry and stories, but in every other task of living: parenting, paying bills, doing our jobs (“creative accounting” is something else, though).

People have always been creative, but Creativity as a study is fairly new; psychologists are very interested in the topic, but artists, scientists, and other creative types contribute to the discussion. One writer who early on offered an interesting formulation of creative process was the Englishman Graham Wallas in 1926, in his book The Art of Thought. In fact, what he offers is a kind of flow chart, or perhaps an algorithm: a series of steps. No, I don’t mean to say that one can necessarily be “creative” or become a Shakespeare or Da Vinci by following a checklist; not exactly. But to get back to what I said above about the cognitive approach, I believe that if one is aware of what takes place during a process (which is to argue that artistic inspiration can be analyzed as a process), we can at least increase our chances of having ideas – more ideas, more frequently, with more variety, from more directions, which is, I think, how anyone gets to having BETTER ideas: by increasing the flow of ALL ideas, including the “bad” or “dumb” ideas.

Here is the essential part of Wallas’ argument about creative process (as modified by some of his interpreters, at least):

Preparation: having defined a problem, question, or challenge in some form, the thinker “works” – drawing, writing, mapping, studying, talking, arguing, handling, testing, etc.
Incubation: the thinker moves away from the problem. He or she sleeps (as we all must), relaxes, works on other problems or questions, goes for a walk, listens to music, plays a sport, or anything that is consciously other than the problem itself.
Intimation (this part is often added to Wallas' original series): one feels that an answer or a solution is coming.
The heart of it all: illumination. The idea (or answer, or solution) reveals itself.
The final stage in Wallas’ formulation of creative process is verification: in the arts, this is perhaps when the audience, reader, critic, or fellow artists review the work that was developed from the idea (and the artist’s own self-judgments); for a scientist, this is standard scientific review, testing, duplication of experiments, etc. In business, this is the marketplace: do people like the product? Do they buy it?

It’s easy to imagine other ways to define the process: fewer or more steps, different ways to name and define them, etc. There are, in fact, other patterns, going back at least to the concept of the Muse that was popular among the ancient Greeks, and still given lip service by poets and artists today. In fact, one way to engage this process theory is to critique it, to challenge it, extend it, and revise it to suit your own experience and sensibilities.

My argument is this: if you meditate on this process theory, considering its implications, opportunities, and limitations, it will make you more attuned to your own mental processes, however best they can be described.It might be hard to imagine how Steps 3 and 4 can be manipulated (besides drugs or alcohol, which are dubious enhancements to creativity, although some folks swear by them – see Coleridge’s story; or chanting, or intense prayer); however, what about the other steps?

S. T. Coleridge

Certainly Step 1is in our control: READ, READ, READ as I have already (elsewhere) emphasized; re-read, discuss your reading, read what you love and love what you read!

Then go out and explore, take trips, stop and study things, take notes – copious notes: most artists and scientists are inveterate note-takers, and their journals and diaries and field books are available in museums for review. They also marked up their books, and whole academic careers have been devoted to studying Melville’s or Coleridge’s annotations and notes.

Also, Step 2 is in our control, although less obviously. How do you incubate? When we sleep, we dream; as you lie down, prepare yourself for dreaming: try telling yourself what you want to dream about (I find it works a lot of the time, although not always as I expect – which is good!); have an intense waking dream, perhaps the same one each night (I often place myself on a desert island, each night with different problems to solve, and different resources at my disposal, or on different kinds of desert islands) that will entrance you and draw you into sleep; read or study something right before sleep; keep a dream journal by your bedside.

Also, spend time alone: give yourself space, and maybe a particular space (your “querencia,” your bower or special private place), where you can feel free to daydream. Take walks; walking (the body thinks, remember) stimulates the mind, as William Wordsworth and (long before him) the Peripatetic philosophers knew.

Mainly, be prepared: the mind is an imp! It tends to toss out inspirations when we least expect them, and are least able to turn our full attention to them – when driving, or in the shower, for example. (I read once of an engineer who had so many brilliant ideas while in the shower that she designed a special pen and shower-stall coating so she could write her ideas down while wet. As for driving, I keep a digital voice recorder handy, and practice mnemonics.)

Also, talking your ideas out with people, at certain stages of development, is helpful: bouncing ideas off another person is good, because that person will perhaps question, extend, relate, or simply inadvertently remark on something that stimulates the thinker (which leads to a different category, Group Creativity, which we can discuss later). Also, talking about your projects helps you siphon out unformed thoughts, and leads to what I call “creative b.s.” – often, trying to make it look like you’ve done more on the problem than is really true, so in an effort to impress, you improvise your way into the solution. Or, you look like an idiot; but courage, risk, and even foolhardiness are part of being creative.

Also, practice juggling two or more problems/questions at a time. Edison supposedly had many work benches in his space, because he could leap from one to the other, trailing matters from one area to the next – cross-pollination. Much good thinking is analogous thinking: seeking and discovering similarities between otherwise unlike categories of experience. Switching from one problem to another, even when they are seemingly unrelated, allows you to incubate or “slow cook” one problem, but also season it with flavoring from the other problems. Everything is related to everything else in this universe. It’s just that most of those relations, most of the time, appear meaningless to us, or do not appear at all.

And finally, verification: that is very much in our control, but one way to think of it, to extend or reshape Wallas’ series, is to see it as folded over on itself, or shaped like a helix: once you get to verification, you are also, often, back at the preparation stage: you do more study, more questioning, reading, talking, exploring, and define new problems, or pass the matter on to new problem-solvers.

The Workshop is our Verification Tank, but there are many other ways to “verify”: revision is a way to verify your work – even when something seems good, complete, or at a dead-end, there is always a variation, extension, connection (to another, separate work), redirection, inversion, or truncation that you might apply. Think of all the parts and references in a work as trap doors: in your poem about your father, your mother makes a brief appearance; next poem, go toward her, and see what you see. Or that object on the table in your memory: pick it up, see what’s underneath it, inside it – describe it so intensively (enargeia, which I will discuss more later) reveals that we always see more than we think we see, and can see much more, and say much more, or much less, or from many more perspectives, than we think.

Ah, this is long – but I have much more to report! So, ponder these words, and ponder your pondering: consider how your mind works, and see where you can tweak it. Do not be afraid to write and speak; yes, there are dumb ideas, but some of them are squatting on top of brilliant ideas.

More later on this…although I might take up a different topic next week.

2011 Readings in Houston

2011-01-22T15:10:00.000-08:00

Among the earlier posts you will find similar information, but I'll re-post certain information, to make it more accessible. But remember -- you can push back through the earlier posts to find a great deal of valuable information!

Try to attend some live literary events this season; here are some options:

http://www.inprinthouston.org/20102011-brown-reading-series

The premier reading series in town -- Inprint Margaret Root Brown Reading Series. Next:

http://www.gulfcoastmag.org/index.php?n=6

The Gulf Coast Reading Series, sponsored by Gulf Coast magazine and the Brazos Bookstore -- which has other author events as well:

http://www.brazosbookstore.com/event

Also check out Houston's best used bookstore, Kaboom Books (two locations), which has a reading series in "nanofiction":

http://www.kaboombooks.com/

Let us know if you hear of any events!

The Paris Review

2011-01-19T21:24:00.000-08:00

The Paris Review is one of the more important literary publications of our time. Find it in the library or in bookstores; meanwhile, visit their web site, where you can find selections in nonfiction, fiction, and poetry from many years' worth of issues. Most importantly, you can find an archive of their famous interviews with authors -- perhaps one of the best resources for discussion of craft you can find anywhere. There are print volumes of these,but why not read some online to get started?

Book Reviews

2011-01-19T21:15:00.000-08:00

In my first group email on Blackboard, I spoke of reading book reviews as one way of learning critical vocabulary; here are a couple of web sites for finding reviews:

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/

and

http://www.complete-review.com/main/main.html

...but there are many other ways to find reviews, online and in print.

Poetry Almanac

2010-11-21T17:25:00.000-08:00

This is a good site for poems, specially selected each day, with other poetry-related information -- and audio, since this site is connected to Garrison Keillor's "Poetry Almanac" on NPR.

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/

Walter Mosley, "Pet Fly": Invention-Patterns

2010-11-12T14:50:00.000-08:00

After reading the story by Walter Mosley called “Pet Fly,” think about some of the following observations:

We can read a text in a “readerly” way, focusing on what it means; or we can focus our attentions in a “writerly” way, thinking about how it works. Further, as I have tried to emphasize in all our text-based exercises, and in some posts, we can consider specific devices that writers seem to have borrowed from each other, and practice writing as a kind of imitation process. All writers, all artists, all creative people generally, learn in part by “stealing” from others: they see something work in one story, or movie, or building, or system, and they identify the device or element or gesture that is transferable to a work they are engaged in (or, the insight that a device is transferable, that other practitioners can use it, inspires a new work).

This imitation method is the basis for my course; it is the most important way to learn how to write – paradoxically, it is the best way to learn how to be original: to borrow from others, then experiment a bit, update certain aspects of the new work, turn things upside down, invert them, truncate them, extend them, question them, mix and match…the, see what happens.

So, in this story, what can be transferred? If I were to create an exercise or two from this story (and I will), what ideas would be most fruitful?

Let’s start with setting. Mosley’s story is set in a classic environment – the workplace, an office – on Wall Street. Mosley isn’t the first person to use that setting; in fact, I suspect he was himself influenced (since imitation is an unending series of exchanges from one writer to the next) by, among other writers, Herman Melville – famous mainly for the whaling novel Moby Dick, and also for the “workplace” (and Wall Street) story “Bartleby the Scrivener,” in which we have secondary characters presented as “peas in a pod,” let’s say (if there’s a formal name for this device, I don’t know it) – that is, in “Bartleby,” as a tripling of characterization, and in “Pet Fly,” as a doubling. (Hamlet does the same thing with Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern; Lewis Carroll, with Alice in Wonderland (Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum).

In Mosley, the two Lindas are doubled – in a joking way, because Mosley doesn’t even bother to give them different names. Why? What effect does this device have? First, it is one of many ways to think about secondary characters. They might represent certain challenges or experiences of the major characters; they might be devices meant mainly to deepen atmosphere, to pace the plot of the story, to provide shadow or contrast to the main focus of the story; they might be comic relief, among other possibilities.

Doubling such characters, at least in Mosley, Hamlet, and Melville, also makes us see the characters as incomplete in themselves; it takes two or three of them to create the effect. This has the thematic value, in all three of these texts, of highlighting the ways in which bureaucracy, systems, institutions, power structures, etc. can devalue human individuals. People in offices, sometimes (at least as far as some “free spirits” are concerned) lose their individuality or efficacy.

So, the two Lindas help create atmosphere, and they “shadow” the main character, Rufus; that is, they reflect something of his on inefficacy, though with variation on the theme: we don’t see their interiority (what they feel or think), and they seem to be unresisting of the System.

To steer back to writerly concerns: how does a writer invent character? Partly, a writer invents character by deploying secondary characters in various ways to reflect, contrast, shadow, support, frame, or otherwise influence the main character or characters, and how we see them. We could create types or functions for other secondary characters in this story: they represent, mainly, the dynamics of the office that Rufus is employed at.

Notice, as well, that we have other obvious doublings – in particular, the twins, Mona/Lana. There are a few very subtly surreal elements in this story (which is one reason I enjoy it), and this suspicious pair of twins is one such element: are there really two? Page 228 seems to establish them as real, but why do we need twins in the story? It might be Mosley’s send-up of that old racist notion, “they all look alike” – a reversal of it, in what is clearly a story about racism, and sexism, but through a perspective that denies us clear answers.

Look at the scene in the bottom half of page 226, in which Rufus has an encounter with “Big Linda.” It seems ordinary, or naturalistic: pretty much the way it might unfold in a real-life encounter at an office between two people in menial positions. But as you read the dialogic scene, consider two things: first, how what Linda says to Rufus teaches us about his character; and second, how his responses and interior reflections also reveal something about who he is. Often, when a secondary character serves as a refracting device: he or she provides a screen, in a sense, upon which the main character’s reactions can be projected so as to show us more about him or her.

We see in this scene that Rufus is a large man, but not assertive; we learn a little about how he perceives women, and that he avoids rudeness and conflict. This small scene, in addition to pacing the story (providing a segue between the expository scene with Ernie and the first encounter with Mona/Lana), allows us to see how Rufus sees, and how he is seen by others. Notice as well how the first Mona/Lana encounter is followed (after the rather strange encounter with the fly) by another scene with Big Linda. Patterning like this helps us enter the illusion of familiarity with fictional character, I think; it “baffles” the invented time and place of the story, suggesting depth and movement.

This story has very little “action:”; the only moment of real conflict is the sexual-harassment complaint, which, since it seems to lead, ironically to something good for Rufus, is a kind of non-conflict in the story. Instead of action, we have situation; we have what amounts to a deep and insightful character portrait, really – a story that allows us to feel and perceive small and nuanced details of experience through Rufus’ “everyman” life. he is not remarkable, but in small but pointed ways, he is remarkable; he has a sensitivity to things that he refuses to surrender.

I want to focus on one more doubling element, which is of course the “pet fly” – the fly at home, that is, whom Rufus adopts, briefly, and focuses his attentions on – as if deflecting his mind away from his own miniscule existence within the office, where he might be “squashed” (what one usually does with flies) if he doesn’t stay in his place.

This is the third doubling of the story: we have two Lindas, Mona/Lana, and the at-work and at-home flies. Again, the flies are there mainly to refract something of Rufus’ interiority: he talks to them, relates to them, and such “relationship” intensifies our sense of his essential loneliness.

Do we “need” the flies in this story? How would it read if we edited them out? Or the two Lindas, or for that matter the twins, when one would do for the sexual-harassment plot line?

First, they are elements of invention as much as they are elements of structure and content; that is, I suspect they have something to do with the way the story was created by the author, and not only with the final “product” and its meaning or effect, or its “contents.” It is not easy (short of asking the author, who will not always have clear answers himself about such things) to separate the product from the process – but in this course, that is what we are seeking, really: we read, in part, to find how we might write.

So, how do they aid in invention?

Many of my exercises are aimed not so much at achieving theme or meaning in what you write; most writers accept that if they focus consciously on what they “mean,” their poems and stories will be flat and unmemorable. So, pattern is the thing: artists are interested in rhythms, pulses, patterns, tensions, contrasts, amplifications, etc. – and by focusing their energies on that abstract level, they are more likely to discover meaning, I believe. Meaning, once it is pinned down, dissolves; it has to keep moving away from us to exist. Works of art are more about their effects. The fly, in a way, is pure effect: it is itself a symbol of meaninglessness, and yet it is also the condensed point of meaning in the story. It is smallness of scale, and in looking at it (through Rufus’ eyes) we see ourselves seeing; the world at normal human scale is intensified, turned off-kilter just a bit, and the ordinary is made less than ordinary. If there is a meaning in such a story, it is simply that we need to look at things in new ways, and that doing so will save us – from what, I don’t know; perhaps only from the deadening effects of the ordinary.

So, what exercises might come from this? One: toss a fly (or something arbitrary, out of scale, slightly odd) into a story, and see what happens. Two, think not only about plot and character, but also architecture in your stories: patterns, doublings, oppositions, framing and pacing, risings and fallings – such as the one at the end of this interesting story. Rufus takes home the bonsai tree he’d bought for Mona/Lana; it is metonymic of her, as is the fly, in a weird way (when he sees the office fly, he thinks of her); and she is indicative of the lack of direction in Rufus’ life, as his mother points to it in the last line. The plant goes home with him, but not the girl; this man lacks those things that make us whole: companionship, and, as his mother says, “a real bed.” I love the way the closure in this story avoids any real thematic resolution. We end with the emblematic nature of the bonsai (a small world itself – one in which a fly might be human-sized), with the ordinary comments of the mother, and a sense that life, even a life slightly of off track, keeps moving forward.

Read, if you have time, the story by Anton Chekov called “Lady with the Pet Dog” (or “lady with the Lap Dog” in some translations); the dog is another good use of what we might call a red herring, or a device that refracts or suspends meaning more than it holds or creates it.

Poets at Work

2010-10-17T16:57:00.001-07:00

This is a new site that looks like it has good information and resources:

http://poetsatwork.com/

Tom Larson

2010-10-17T16:50:00.000-07:00

A quick informational post, while I work on the next "lecture" --

If you have time this week, consider going to this event at the downtown Houston Public Library. The author, Thomas Larson, is a friend and colleague of mine, and an authority on memoir as a creative-nonfiction form. If you are interested in writing memoir, he can perhaps answer questions. The book he is presenting is a hybrid form: memoir, music history and biography, culture studies, musical analysis. It will be a media presentation, so if you are interested in writing about music, it might give you some ideas.

It's Wednesday, October 20, 6 pm -- read more at this site:

http://www.hpl.lib.tx.us/an-evening-with

A Study of Two Poets: Cruz and Kooser

2010-10-10T19:08:00.000-07:00

I spoke before about repetition as a dynamic and formal element in writing. This week I will focus on poetry more specifically, and will look at prose next time. I want to look somewhat at repetition, but since it is, in a sense, artificial to isolate the elements of art, I will also talk about a few other matters, to show how important it is to study these points of craft one by one, but also to see their synthesis.

One issue I’ve tried to address in my Workshop posts, particularly with regard to poems, is the importance of defining the integrity of the line. The ways in which a voice or a point of view in the poem can help “shape” the line are quite varied. Traditionally, a poetic line has been defined greatly by the elements of stress and syllable count, or “meter”; but even when poets use those metrical elements in traditional ways, there must be some other force at work to give it life and authenticity.

I have spoken in the Workshop about dramatic situation, for example; “voice,” the word I use above, is in a way a further condensation of the concept of dramatic situation.

Voice is (to offer some tentative definition) how the poet creates a sense of relationship in the poem, and also a sense of occasion in the traditional rhetorical meaning of that word (kairos). Occasion in that sense is the spur, the impetus for writing or speaking; it might be some event, some previous text or other words, or merely a feeling that arises when the poet prepares to write (or that cause her to write). But also, the poet (or any writer) can invent a sense of occasion, and make it an important part of the poem (or story, or essay).

Sometimes, the voice appears to speak “to” or “of” somone, although that other presence might be abstract. The poet W. B. Yeats said that rhetoric was speech heard, and poetry was speech overheard – meaning that poetry, often, is more private, and more like one’s speaking to oneself. But even in that situation, we have a matrix between speaker and auditor – a space within which some sort of occasion, sense of pace, sense of prior and succeeding action, exists, however slight or abstract.

Look at the first poem below, by Victor Hernandez Cruz. It uses a fairly universal occasion, you might say: eating; and it uses, I think, a particular food, red beans, in a metynomic or more broadly a symbolic or emblematic sense – red beans stand in for cultural identity, but also, for the archtetypal truth of sustenance, hunger, and fellowship (we tend to eat together, and meals are rituals).

*

Red Beans

next to white rice
it looks like coral
sitting next to snow

Hills of starch
border
The burnt sienna
of irony

Azusenas being chased by
the terra cotta feathers
of a rooster

there is a lava flow
through the smoking
white mounds

India red
spills on ivory

Ochre cannon balls
falling
next to blanc pebbles

Red beans and milk
make burgundy wine

Violet pouring
from the eggshell
tinge of the plate.

*

There are many wonderful forces at work in this poem: it is beautifully imagistic, very inventive, and expansive, although the initiating element is something as mundane, as ordinary as red beans and rice!

Think, first, of occasion: the poem might indeed make you feel hungry, but certainly, it reminds you of eating, of family, of the table, the kitchen, a restaurant, and all the noises, smells sights, and feelings of such experiences. Furthermore, the poem is metamorphic: it compounds one image and suggested scene upon another, each quite different from the next (though all related, ultimately) such that in fact it has no natural (or climactic) way to end – it could go on even longer, I imagine, proposing various ways that the red and the white of a plate of red beans and rice suggest other sights and experiences.

It is a “list” poem, of a sort: and that is a key aspect of repetition as a force in art. Give your reader one thing, and then be generous enough to offer it again in a different packaging, a different flavor, from a different angle. In other words, although there are nine stanzas here, there is one basic concept that the poet unfolds numerous ways. Creativity, to a great extent, is finding many ways to do the same thing, and making us enjoy it rather than get bored because we know what’s coming. You want the reader, in a way, to both know and be surprised by what comes next.

Each stanza – of two or three lines – is a miniature scene; each one, directly or indirectly, is also metonymic or symbolic of some aspect of history, or more specifically, of the ongoing experience of people of the Southwest – or so it seems to me; and you could, of course, interpret or value the poem in various other ways. It is from knowing a few things about the poet, perhaps, that I make that connection – but it is also the metonymic power of single words. One word or one image can suggest volumes of history, emotion, and life.

But notice as well how concrete and particular the words are, for the most part. This is another point I’ve been trying to make in Workshop. Start from concrete, small, sensual details; if you want to write a poem about love or loneliness or war or injustice, forget that you want to write such a poem, and look for a real thing that your mind can handle, explore, and open up into the poem that seeks you. If injustice or love or war or loneliness are in your heart, the poem will probably end up touching those notes; but it will do so in a way that evokes, that conjures, that strikes – not by preaching or essaying.

One more point: the lines here are free-verse lines; they are small lines, in short stanzas. The appropriateness of those two choices is probably due to the essentially imagistic frame of the poem: often, image-driven poetry uses a narrow line in a short stanza, because it is (I think) somewhat like the movie camera moving in close, to show us the pores, textures, beads of sweat, blemishes, granulations, etc. – the distance between what a thing is as an item in a genus or family of other things, and what a thing is as the pure matter of which all things are made – whether we react to them with love or hate, revulsion or desire, hope or regret.

Next, I will look at a poem that seems very different to me, but that still illustrates these issues, I think. First, the poem:

A Box of Pastels

I once held on my knees a simple wooden box
in which a rainbow lay dusty and broken.
It was a set of pastels that had years before
belonged to the painter Mary Cassatt,
and all of the colors she'd used in her work
lay open before me. Those hues she's most used,
the peaches and pinks, were worn down to stubs,
while the cool colors - violet, ultramarine -
had been set, scarcely touched, to one side.
She's had little patience with darkness, and her heart
held only a measure of shadow. I touched
the warm dust of those colors, her tools,
and left there with light on the tips of my fingers.

Ted Kooser

Ted Kooser was the Poet Laureate a few years ago (the position changes every two years; the current Poet Laureate is W.S. Merwin). He is culturally and aesthetically different from Mr, Cruz, I suppose: a midwestern Anglo-American (well, maybe not "Anglo," exactly!), somewhat older, and more of a traditional poet, although still mainly operating in free verse. Perhaps Mr. Cruz owes more, in his construction of the poetic line, to the Modernist poet William Carlos Williams, who was trying to create a distinctively American sort of poetic form (different, that is, from the European, specifically, British, tradition), also focused quite often on seeing – on the image. Mr. Kooser is still harkening back to the traditional iambic pentameter line, and thus still presents a poem that includes more overt narrative and discursive statement (the Cruz poem suggests the occasion or situation of sitting down to eat, but the rest of its occasions are very abstract, though also very visceral: the cannon invokes war and the ravages of history, the rooster suggests peasant life or at least rural life, the Azusenas suggest womanhood or romance (to me!), etc. But such a story does not have at its center a singular consciousness, or a distinctive, named self.

Kooser’s poem is almost confessional; that is, it does focus on a single self, an "I," a speaking consciousness, talking directly from memory. The character and story are not elaborate, within the lines of the poem, but they are clear and complete, though compact.

The dramatic situation suggests a visit to a museum, or perhaps the house of a famous artist (Mary Cassatt), that has been turned into a museum (I'm guessing, and could perhaps do research and find out more surely, but guessing is often good enough for appreciating the poem as it is). The “theme” of the poem seems very strongly tied to the basic antithesis or continuum of colors as “cool” or bright. It is symbolic in the sense that the poet tells us, more or less, that this painter preferred birghtness – not only in terms of raw color, but perhaps in terms of emotion – optimism over pessimism, hope over despair. (None of this is exact or certain; it doesn’t need to be. Your intepretations need only be plausible.)

Also, before continuing: this poem is just slightly, indirectly, related to a class of poems (writing generally, really) called ekphrasis. An ekphrastic text is an intensive verbal description of a work of art or visual scene. More recently, a poem about a work of art, or an artist's work, is called ekphrastic, but the basic point is that the poet or writer attempts to evoke, to conjure, the visual object within words. It is almost a kind of contest between the powers of visual art and the powers of verbal art. Look for my earlier posts on ekphrasis, and look out for Exercises on our class site dealing with various aspects of ekphrasis.

But how is it similar, if at all, to “Red Beans”? I am trying to help you as writers discover the most rewarding aspects of craft and skill; how to find the true energy of making art. It seems to me that both poems depend heavily, if in different surface-level or formal ways, on repetition. In the Kooser poem, it is more a matter of reiteration, or how prose often moves forward: state a subject, then move forward in part by restating or renaming it. See the Kooser poem as reduced to the main line of this list: rainbow, pastels, colors, hues, peaches, pinks, cool colors, violet, ultramarine, darkness, shadow, warm, color, light. These words are reiterations, I think, of the same basic note (to insert a musical analogy). In a way, the poem is made up entirely of this one concept, “color,” unfolded in a dozen different ways. But the poem has synthesized that with a basic narrative; we like to listen to anecdotes, to stories, but it seems to me the true art here is not in the story itself, but in the reiterations – in the unfolding of the one thing into many things, as if the poet were a magician – or a creator. (Really, the art is in the synthesis: in giving us both a natural, appealing story, and also, a fugue of words).

Cruz does the same thing, but his “story” is much further away (there is no “I once sat down for dinner…” comparable to Kooser's "I once held on my knees..."); but both poets give us a fugue of words. In Cruz, as it happens, it is also to do with color; in fact, that red and white (also the colors of blood and flesh, the Eucharist, or the Catholic identity of many Hispanics of the Southwest) are foregrounded in this poem. So, Kooser foregrounds narrative, but combines it with the reiterations on the theme of color. Cruz foregrounds color, but still has a suggestion of situation, if not exactly narrative.

My points, to work back toward being a creative writer, are: first, consider the paradox of the many out of the one when you are creating. Open a door – choose a singular, but concrete, theme – and then find the various ways you can repeat it. Second, if you choose a formal or structural armature – telling a story or painting a scene – consider that you still need a contrapuntal element: and often, that will be how your story needs the stasis of scene, or your scene needs the dynamics of story, though one or the other might be minor rather than major.

Repetition: Further Thoughts

2010-09-28T11:12:00.000-07:00

I've written, last year and already this term, on the matter of repetition. Repetition as a key to matters of both form and invention (or, what we make as well as how we make it: product and process) is an obsession of mine -- because it is both simple and complex as a concept.

So, I try to approach it in different ways. Technology (online tools, that is) allows some new approaches, although they resemble skills that are already necessary to reading and writing.

For example, the simple CTRL + F command (in your browser or in Word), which allows you to quickly locate instances of a word or phrase. Take a text of your own, or of any writer, and search it for various words and word-patterns: what do you notice of primary terms, instances of repetition, proximity of certain words, etc.?

Another useful tool is a tag cloud. A cloud allows you to create a visual representation of word occurrences.

Before proposing an experiment, I will develop my thoughts a bit more. Creativity is, from one angle, a matter of finding associations that others don't notice, or that are in some way volatile -- leading to further associations, for one thing. Art is pattern-making; repetition is the tick-tock of pattern-making and pattern-recognition. Between two things, including two instances of the "same" thing, there are many dynamics: a matrix or space of possible value or meaning, a tonality derived from the combination of the two things, a sense of speed in traveling between the two, a texture, a rise, a fall, etc. (Tick-tock: what is that vocable we use for naming time except the resistance to seeing a second instance of the same thing as the same thing? We have to alter it; we have to invent the illusion of change.)

Writers develop their works, they invent and discover, partly through returning to a point of observation, obsession, desire, fear, or memory. Language allows us to see many in one: Love is love, but it is also lust, ardor, passion, longing, romance, fondness, amorousness, and many other "synonyms" that are really different angles, different degrees, different stages, different influences, different steps on different ladders of experience. Also, each word, each concept or node of experience, has it's opposites: hate, loathing (an almost-rhyme with loving!), despising, disliking, detesting. One word, one node, when touched, reveals many possible pathways forward. We fit experience to language, and language to experience. We invent, and yet we re-inhabit forms that writers have always used; we speak words and phrases, perform entire conversations, that others have had before us. Life is a ritual, life is a discovery -- both.

One way to think of art-making is as a way to move forward (to discover, to escape, to survive) and at the same time stay still (to preserve, to persist). This is a paradox -- a puzzle that making art seems to undo, but really it adds other layers to the puzzle. Repetition, creating of patterns, invention of form -- these are ways we engage the paradox.

This is all rather abstract and high-falutin', I know. It is a felt notion more than a theory, I guess. So, let me push into the experiment, and see if you have any insights of your own -- ways to make more concrete and practical my ethereal ramblings:

*

Look at these two texts by classic American authors -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature" and T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Emerson's text is a long essay, Eliot's is a longish poem; the essay is from the early 19th century, the poem from the early 20th century. Both use reiterations of words and concepts. What I'd like you to do is to use CTRL + F, and/or simply your own scanning/re-reading/note-taking skills to study how the writers use repetition at the word/phrase level. Specifically, for Emerson -- focusing mainly on the Intro and Chapter 1 -- how often does he use words that have to do with SEEING an LIGHT? Don't look only for those words; think about what words are in some "family resemblance" with them: words that directly or indirectly have to do with seeing, light, and their opposites.

Then, in Eliot's poem, discover how often he repeats the same words, but also, again, consider how those words form patterns in association. Study as well how those clusters of similarity change and move in the poem.

Finally, for fun, copy and paste some or all of the texts -- and any other text -- into this resource, "Wordie" -- a word-cloud generator. What words are dominant? What forms do you see in the hierarchies of repetition?

As a final "Exercise," you might take the most frequently used words and write your own story/essay/poem with them.

Reading Events in Houston

2010-09-19T17:14:00.000-07:00

There are many literary events in Houston,; here are links to online information about some of them. Going to readings is a good way to meet other writers, to get a sense of the social sphere writers inhabit, and perhaps to find opportunities to read yourself (particularly at open mic events).

http://www.inprinthouston.org/20102011-brown-reading-series

This is the premier literary event in town -- the Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series.

http://www.inprinthouston.org/first-fridays

Inprint also has readings by local writers, followed by open reading opportunities.

http://www.gulfcoastmag.org/index.php?n=6

The University of Houston Creative Writing Program has readings, but also, the literary magazine they host, Gulf Coast, has a series at the Brazos Bookstore.

http://houstonpoetryfest.info/

The Houston Poetry Fest is many events every fall: readings, awards, etc.

http://www.uhd.edu/academic/colleges/humanities/cultural_enrichment_center/index.htm

Here's a single event at UH-Downtown.

http://www.kaboombooks.com/

Kaboom Books is Houston's finest surviving used bookstore -- and they host a reading series specifically for "nanofiction"!

http://houstonpoetryslam.org/verboscity-slam-showcase/

If you're interested in the Poetry Slam movement -- the main site has more information besides this Verboscity reading series.

http://www.houstonpress.com/calendar/

Check here for ongoing notices, particularly events at Borders and Barnes & Noble stores in town.

YouTube as a Writer's Resource

2010-09-16T12:44:00.000-07:00

You probably know about YouTube as a source of entertainment, how-to information, etc. Have you thought of it as a writer's resource? There are a few ways I can think of it as useful to us, but for this post, I'll focus on YouTube as an archive for video/audio of lectures and readings.

Writers frequently give "readings" -- they are invited somewhere ( a college, a bookstore, or some other venue) and read selections from their works. Sometimes, they also lecture on their art; also, they give extended interviews, usually on their influences, their craft, their politics, their live stories, and other matters. There are also a few films about writers and their lives, their times, and their work. Finally (and for this, see some of my posts from last Fall 2009), there are feature films about writers, or -- of course -- films based on their works (even, though rarely, on poems, as opposed to novels).

For now, I will share some YouTube videos of writers reading (and, as often happens at readings, talking about their craft and inspiration).

You can, of course, simple search YouTube (or Google) using any writer's name; but if you search YouTube itself, there are always suggested, related videos on the right. That's one good way to explore and discover new writers. Try that with some of the suggestions I make here.

Also, listen and look at the way writers read their works. Some are terrible at it! Others are very instructive as to how their works, or how poetry and prose, should sound out loud. (By the way: practice reading your own drafts out loud, or reading what you like of others' works out loud, as a way of hearing what's there that silent reading doesn't reveal.)

Some recommendations:

Kay Ryan, former Poet Laureate:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yfPSnEGQEk&feature=related

I highly recommend Ryan as a good poet to start with -- she's accessible, amusing, and brief -- but her poems are highly crafted, and explore the edges and interconnections of words and meanings.

Raymond Carver:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iayOxcwLS_Q

Ok, this is mainly for the audio; but listen carefully! Carver was a modern master, brilliant with language, and courageous in his characterizations.

Kevin Young:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1c-GXK8Vm4

Young is a prolific poet, and his poems -- in books that are amazingly long for poetry books these days -- are deeply inclusive, rangy, fluent, amusing or moving, and embracing. Sometimes, as a kind of parlor game, we can ask whether a poet is more "Whitmanesque" or "Dickinsonesque" -- read Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, and see what you think (and yes, it's a trick question).

Sandra Cisneros:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2brwzI6KmkE

Unfortunately, there aren't so many good YouTube videos of Cisneros reading (some, though, offer us her thoughts on writing); there are good videos elsewhere, and later, we'll explore non-YouTube video & writing resources.

Mary Gaitskill:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_0bXFHl-aY&NR=1

A weird camera angle; but a typical sort of literary event, with a good reading presentation from a solid prose stylist and storyteller.

Ann Sexton:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfvS_fgbuDI

This takes us back a bit: digitized video of older analog film. This combines Sexton reading with documentary.

Allen Ginsberg:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVGoY9gom50

"Howl" was a classic work of the fifties and sixties: the flagship of the Beat movement.

Taylor Mali:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OonDPGwAyfQ&feature=related

Slam poetry! -- perhaps a different category from "literary" poetry, but let's not be too picky; on the other hand, how is this different from, say, T.S. Eliot? I can guess which one makes us happier, but -- it's worth our while studying the differences and similarities. What, of these two choices, can be combined for something new...?

Wanda Coleman:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMCCoZq8hes

...maybe Ms. Coleman shows one way -- literary, fun, lively, well-made, loud!

Thomas Lux:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLDPUBJEBvU

Tom's an old teacher of mine. Topical poetry! -- note, in particular, how as one goes through the world (driving on the highway, in this case), there are occasions for poems everywhere.

*

There's much, much more. There is also a lot on YouTube, though, that's BAD -- mainly, I mean the videos themselves: remember, it's everyone who wants to post something (well, with some editorial oversight, I guess) -- so sort the good from the bad: bad production values, in particular. But listen to how poetry and prose come alive when seen and heard, and take those insights back to the page with you.

Publishing

2010-09-14T10:02:00.000-07:00

This is premature for us, perhaps, but all the same, it's worth considering ways of publishing your work when you feel it's ready. There are many ways to publish -- which, over the past fifteen years or so, has meant online as well as in print (well, we can include electronic media such as CD's as well, I guess -- and even live performance is a kind of publication).

Below is a link to information on an undergraduate-oriented literary journal; there are other types of journals, including online, and then there are more "commercial" or "popular" publications. It really depends on how you see your writing, your intended audience, and your concern about $$$. Literary writing doesn't pay much, or at all! It's for the "art." In our course, I'm focusing on the "art," but that doesn't mean your writer's sensibility has to be artsy -- just focused on matters of craft.

Anyway, here's a call for submissions I received from a former colleague; and below that, a web site that lists many journals, magazines, and small-press publishers (more on book publishing in a later post).

http://webpub.allegheny.edu/group/review/details.html

http://www.duotrope.com

Things

2010-09-06T12:37:00.001-07:00

I have exercises on writing about things – two in particular that I will post this week (Week 2) are called “The Talisman” and “Garbology.”

On Facebook today, a friend linked to this interesting article in the New York Times Magazine. I offer it as an adjunct to the “Talisman” and “Garbology,” along with some musings to accompany it.

Partly, these exercises are about seeing. When we look at what’s present, we are seeing only a small part of what is really there, and only a small part of what each item in our view really is in itself. Regarding that first statement: we tend to see what we are inclined to see, what we are already familiar with or what fits our general view of the world we are a part of. Our eyes tend to home in on particular things, as well, to the exclusion of other things right there before us. (That’s true of hearing, as well). Regarding the second statement: everything is an emblem of some larger experience -- a history, a family of things, the use or other meaningfulness of the thing, the metonymic realities of the thing (who owns it, made it, was affected by it, among other associations), and countless other contexts we could define.

Many of the exercises are meant truly to “exercise,” that is, train, our perceptions: to see more, to see less at times, and thereby to see with greater focus, greater opportunity for value or meaning.

One thing that interests me about this Times article (about the Internet-based initiatives it discusses, that is) is that the things we own and share are interconnected, and the stories about them are interconnected; the Internet, essentially a vast and dynamic system of interconnections, is therefore a natural medium (or dimension) for exploring the interconnectedness of things and the people who own and share things.

So, to add to ideas surrounding “The Talisman”: these web services, forms of Social Networking, offer technological ways of narrating and sharing stories; how do the Short Story, the Poem, or the Essay (consider them much older forms of technology, and also media, or alternate dimensions!) already do the work of telling, framing, and sharing stories related to things? How are things works of art in themselves; how are they also projections of identity, family, community?

PBS Poetry

2010-09-01T10:53:00.001-07:00

Listen to their podcasts --

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/entertainment/poetry/

Tributes & Remembrances

2010-08-29T14:40:00.000-07:00

This link, to an article originally published in AWP Chronicle, turned up on the New Poetry listserv today:

https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://robertmcdowell.net/articles/georgehitchcock.pdf

...and someone followed up with this one:

http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_marcus.php

I offer them with two purposes: one, as examples of prose forms -- the tribute, or alternatively, the remembrance of someone. These can be autobiographical, but not necessarily; as memoir, they might focus on the narrator equally with the subject, or the narrator might be essentially hidden from view. However, one way to think about such writing (all writing, really) is that the narrator, or the author, is always refracted in some way, even when he or she isn't overtly presented in the narrative.

Also, I offer them as representations of "Creative Writing culture" -- or, at least, of a certain perspective of it; and of the poet as mentor or teacher.

Can you find other tributes or remembrances? Other writings that somehow portray the culture and sensibility of artists, writers, readers, etc.?

You might also look for online groups (Yahoo, Google Groups), forums, or listservs meant for poets, other writers, readers, etc. Later, I post links to some.

Our Text Companion Site

2010-08-29T10:28:00.001-07:00

Our textbook comes with a companion site -- ancillary materials worth having a look at:

http://www.prenhall.com/creativecafe/

Memoir; and Thoughts on the Creative Process

2009-11-22T19:00:00.000-08:00

In another course I’m teaching this term, students are writing memoirs. Thinking about their challenges, I decided to develop my points further for this course – although we’re mostly doing poems, and some short stories.

A memoir is a nonfiction form; but most memoirists seem to think of their projects as imaginative, and not only memorial. That is true, I think, in at least two senses: first, memory can be thought of as imaginative recreation of the past, rather than an always-factual representation of people, things, and events as they were. Second, when we present fleshed-out writing that focuses on the past as we recall it, if we want readers to be engaged, and to come close to the emotional as well as the intellectual truths, we will probably need to dramatize our memories. Sometimes in memoir that does actually mean outright invention: transposing, events, leaving things out, making composite characters, concocting dialogue, inventing props, and other things that our memories of long-past events typically cannot recover. Also, if we want to engage readers, we need to use the devices of fiction – dialogue, character development, scene creation, foreshortening, exaggeration – to get at those emotional truths.

This is not universally accepted; there is, in fact, much argument among readers, writers, and critics about what’s appropriate or necessary in memoir.

The line between fiction and nonfiction (not only memoir, but other forms as well) is hard to identify. Some autobiographical novels are closer to “real” events (depending on whom you talk to) than many “nonfiction” memoirs.

It seems to me the memoirist can seek the right balance between fictional or dramatic texture and documentary accuracy. Even if she tries to please the most literal-minded fellow witness to the events she’s writing about, she will most likely outrage someone. If it’s not the “false” elements that make someone mad, it will be the truth itself.

Once we start writing about our memories, or from our memories, we risk replacing memory with interpretation. But we have probably (if Freud and others are to be believed) already re-interpreted certain memories a thousand times before we ever write them down. Perhaps our latest recollection of an event is merely a remembering of the last time we entertained the memory: a recollection of a remembering.

For now, I want to talk about some strategies for structuring our recollections; but these are also ways of recovering them in the first place. I think that when we talk out loud or write the memories down – when we do something social or physical, something that is more than sitting back and dreaming of the past – we study the lacunae, the gaps, as much as we do the threads of action and image.

Most of my memories, when I look, are bits and pieces; they are puzzles of 1,000 pieces for which I have maybe 100 pieces remaining – but often, just the right 100 pieces to reconstruct the rest, although with guesswork, myth-making, self-justification, forgiveness, transfer of blame, etc.

One structural device I call “topic/shadow topic.”

For both the writer and the reader, the mind plays tricks – and wants to be tricked. For the reader, often, it is best not to “tell” what we mean as writers too directly; or, not to tell it in discursive or direct terms in certain kinds of writing. If you write on one subject, but seem by the end to have actually written on another, that can be a more enlightening experience for the reader. Likewise, if you start out writing about one thing, but find yourself writing about another – you might have come more honestly or more effectively to that “shadow topic” than if you’d focused your sights on it at the start.

Some of what we call “craft” in writing is a way to successfully trick ourselves and our readers. You can frame your writing process, or your writing goals, in such a way that you increase your chances of coming to the “right” shadow topic. You might already know in certain ways what you want to say, but creative writers, including essayists, allow themselves to be surprised by their own minds. [Note: essay comes from the French word essayer, to try or attempt; it seems to bear the notion that writing of this type is really guesswork.]

How can you come to the shadow topic?

One way is to deliberately choose a certain armature, or scaffolding, for what you are about to do: if in a memoir about your mother you want to get at what it was about her that made her special, you might “look,” for a moment, at what that specialness is, and then turn away from it at an angle, and go into something fairly ordinary in your memory that has a built-in structure. For example, you might look inside your memory at some process your mother did repeatedly in memory: cooking. (I’m not trying to be sexist, by the way! I grew up in the late fifties and sixties, and my mother spent a lot of time in the kitchen.)

First, we can count on certain elements of such a memory scene to be archetypal, at least for a certain kind of reader: mothers in kitchens will be familiar as a shared experience, maybe even for people who didn’t experience it first-hand. Second, what mothers did in kitchens was repetitive and even ritualized, perhaps: when dinner would be started, what steps had to be followed in what order, her particular methods, who helped, what her favorite utensils were, the apron she wore, etc. (this scene is deliberately clichéd – but I want to emphasize the commonness of the scene.)

Enter into the scene, and paint it as carefully as you can – in memory, or right there on paper. Place yourself in the scene, but on the periphery; how old are you? Who was your teacher that year? Put everything in its place, give it its hue and texture, read the labels on the jars and cans, hum the jingles you heard on TV when the commercials aired. Recall the way the light entered the window above the sink in winter, when the sun set early; remember the sound the exhaust fan made above the stove; study the design of the floor tiles. And smells – what were the smells of spices, of the meat broiling in the oven, of the flowers in the vase that were three days old?

What was the rhythm of your mother’s work; how many tasks were running at the same time: stirring the pot, cutting the onion and wiping her eyes, listening to the evening news on the TV in the other room, wiping your baby sister’s mouth, who was feeding herself somewhat sloppily in the high chair? And you, you’re sitting at the kitchen table, doing your math homework: she stops to check on you, and encourage you, and then answers the phone, which she cradles with her chin on her neck while she returns to stirring; and then a laugh, at something the person on the phone just said…

So you get into the scene. Go much further than you will need to for whatever final episode you’re hoping to construct. Let yourself become entranced by the rhythms, sensations, and incongruent emotions of the scene (perhaps because the innocuous memory hides something more pointed. They usually do, I find; which might or might not be your shadow topic).

Ok. You might, in the first go, have discovered, or at least sensed, that other thing or things you want to get at. While you were distracted by the lulling rhythms and sounds and smells and colors, your mind relaxed, and let go of one of its treasure or one of its secrets.

Write often enough, and it will happen, even if not the first time.

But also, you will rewrite. Writers add, take away, insert, weave, jump out, jump back in – you can be in that kitchen, on that winter evening, but also leap years back or forward, as long as you feel for the unity that must ultimately be in place. Everything is connected to everything else; if we segue, or transition, carefully, we won’t lose the rhythm of the scene or the reader’s patience, either. That person on the phone while your mother was stirring: digress, since you are no longer that ten-year-old child, on what happened to her years later. The TV news is on: what were the day’s tragedies or absurdities; what was the sound of the newscaster’s voice? (Some things that your memory has hidden too deeply you will be able to rediscover as history; ask people, look in books, on the Internet, and recapture the historical part of your life at that general level – then, bring that information back down into the personal. Much of our lives is really “the world,” and has been recorded somewhere.)

Your passage, which might be many pages long if you go through the process above, will be rewritten, condensed, and rearranged. Like a film editor, you can splice in whatever develops a particular dimension of meaning in the passage. Things that seem unconnected on the surface might share some significance, pattern, or point of contact; in any case, much of the art of writing, as in magic, resides in the transitions and sleights of hand. Connectives, qualifications, reiterations, contrasts: everything is related to everything else, but the writer needs to find the relations that will matter within the work.

A process, like cooking, can get your mind into a certain space where it will be more open to meaningful associations. Partly, it’s because we already have the entirety of the “narrative” of a process in mind; we can relax our efforts as it tells itself, and within its interstices, encoded elements will (hopefully) become visible. The process, in this case cooking, is readymade with figuration: the kitchen is a charged space for metaphor, metonym, symbol, irony, myth, and anything else that shapes meaning and vision.

Let me give you another fancy word: "topos." A topos is a template for ideas, or for how to generate writing. For example, I talk about "mother in the kitchen" above; Other writers use the same topos, as do filmmakers and others. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in an essay called “In the Kitchen,” uses the “mother in the kitchen” topos. There are many topoi (plural), although the person who created the term, Aristotle, uses them in a much more precise way (Google "Aristotle" and "topoi" and you will find the original list from 2,300 years ago). The value of the topoi is that there are always many subsequent elements or aspects that go along with the initial elements. For example, if I say "mother in the kitchen" we all think of similar subsequent elements, but not entirely the same. We might think of stoves, ovens, refrigerators, toasters, tables, cabinets, and other things; we think of smells, sounds, the "rules" and rituals of the kitchen (who can do what, for example); and yet, all of those things are a bit different for each of us.

My wife is Japanese; so, for example, there would be no memory for her of her mother baking, because Japanese kitchens don't usually have ovens. They don't bake muffins or pies the way we do in the US. And even today, Japanese husbands or sons almost never do dishes! My mother-in-law was amazed and disturbed when she saw me doing dishes. But for me, one of the features of the topos of “mother in the kitchen” is “somebody besides Mother does the dishes.” That was one of the rules in my house.

So, some things would be similar, some different, but each of us could start from the initial element (mothers, kitchens) and create an elaborate, patterned, active scene from our memories and other sources of information (reading, hearing other people's stories of mothers and kitchens). Think of the topos, whatever it is, as a doorway; then, in that room, there are several other doors to go through, and many more through each of those. If you write by imagining what you say as a series of “spaces” or doorways to choose from, you will see that the main problem of writing is not “I don’t know what to say next” but instead, “I don’t know which of these many choices to make next.” It’s a problem of too many, not a problem of not enough.

Also, we can invert, reverse, take out, replace, and do other things that are simple, formal games we always play when we're being creative. For example, Gates puts his mother in a kitchen, but instead of cooking, the main activity he talks about is styling hair. That didn't happen in my mother's kitchen, but I can juxtapose the two things easily in my imagination.

Metonyms, metaphors, symbols: Gates' essay is not simply about hair. It's about how hair is an emotional, cultural, social, and even a political thing. He says "hair" and "kitchen" but he means "people" and "race" or "ethnicity." And maybe, when he started writing, it was his conscious purpose to talk about politics or race. Abut probably, if began writing from a sense of pleasure rather than purpose, he thought first of the kitchen, his mother, someone’s hair, a neighbor…one or more of the treasures of his childhood, worth nothing now but in the ways memory itself confers wealth; and it is through good writing that the wealth is passed along, without diminishing in the slightest.

Definitions of "Poetry"

2009-11-12T20:24:00.000-08:00

When people think of “definition,” they generally think of the dictionary: rush to the nearest one (now often online), look up the word, and there you have it. But if you have tried looking up a word in more than one source, you’ve seen that all definitions are not the same. They’re usually close enough, for each equivalent usage, I suppose; but the meaning of a word is a matter of opinion (however authoritative), or of opinion reached by consensus.

But “definition” in its deeper sense is a matter of argument; simply figuring out what to call something, and thereafter how to define it or say what it means, is often the very core of a subject, discipline, or pursuit.

So, we argue for meanings; and the argument is never fully resolved, if we’re lucky: the journey is the goal, as Basho said.

Definition can mean something like outline or resolution, as with an image or a space. So, to define is to find boundaries; but finding boundaries is also finding what lies past boundaries.

Let’s work with “poetry.” Consider each proposal below as a boundary, angled slightly differently than the other proposals for meaning. Order these in different ways; try to create a taxonomy, or a scale, or a hierarchy: which meaning is closer to a “true” meaning; which is more up to date, more expansive, more focused, more helpful in understanding specific poems?

On the other hand, there is much overlap; what are the shared concerns of these seekers of meaning?

But first, I want to point out that when philosophers and aestheticians talk about “poetry,” they often mean something far larger than verse. Frequently, they mean “art” or “imagination” altogether. “Poetry,” though, seems to be a good part-to-whole representation of those larger categories. Why might that be? I think it’s because a definition, as I mean it here, is itself a matter of words.

Poets, themselves, of course, love to define poetry. here’s Reginald Gibbons:

All poetry is language that is also in some way about language.

Notice that this one fits the form of classical definition: genus – species. “An automobile is a form of motorized transportation [genus; a family that includes trucks and motorcycles, usually with four wheels and intended for passengers [species: how autos are different from other members of the genus.]”

Of course, most of these provisional definitions will not bear a great deal of scrutiny if we expect them to be consistent and logical. “Linguistics” is also “language that is also in some way about language.” But by “provisional” I mean “good enough to get us going.” And so, in Gibbons’ definition, we get the notion that poems are often focus on the way language works, how it means, where it comes from. Perhaps we are also meant to sense that poetry pluralizes language: there is more than one level, as with harmony in music. Verse is to melody as poetry is to melody… how far can I go with that sort of analogy?

To put it a different way: poetry is one of the ways we use language to get outside of language; it is “meta” language.

Try another – this, one of many definitions that Percy Shelley offers in his “Defence of Poetry":

Poetry redeems from decay visitations of the divinity of man.

This one’s a bit more poetic – more metaphoric, anyway. Much is embedded here: first, the notion, quite old itself, that humanity fell from a higher state: a golden age, heroic era, or as the line says, godliness itself; which makes of poetry a backward-looking force, and elegy its primary modality. “Redeems” as well is a powerful word in Christendom, and post-Christendom as well (Shelley flirted with atheism). One common argument among poets is whether poetry “does” anything, or has much use in the world:

Poetry makes nothing happen

is the famous line from Auden. But in Shelley’s definition, it’s not Man himself but only “visitations” (glimpses?) of a lost divinity. That also makes of poetry something visual; and focused, I think, on parts and fragments, rather than wholes.

Another, from the German poet/philosopher who renamed himself Novalis:

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

A bit stark; file under “hyperbole.” But actually, I like the underlying metaphor: that poetry heals (notice that it partakes of Shelley’s “saving” metaphor, if you allow for the equivocation – they’re both Romantics, after all), and that “reason” (think of William Blake’s Ulro and Urizen – another Romantic!) harms. For “reason,” replace with “real world,” “materialism,” “greed”… whatever strikes you as the thing we sometimes need refuge from; poetry heals it, Novalis says.

(to be continued…)

The Prose Poem

2009-11-01T20:19:00.000-08:00

The prose poem is a hybrid creature, not accepted by many as poetry at all, but not taken seriously as prose fiction or essay by others. It seems to like that questionable status, however, and generally lives near the border with uncertainty or doubt.

What is a prose poem? It is generally short, a few lines to a few pages. It does not have lines in verse, or broken lines, and when there is a break we call the parts “paragraphs” rather than “stanzas.” But at the same time, the prose poem aims for compression like a lyric poem; it might feature more repetition or other linguistic effects; it might focus on a particular image, or gesture, or scene, although it might also tell a story.

Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference, if it matters, between a prose poem and a piece of flash fiction. If the author is someone mainly known as a fiction writer, then it will often be seen as short-short fiction; if the author is generally a poet, it will be a prose poem.

The prose poem might have begun, a couple of centuries ago, as a way for poets to escape the constrictions of poetic form. French poets especially liked the prose poem, as traditional prosody in French is very rule-bound; so the prose poem offered escape from those constrictions.

The prose poem is a modern creature, and modernity is all about revolution, breaking rules, trying new things just for the sake of newness. On the other hand, the breaking of lines on the page to show that a poem is a poem is not such a very ancient convention; much of the Old Testament (Job, or the Song of Solomon, for example) could be thought of as prose poetry.

Some prose poems insist on staying inside a kind of box, like the sonnet; they like that square, almost-rectangular shape of the single paragraph, which I think of as a kind of box, or perhaps a stage with proscenium arch: some strange specimen is intimately framed for our amusement.

Many prose poems partake of the absurd, the surreal, or the merely strange or droll. We read, we enjoy or wonder at the strange sight or action, the funny conflation of words or things, and then, as with any tightly-bound work of art, we take a moment to wonder at what we just read. The brevity of lyric poems and of many prose poems tempts us to read again, to see if what we saw is still there.

Te prose poem is not a song, usually; sometimes it’s a snapshot, a post card, a brief note (as in a diary or a field journal), an anecdote, a cameo, or a moment.

Smetimes when we can’t quite say what a thing is, we call it everything else, searching for similitudes; moving backward in order to go forward. “Prose poem” puts together two things that are considered opposites; they cancel each other out, and what’s left is defined by negation as much as presence.

One way to approach poetry, or anything that is sought after, is by continually redefining it. A poem is its own definition. Here are two operative definitions from David Lehman, in the introduction to his anthology Great American Prose Poems:

The prose poem is…poetry that disguises its true nature.

and:

Just as free verse did away with meter and rhyme, the prose poem does away with the line as the unit of composition. It uses the means of prose toward the ends of poetry.

Both these definitions, it seems to me, accentuate the tension between absence and presence. That tension or counterpoint might itself be a key to the modality of the prose poem; but one way to approach the task of finding one’s voice or style or theme in art is to seek after one’s own definitions.

There are many anthologies devoted to the prose poem. Here are a few:

Among those poets who have excelled at the form are: Charles Baudeliare, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Simic, Russell Edson, Harryette Mullen, Mary Oliver, James Wright, Ray Gonzalez, and Mark Strand.

Here are several prose poems to study – all at the Poetry Foundation Web site:

Russell Edson, “Antimatter”
Matthea Harvey, “Wack-A-Mole Realism”
Ray Gonzalez, “And There Were Swallows”
Carolyn Forche, “The Colonel”
Lydia Davis, "A Position at the University"
Gabriela Mistral, "The Lark"
Charles Simic, from "The World Doesn't End"

...and an interesting analysis of a prose poem by James Wright by the poet Robert Peake, at his blog site.

The Sound of Sense

2009-10-25T20:35:00.000-07:00

Where do ideas come from? What are the sources of imagination? We have our senses, and our memories; we can assemble and recall information, and reconstruct it in countless ways.

Still, these are not the primary sources of ideas for the poet. Language itself can generate ideas. Writing, as a physical and emotional act, draws forth what it is we want to say – quite often, before we know consciously.

Language is sensual; language is historical; language is animated. It is in us, but we call our first language our “mother” tongue – it gave birth to us, or we came from it.

A poet, or an artist who works in language, more generally, is someone keenly aware of the living qualities of language. Sense and nonsense share a shifting boundary; thought and sound connect across it.

We are all to some extent aware of the physicality of language: we love rhymes, jokes, figures of speech, baby-talk, jingles, and other forms that emphasize that physicality. But a poet seeks after it, and trains his or her ear (and tongue, and eye, and hand) to capitalize on it.

Robert Frost spoke of something he called “the sound of sense.” The most remarkable aspect of this – something which I think songwriters will understand – is that music often comes before the words themselves to a poet like Frost. Here is how he describes it in a letter he wrote:

*

(From a Letter to John Bartlett, 4 July 1913) (...) I am possibly the only person going who works on any but a worn out theory (principle I had better say) of versification. You see the great successes in recent poetry have been made on the assumption that the music of words was a matter of harmonised vowels and consonants. Both Swinburne and Tennyson arrived largely at effects in assonation. But they were on the wrong track or at any rate on a short track. They went the length of it. Any one else who goes that way must go after them. And that’s where most are going. I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense. Now it is possible to have sense without the sound of sense (as in much prose that is supposed to pass muster but makes very dull reading) and the sound of sense without sense (as in Alice in Wonderland which makes anything but dull reading). The best place to get the abstract sound of sense is from voices behind a door that cuts off the words. Ask yourself how these sentences would sound without the words in which they are embodied:

You mean to tell me you can’t read?
I said no such thing.
Well read then.
You’re not my teacher.

==

He says it’s too late.
Oh, say!
Damn an Ingersoll watch anyway.

==

One--two--three--go!
No good! Come back—come back.
Haslam go down there and make those kids get out of the track.

Those sounds are summoned by the audial imagination and they must be positive, strong, and definitely and unmistakeably indicated by the context. The reader must be at no loss to give his voice the posture proper to the sentence. The simple declarative sentence used in making a plain statement is one sound. But Lord love ye it mustn’t be worked to death. It is against the law of nature that whole poems should be written in it. If they are written they won’t be read. The sound of sense, then. You get that. It is the abstract vitality of our speech. It is pure sound--pure form. One who concerns himself with it more than the subject is an artist. But remember we are still talking merely of the raw material of poetry. An ear and an appetite for these sounds of sense is the first qualification of a writer, be it of prose or verse.

*

I like the idea that much meaning is carried in tone; and that one can hear voices as if on the other side of a door, missing the precise words, but getting, through intonation, stress, and to some extent coloration, some essential meaning of the words.

I want to relate this concept of Frost’s to another, more broadly linguistic concept, sometimes known as “sound symbolism” or “phonetic symbolism. The basic idea is that the sounds of words, the vowels and consonants in particular, and the patterns they create, are not random, but are rather connected to the meanings of words. This is a controversial idea, because most linguistics stems from the notion that the relation between sound and sense is arbitrary. And one must wonder how it is that so many languages – thousands of languages, existing and extinct – have connected so many different sound patterns to the same basic ideas. But I have the sense, as I think most poets do, that at least in its traces, language as we understand it today owes much to the ways in which sounds were created by the body, or the way experience affected particular human beings, such that a particular sound came to be associated with a particular meaning; no doubt many time, in different ways, leading to different primeval languages, of which our modern languages are distant descendants, much changed; and the physical connections are now often abstracted, transformed, fossilized, and mostly unrecognizable. Something similar is true for the beginnings of written language, as well – but many thousands of years after the start of spoken language.

So, the poet is an archeologist, or an atavistic creature, or a prophet (if our end is in our beginning). She tries to connect the present and future of language with its past, although its most distant past is occluded.

It is useful, in training your ear as a poet or writer, to study the etymologies of words; not only for the shifting forms and meanings, but to discover the way certain forms stay the same as we go back in time, and to discover the similarities as we cross language boundaries (in particular, in the Indo-European family of languages).

To explore some of this further, I recommend:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7DrafqrvGY

…which offers Frost himself reading his “sound of sense” argument;

http://www.frostfriends.org/sounddevices.html

…which offers some very useful classifications of sound devices as related to various poems of Frost;

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20444

…which offers some thoughtful discussion by Carol Frost (no relation) on Frost’s poetics;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_symbolism

...which offers some useful information on sound symbolism.

Also, here is a children’s picture book I wrote, based on some of the concepts of sound symbolism:

http://sophia.hccs.edu/~robert.lunday/babels_basement_small.htm

Some Notes on Fiction

2009-10-17T08:50:00.000-07:00

What is a story?

Let me start with a famous distinction made by the writer E. M. Forster in his classic work, Aspects of the Novel. Story is like this: “The King died, and then the Queen died.” Plot is more like this: “The King died, and then the Queen died of grief.”

What’s the difference? Story, in Forster’s definition, is a series of events; plot is a series of events that indicate causation. When we hear story, Forster, observes, we think “and then what next?” but when we experience plot, we ask, “and why?”

This is what I call operational definition: a definition to suit a particular situation, need, or argument. “Plot” and “story” can mean more or less the same thing, but even if you don’t like Forster’s distinction, consider the problem of causation: how, in a story, can you get at meaning; at the possibilities of “why”?

Here is another point about how “story” and “plot” differ – and this, really, was more what Forster was concerned with: “story” is the basic chronology of events: how things unfold in time. “Plot” is any meaningful (or, I suppose, meaningless) arrangement of those events. So, when you tell a story, you can go forward in time, first to second to third to last; or, you can choose another arrangement – one that suits some thematic purpose, or any purpose at all. Stories (as in the movie “Memento”) can be told backwards; or (like the movie “Pulp Fiction”) they can be told both forwards and backwards, leaving us somewhere in the middle. Often, a story starts “in medias res” (“in the middle of things,” a Latin phrase I’ve used in posts), because that is where our attention can be most successfully engaged; often, then, a story will back up, or otherwise fill in information, or provide some exposition, to give the reader sufficient background and context for the story and its characters, and their situations.

But there are many possibilities. Time can be directed, replayed, skipped, and multi-layered. Think of the Akutagawa story (the basis for “Rashomon,” one of our first exercises): the same story is told several different ways, according to the different characters’ points of view, and their differing motivations/limitations. Many stories, especially films and novels, will present a scene in one place, according to one character’s point of view; and then jump to a different character/location to show us simultaneous or coterminous events, often linking the two plot lines later in the story.

Also, plot elements can be nested: we can go back in time, or forward, and then, within that secondary chronology, we might be pushed further back or forward. A good example of this is in James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues.”

This story begins with the narrating character learning of his younger brother’s arrest for drug possession; from this point, we go a little forward, partly to gain some further understanding of our narrator’s perspective; then we go back, to learn of the brothers’ shared past, and within a dramatic framework, we go further still, through a story told by the mother (long dead in the story’s present) of their father’s childhood, and a dark event that shaped his destiny – his, and his own brother’s (creating a parallel, of course, with the narrator and his brother’s destinies). We also have the narrator’s memory-scenes that present us with an idyllic past, when both mother and father were alive, and the family was in equilibrium (but with a threatening darkness not far off).

So, we have story within story, and in a sense, our questions “why?” – why does Sonny, the younger brother, have a drug problem; why should we care about him; why does the narrator, the older brother, feel regret – are suspended, amplified, and (perhaps) internalized: the characters’ investments in one another become our own, in part, I feel, because we enter their story (their plot, really) as if it were a labyrinth of meaning, leading not out but toward a center as the point of liberation.

Consider, then: when you have a story to tell, how should you construct the plot? Is chronological order the best way? Even if so, will foreshadowing or flashbacks enhance your purposes? Is there a point in the midst of events from which you can work back, then forward, to catch the reader’s attention? Are there simultaneous perspectives to alternate between?

The most important thing, I believe, is to think in terms of scenes: how can you help the reader “see” what is happening? Create a series of self-contained, extended moments: what action, what realization, what gesture, what knowledge will give that moment its purpose within the story? What mode of storytelling will predominate: dialogue, narrative, description, interior monologue?

My preference, even in essays and poems, is to think “cinematically,” at least at some stage of the composition: to imagine where the cameras would be placed; to design the tracking, the series of angles, to try out medium vs. close-up vs. long-shot distances; to imagine the montage of shots, considering both what is shown and what is omitted, and how the gaps communicate meaning; and to consider “mise en scene” (what is placed within the frame), also thinking of the relation between presence and absence, and how best to use what I expect a reader to know of what I don’t reveal.

Houston Poetry Festival

2009-10-04T10:52:00.000-07:00

Click here to read about this week's Houston Poetry Festival:

http://houstonpoetryfest.info/page3.html?ifrm_2=page5.html

Thus Far, Part 1 (or really, part 1b)

2009-09-27T14:21:00.000-07:00

I want to put together some thoughts , over the next few posts, on the Workshop work that you've all been posting thus far. Some of this is reiteration of what I've been posting to the Workshop as replies, but I thought it might be good to pull some of it together.

By the way -- are you opening and reading all my replies to other student's posts? Essentially, those are becoming the ongoing lectures (Ihadn't intended it that way at the start; remember, this course is an experiment). So, try to get in the habit of reading my posts, because I'm directing my replies to everyone -- not everything is meant only as a comment on the particular poem or story I'm "replying" to.

For now, I'll stay with a discussion of poetic form; we've had some brief fiction work, but I'll get to that a little later.

One point I've made in several posts has to do with the poetic line. Other than breaking the line before the right margin, what makes a poem a poem?

The most noticeable thing is end rhyme, perhaps. But my observation in many comments has been that an end-rhyme isn't enough to create the integrity of the verse line (to put it in yet another phrasing). More important, I think, is whatI've called the cadence or meter of the line.

Many poets over the past century or so have written free-verse poetry, which doesn't mean "unrhymed" so much as unmetered. However, free verse poetry still, usually, has a cadence. What is that? I think of it as some way of creating a pattern of sounds that is pleasing and that guides the reader, beyond the sense of the words themselves -- through stress patterns that are not necessarily metrical, but also through grammar, rhetoric, or what can be referred to as "sound symbolism" or "phonetic symbolism," or some other way of drawing more attention to the language than we might expect in prose.

It's very hard to make a clear definition of "poetry" vs. "prose." There are prose poems, for example. So, which are they? Prose, of poetry? We often like things to fit neatly into categories, but often, they don't. Perhaps an artist, or a creative person generally, is someone who doesn't mind, or actually enjoys, confusions of identity, meaning, form, etc. Boundary zones are fruitful places.

So, I am attempting operative definitions here: not absolute ones.

But back to my point: when writing a line of poetry, rhymed or not, try to discover what qualities of language will give energy to the line; and how that will create a pattern, an integrity (something that earns its way, perhaps), a sense of wholeness or rightness.

Metered verse, in the English-language tradition, is "accentual-syllabic," primarily (but not exclusively). That means: verse in which the poet has created a line of a certain number of syllables (usually eight or ten) and a certain number and pattern of accents. The most common pattern, traditionally, has been "iambic pentameter" -- something like this:

That time of year thou may'st in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang:

(Shakespeare's Sonnet 28)

If I use capitals to point out the stress pattern, it looks like:

That TIME of YEAR thou MAY'ST in ME beHOLD
When YELow leaves, or NONE, or FEW do HANG
UpON those BOUGHS which SHAKE aGAINST the COLD...

You'll notice, by the way, that the pattern is not consistent. A poem that was perfectly metrical (da DUH da DUH da DUH da DUH da DUH) would sound mechanical. So, the poet sets up a recognizable pattern, then avails himself of inversions, ellisions, additions, and truncations along the way -- often to draw attention to something connected to meaning in the poem. many sound effects are mimetic of meanings, or so people often feel. But other effects are far more subjective, and draw connection to meaning through context, or from a long-held association common among speakers of a language. "K" sounds sound hard; "s" sounds (sibilance) sound soft, or weak; "aye" and "ei" sounds are bright, "oooh" and "oh" sounds are dark, and so forth -- depending on context.

Anyway, an iamb is two syllables, unstressed followed by a stressed; pentameter means five pairs, making a ten-syllable line. Tetrameter would be four pairs. If you're interested in learning more about traditional prosody, Google "meter" or prosody"; here is the Wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_(poetry)

It isn't necessary to write metered verse. But it is a good idea to practice it as a way of improving your ear and your command of a free-verse line, which still needs that "integrity" -- something that makes every syllable earn its way, something that justifies every sound and every word in the poem. And that is one operative definition, for me, of a poem: a text in which every mark, every sound, counts -- nothing unneeded is allowed in, and yet it might seem conversational or casual.

I encourage everyone to read a lot more poetry in the "Anthologies" post below. Reading a lot of poetry will greatly improve your ear, and your sense of what's possible.

I'll do more in another post on other issues, and say more about meter and cadence and other sound elements as well. For now, consider the above; and regarding rhyme, try leaving it out, and find the elements in the line itself that give your line its integrity; don't just work your way out to a rhyme with whatever words and sounds get you there. Also, consider other patterns of rhyme besides couplet rhyme. it's often to chiming, too close to allow some of the more pleasing effects of rhyme. Consider quatrain patterns (such as abab, abba, abcb, and so forth) as well as other patterns, and random rhyming.

More later...

Poetry Anthologies, and Various Reflections on Our Work Thus Far...

2009-09-27T07:51:00.000-07:00

We don't have a text in this course -- because what I think works best is for writers to discover texts individually, and (as I am doing via the Internet) in relation to specific exercises, or challenges in form and craft.

These are related impulses, although they might sound contradictory. Every writer's path is unique, and yet there are patterns, and writers are a community: influencing, critiquing, competing, reading, envying, disparaging, supporting...dysfunctional at times, but a community.

What are you reading, besides the samples I'm providing? It is important for writers to read voraciously; that's how you discover possibilities -- or at least, it is the best way to discover them: to see what writers before you have already done. Usually, they've done there work in part by borrowing/stealing from writers before them.

If you read a lot, even pushing through on poems and stories that confuse or bother you, you will absorb much; after a while, you'll write as if regurgitating. It will lead you to write some things that are too much in the voice or style of other poets (try reading a lot of Walt Whitman, then try not to write in long anaphoric lines!), but it will also help you build a repertoire of your own: a series of gestures, sounds, patterns, etc. that are your own, but which connect you to the commuity of writers.

One of the things most often missing in the poems I''m seeing on the Workshop is a good sense of cadence or rhythm in the lines; or, an effort at working within a cohesive set of sounds, what is sometimes called "phonetic symbolism" -- vowel and consonant patterns that somehow fit together and create interesting textures that are as important to the poem as the meaning -- or more so.

If you read a lot, you'll have a better ear for cadence, and for the particular rhythms that are your own. But stop, everyone, aiming only for end-rhyme! That's not the be-all and end-all of a poem; it's not the one thing that makes verse verse. It's not bad, and in fact it can be very pleasing; but aim first for a strong line, with or without end-rhyme.

Also, rhyme can be more than couplet-rhyme: again, if you read a lot, you'll see that there are more patterns of rhyme, and often, a more distant relationship between rhyming words can be far more pleasing than the often too-close couplet rhyme.

Anyway, this post was to be about anthologies: I have found two good lists already on the Web. I recommend that you find a couple of these, and keep them around for a while: pick them up, browse, read, and if you really like a certain poet, then buy/borrow some of his/her full-length collections. Do you have a Houston Public or Harris County Public Library card? Also, HCCS campuses all have good libraries; also, if you go to an HCCS library and request a Texshare card, you can check books out at UH, TSU, and other area academic libraries. But those, along with Rice, will let you in; it's just that to check books out, you need the Texshare card (up to four books at a time; and Rice isn't part of Texshare -- it's for public institutions).

Also, besides Brazos Bookstore, Barnes & Noble, Borders, and other bookstores, thre are used bookstores -- Half Price is the dominant one these days, with several stores in the area.

Here is a list of anthologies at the poets.org site:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_poetry_anthologies

...and at the ever-useful Wikipedia site:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_poetry_anthologies

I'll do a post on fiction antholiogies next.

Poetry Reading

2009-09-24T16:06:00.000-07:00

This is late notice, but if you're free tonight or tomorrow night, you might find these two poets worth hearing:

http://www.houstonpress.com/events/poison-pen-reading-series-dean-young-and-matt-hart-1442294/

If not tonight (Thursday), the same poets are reading at HCC's Southeast College Friday night as well:

Literary Luminaries Poetry Series

Sep 25, 2009
7 p.m. - 9 p.m.
Features poets Dean Young and Matt Hart, plus student performers. Sponsored by HCC Southeast, English Studies Department and CAB. Contact: 713-718-7165 or 713-718-7159
Location: Learning Hub auditorium.

Robert MacBrearty: “First Day”

2009-09-24T15:49:00.000-07:00

THE BOSS SPAT. "Do you know how to work hard?" he asked. "I mean hard?"
"Not really," I said.
"I'll take a chance on you," he said. "The first thing you need to do is move that big thing over there."
"That big thing?"
"Hell yes, that big thing."
"It sure looks big," I said.
"You're goddamn right it's big. That is one big thing."
"Where do you want it?"
"Well, we sure as hell don't want it there, do we?"
"So where do we want it?"
"Where do you think we want it, Einstein?"
"Do we want it over there?" I asked, pointing.
"Hell no, we don't want it over there. What the hell would we want that big thing over there for?"
"I guess we don't."
"You're damn right we don't. Take it down to the goddamn warehouse, Edison."
"Where's the warehouse?"
"Where's the warehouse? You work here and you don't know where the goddamn warehouse is?" The boss spat. "Three blocks that way, and then turn that way and then turn that way. That's where the goddamn warehouse is, Balzac."
"Well, okay," I said. "I'll take that big thing down to the warehouse."
"They'll know what to do with that big thing there."
I got ahold of the big thing and tried to hoist it tip on my shoulders.
The boss ran up. His face was red. He spat. "What do you think you're doing? You don't lift those big things, Galileo. You roll them. -What did you do, go to college? You roll those goddamn big things. You don't lift them."
"Okay, okay," I said. "I'll roll it."
I got behind the big thing. I put my shoulder against it. I grunted. My heels came off the ground. The boss watched me. "How's it feel?" he asked.
"Big," I said.
"You're goddamn right," he said.
I dug my feet into the ground and pushed. It creaked and slid a couple of inches.
"Roll it straight, Da Vinci," the boss hollered. "Don't let that big thing get away from you."
It was getting easier. The big thing was starting to roll. The big thing bounced to the left, and the big thing dragged to the right, and I tried to move it from side to side. We rolled out the gate and on to the street. Cars started honking. People were yelling. A guy shouted out his window, "Get that big thing out of the street, you moron!"
I got the big thing up on the sidewalk. it started to pick up speed. It was really rolling now. I saw some people on the sidewalk. I tried to stop the big thing but it just pulled me along with it. "Hey look out," I called. "I can't slow this thing down."
"Watch it, watch it," a man cried. "He's out of control."
People dove out of the way. "Be careful with that big thing," a lady screamed. "You ought to be ashamed."
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," I said. "I'm just trying to do my job."
I turned this way and I turned that way and then I turned that way, and I kept running behind the big thing calling, "Look out! Everybody look out!"
I saw a bunch of guys on the loading dock at the warehouse. They were hollering and waving their arms at me. The big thing rolled through the gate and headed right at them. They shouted and scattered out of the way as the big thing smashed into the dock. Wood splintered, some boxes fell, glass broke.
A man with a clipboard charged up to me. "What the hell are you trying to do with that big thing, kill somebody?" he screamed. Some guys with tattoos surrounded me and stood around spitting.
"My boss told me to take it down here," I said.
"Well, we sure as hell don't want that big thing here. Why the hell do you think we want that big thing down here?"
" I’m just trying to do my job," I said.
Somebody spat tobacco juice on my sneakers. The guy with the clipboard poked me in the chest. "You got a form?"
"No. Nobody said anything about a form."
"Well, I sure as hell can't take that thing without a form, can I? You're going to have to take that back and get a form."
"Okay," I said. "I'll get a form."
"And don't forget to bring me some avocados while you're at it."
“Okay. Sure."
They all hooted and whistled at me as I tried to get the big thing turned around.
"Crank it, crank the son of a bitch," somebody yelled.
"Where?"
"Where?" They all laughed like ruptured hyenas. "Crank it 'where'?"
They hooted, punched each other in the ribs, slapped hands.
I stood on the dock and shoved and the big thing moved an inch and rolled back. The dock vibrated.
"Get that big thing out of here!" the clipboard guy yelled.
"Okay, I will," I said. I put my feet on the edge of the dock and leaned my back up against the big thing and pushed. It lurched forward suddenly and I fell off the dock and scraped my hands and knees. The big thing wobbled forward on its own.
The gang couldn't take it anymore. They convulsed with laughter. They collapsed and lay down on the dock squirming with laughter. One guy drew himself to his knees and said, "If you don't get that big thing out of here now, I'm going to waste you. I'm going to blow you away. We don't take that kind of crap here. We don't take it."
“I'll get it out of here," I said. I caught up to the big thing. It was rolling now. After it was rolling, it wanted to roll. It loved to roll. it was born to roll. After it was rolling, it would roll.
I didn't want to take the big thing back out on the street. I saw an alleyway. I thought I might be able to go back that way. I leaned my shoulder against the big thing. It decided to go the way I wanted to go.
We zoomed down the alley. We knocked over some trashcans. We scared the hell out of a cat. "Look out, cat," I called. The cat stared after us. Its confidence was shot to hell.
We rolled out of the alley and into a park. When the big thing hit the grass, it really started to move. I couldn't keep up with it. The big thing raced ahead of me. I thought that I had lost the big thing for good, but it smashed into a tree. The tree shuddered. The big thing sat against the tree looking like it wanted to belch. I ran up to it. The big thing looked okay. I was glad the boss hadn't seen me roll the big thing into a tree.
I saw a water fountain and I thought I'd get a drink. I left the big thing by the tree and walked over to the fountain. When I turned around, I saw two jerks rolling the big thing down a grassy hill.
"Hey, that's my big thing," I shouted. I ran after them.
The two jerks saw me coming and they gave the big thing a push and took off running in opposite directions. The big thing gathered speed and rolled down the hill and into a muddy ditch.
I slid down the bank of the ditch and waded through the mud to the big thing. I pushed against it and tried to rock it from side to side, but it was really stuck in the mud. It was starting to sink. I was starting to sink too. I'd gotten my foot caught underneath the big thing and now we were sinking together. I was down to my hips. Then I was down to my chest. The mud was up to my neck. I was going down with the big thing. I felt depressed.
“What the hell are you doing down there with that big thing, Houdini?" the boss screamed from up above me. He got out of a jeep. He spat. His face looked red. A tow truck pulled up behind the jeep. Some guys with tattoos got out and looked down at the big thing and me. The mud was over my chin. They looked at each other and shook their heads and spat.
"I ran into a little trouble," I said. "I was trying to bring this big thing back."
"Why the hell were you trying to bring that big thing back, Galahad?" the boss shouted.
"They said I needed a form."
"You forgot the form? You didn't take the goddamn form?"
"Nobody said anything about a form."
"Nobody said anything? You don't think you just move one of those big things without a form, do you?"
"I guess not," I mumbled. I had mud in my mouth.
"Get a cable around that big thing, boys," the boss said.
The guys with tattoos slid down the bank and looped a cable around the big thing and started hoisting it out. I held on to the big thing and they dragged me out with it. I was covered in mud. I had mud in my eyes.
The boss looked at me and spat. He signaled to a guy who bad a toilet tattooed on his chest. "Joe, take this big thing down to the warehouse and tell them I'm sorry for sending Sappho. Tell them Sappho just didn't know what the hell he was doing."
Joe spat. "No problem, boss."
"They want some avocados too," I said.
"Are you out of your mind, Columbus?" the boss snapped. "You mean you forgot the avocados? You didn't even take the avocados?"
The boss looked stunned. "Jesus Christ," he said to the other guys. "Can you imagine what would happen if they didn't get their avocados?"
The boys whistled and shook their heads.
"How could anyone forget the avocados?" the boss asked in disbelief.
"Am I fired?" I asked.
"Fired? Don't be so goddamn sensitive, Geronimo. Don't you like working here?" The boss got back in his jeep. "If you weren't so muddy, I'd give you a lift."
“Don't worry about it," I said.
"Get some lunch, Tolstoy." The boss spat and drove away.
I walked back to work. I sat down with some guys in the grass. They were grinning at me. They offered me some chips and avocado dip.
"So how do you like those big things?" they asked.
"They're okay," I said.
"You'll get the hang of them."
"Is the boss always like that?" I asked.
They stopped grinning. "Like what?"
"Nothing," I said.
"Hey, the boss is a great guy," they said.
"He seems like it," I said.
"You're new. Just listen and learn. You're going to love it here."
They spat. So did I.

Alfred Corn: “Contemporary Culture and the Letter ‘K’”

2009-09-24T15:48:00.001-07:00

First inroads were made in our 19-aughts
(Foreshadowed during the last century by nothing
More central than "Kubla Khan," Kipling, Greek
Letter societies, including the grotesque KKK –
Plus the kiwi, koala, and kookaburra from Down Under)
When certain women applied to their moist eyelids
A substance pronounced coal but spelled kohl,
Much of the effect captured on Kodak film
With results on and off camera now notorious.
They were followed and sometimes chased by a platoon
Of helmeted cutups styled the Keystone Kops, who'd
Freeze in the balletic pose of the letter itself,
Left arm on hip, leg pointed back at an angle,
Waiting under klieg lights next a worried kiosk
To put the kibosh on Knickerbocker misbehavior.
Long gone, they couldn't help when that hirsute royal
King Kong arrived to make a desperate last stand,
Clinging from the Empire State, swatting at biplanes,
Fay Wray fainting away in his leathern palm
As in the grip of African might. Next, marketing
Stepped up with menthol tobacco and the brand name
Kool, smoked presumably by models and archetypes
Superior in every way to Jukes and Kallikaks.
By then the race was on, if only because
Of German Kultur's increasing newsworthiness
On the international front. The nation that had canned
Its Kaiser went on to sponsor debuts for the hero
Of Mein Kampf, Wotan of his day, launching thunderbolts
And Stukas, along with a new social order astonishing
In its industrial efficiency. His annexing
Of Bohemia cannot have been spurred by reflecting
That after all Prague had sheltered the creator
And in some sense alter-ego of Josef K.,
Whose trial remained a local fact until the fall
Of the Empire of a Thousand Years, unheard of in 'Amerika"
Of the Jazz Age. But musicians Bix Beiderbecke and Duke
Ellington somehow always took care to include the token
Grapheme in their names, for which precaution fans
Of certain priceless '78’s can only be grateful.
They skipped and rippled through a long post-war glow
Still luminous in the memory of whoever recalls
Krazy Kat, Kleenex, Deborah Kerr, Korea, Kool-Aid,
And Jack Kennedy. Small wonder if New York had
A special feeling for the theme, considering radical
Innovations of De Kooning, Kline, and Rothko. This last
Can remind us that bearers of the letter often suffered
Bereavement and despair (cf. Chester Kallman) and even,
As with Weldon Kees, self-slaying. Impossible not to see
Symptoms of a malaise more widespread still in a culture
That collects kitsch and Krugerrands, with a just-kids lifestyle
Whose central shrine is the shopping mall - K-Mart, hail to thee!
To "Kuntry Kitchen," "Kanine Kennels," and a host of other
Kreative misspellings kreeping through the korpus
Of kontemporary lingo like an illness someone someday
(The trespass of metaphor) is going to spell "kancer.”

True, there have been recidivists in opposite
Direction (a falling away perhaps from the Platonic ideal
Of to kalon*) like "calisthenics" and Maria Callas,
Who seem to have preferred the less marblelike romance
Of traditional English. This and related factors make all
Supporters of the letter "k" in legitimate forms
And avatars cherish it with fiery intensity -
All the more when besieged by forces beyond
Anyone's control, at least, with social or medical
Remedies now available. Dr. Kaposi named it,
That sarcoma earmarking a mortal syndrome thus far
Incurable and spreading overland like acid rain.
A sense of helplessness is not in the repertory national
Of our national consciousness, we have no aptitude
For standing by as chill winds rise, the shadows gather,
And dray light glides into the room where a seated figure
Has taken up his post by the window, facing away from us,
No longer bothering to speak, his mind at one with whatever
Is beyond the ordinary spell of language, whatever dreams us
Into that placeless place, its nearest image a cloudless
Sky at dusk, just before the slow ascent of the moon.

* to kalon: Greek, "the beautiful"

Arthur Hugh Clough: “The Last Decalogue”

2009-09-24T15:38:00.000-07:00

Thou shalt have one God only; -who
Would be at the expense of two?
No graven images may be
Worshipped, except the currency:
Swear not at all; for, for thy curse
Thine enemy is none the worse:
At church on Sunday to attend
Will serve to keep the world thy friend:
Honour thy parents; that is, all
From whom advancement may befall:
Thou shalt not kill; but need'st not strive
Officiously to keep alive:
Do not adultery commit;
Advantage rarely comes of it:
Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,
When 'tis so lucrative to cheat:
Bear not false witness; let the lie
Have time on its own wings to fly:
Thou shalt not covet, but tradition
Approves all forms of competition.

James Wright: "An Offering for Mr. Bluehart"

2009-09-24T15:36:00.000-07:00

That was a place, when I was young,
Where two or three good friends and I
Tested the fruit against the tongue
Or threw the withered windfalls by.
The sparrows, angry in the sky,
Denounced us from a broken bough.
They limp along the wind and die.
The apples all are eaten now.

Behind the orchard, past one hill
The lean satanic owner lay
And threatened us with murder till

We stole his riches all away.
He caught us in the act one day
And damned us to the laughing bone,
And fired his gun across the gray
Autumn where now his life is done.

Sorry for him, or any man
Who lost his labored wealth to thieves,
Today I mourn him, as I can,
By leaving in their golden leaves
Some luscious apples overhead.
Now may my abstinence restore
Peace to the orchard and the dead.
We shall not nag them any more.

Craig Raine: "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home"

2009-09-24T15:35:00.000-07:00

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings -

they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.

I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on the hand.

Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on ground:

then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under tissue paper.

Rain is when the earth is television.
It has the property of making colours darker.

Model T is a room with the lock inside -
a key is turned to free the world

for movement, so quick there is a film
to watch for anything missed.

But time is tied to the wrist
or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.

In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up.

If the ghost cries, they carry it
to their lips and soothe it to sleep

with sounds. And yet they wake it up
deliberately, by tickling with a finger.

Only the young are allowed to suffer
openly. Adults go to a punishment room

with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises

alone. No one is exempt
and everyone's pain has a different smell.

At night when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs

and read about themselves -
in colour, with their eyelids shut.

Poetry & Poets in Film

2009-09-15T16:39:00.000-07:00

One of your choices for the midterm Report is to watch and report on a film that features poetry or the life of a poet in some fashion. Here is a long (but not complete) list of choices, briefly annotated to indicate which poet is featured. Also see the poets.org resources:

http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/195

The Anniversary Party – Matthew Arnold
Awakenings – Rainer Maria Rilke
Barfly – Charles Bukowsi
Basketball Diaries – Jim Carroll
Barretts of Wimpole Street – Robert & Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Beautiful Dreamers – Walt Whitman
Before Sunrise – W. H. Auden
The Bridges of Madison County – Lord Byron
Bull Durham – Whitman, Thomas Gray
Crimes and Misdemeanors – Emily Dickinson
Dante’s Inferno – Dante Gabriel Rosetti
Dead Man – William Blake
Dead Poets Society – Several
The Disappearance of Garcia Lorca – Federico Garcia Lorca
Dr. Zhivago – various
The Edge of Love – Dylan Thomas
A Fine Madness – fictional
Forced March – Miklos Radnoti
Four Weddings and a Funeral – Auden
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – Alexander Pope
Gothic – Lord Byron and Percy Shelley
Hannah and Her Sisters – ee. cummings
Haunted Summer – Lord Byron and Percy Shelley
Hedd Wyn – Welsh poet
Henry Fool – fictional
The Horse’s Mouth – various
The Hours – fictional
Il Postino – Pablo Neruda
In the Bedroom – William Blake, HW Longfellow
The Incredibly True Story of Two Girls in Love – Walt Whitman
In Custody – fictional
In Her Shoes – Elizabeth Bishop, e.e. cummings
The Ladykillers – Edgar Allan Poe
Love Jones – Sonia Sanchez
The Loved One – various
Memphis Belle – WB Yeats
Mindwalk – Kenneth Patchen, Pablo Neruda
Mirrors – fictional
Mrs. Parker & the Vicious Circle – Dorothy Parker
Out of Africa – Coleridge, A. E. Houseman
The Outsiders – Robert Frost
Pandaemonium – William Wordsworth, ST Coleridge
Patch Adams – Pablo Neruda
Pinero – Miguel Pinero
Poetic Justice – Maya Angelou
Possession – fictional
Prince of Tides – fictional
Quiz Show – various
The Reader – Charles Baudelaire
Reuben, Reuben – fictional
Rowing With the Wind – Lord Byron and Percy Shelley
Shakespeare in Love – Shakespeare
Slam – Saul Williams
Sophie’s Choice – Emily Dickinson
The Source – Allen Ginsburg
Sylvia – Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes
Smoke Signals – Sherman Alexie
Stevie – Stevie Smith
Till Human Voices Wakes Us – T. S. Eliot
Tom & Viv – T.S. Eliot
Total Eclipse – Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud
War Requiem – Wilfred Owen
The Weight of Water – various
Wildflowers – Robert Hass
Wit – John Donne
Women in Love – D. H. Lawrence

Heinrich Böll: "The Laugher"

2009-09-13T10:01:00.000-07:00

When someone asks me what business I am in, I am seized with embarrassment: I blush and stammer, I who am otherwise known as a man of poise. I envy people who can say: I am a bricklayer. I envy barbers, bookkeepers, and writers. All these professions speak for themselves. They need no lengthy explanation, while I am forced to reply to such questions: I am a laugher. Then I am always asked, "Is that how you make your living?" Truthfully I must say, "Yes." I actually do make a living at my laughing, and a good one, too. My laughing is - commercially speaking - much in demand. I am a good laugher, experienced. No one else laughs as well as I do. No one else has such command of the fine points of my art. For a long time, in order to avoid tiresome explanations, I called myself an actor. My talents in the field of mime and speech are small, so I felt this title to be too far from the truth. I love the truth, and the truth is: I am a laugher. I am neither a clown nor a comedian. I do not make people gay, I portray gaiety: I laugh like a Roman emperor, or like a sensitive schoolboy. I am as much at home in the laughter of the 17th century as in that of the 19th. When occasion demands, I laugh my way through all the centuries, all classes of society, all categories of age. It is simply a skill I have acquired, like the skill of being able to repair shoes. In my breast, I harbor the laughter of America, the laughter of Africa, white, red, yellow laughter. For the right fee, I let it peal out in accordance with the director's requirements.

I have become indispensable. I laugh on records. I laugh on tape. Television directors treat me with respect, I laugh mournfully, moderately, hysterically. I laugh like a streetcar conductor or like a clerk in the grocery; laughter in the morning, laughter in the evening, nighttime laughter, and the laughter of twilight. In short: Wherever and however laughter is required - I do it.
It need hardly be pointed out that a profession of this kind is tiring, especially as I have also -this is my specialty - mastered the art of infectious laughter. This has also made me indispensable to third - and fourth - rate comedians, who are scared - and with good reason - that their audiences will miss their punch lines. I spend most evenings in nightclubs. My job is to begin to laugh during the weaker parts of the program. It has to be carefully timed. My hearty, loud laughter must not come too soon, but neither must it come too late. It must come just at the right spot. At the pre-arranged moment, I burst out laughing. Then the whole audience roars with me, and the joke is saved. But as for me, I drag myself exhausted to the checkroom. I put on my overcoat, happy that I can go off duty at last. At home, I usually find telegrams waiting for me: "Urgently require your laughter. Recording Tuesday," and a few hours later I am sitting in an overheated express train bemoaning my fate.

I need scarcely say that when I am off I duty or on vacation I have little desire to laugh. The cowhand is glad when he can forget the cow. Carpenters usually have doors at home that don't work or drawers that are hard to open. Candy makers like sour pickles. Butchers like pastry, and the baker prefers sausage to breads. Bullfighters raise pigeons for a hobby. Boxers run pale when their children have nosebleeds: I find all this quite natural, for I never laugh off duty. I am a very solemn person, and people consider me - perhaps rightly so - a pessimist.

During the first years of our married life, my wife would often say to me: "Do laugh!" Since then, she has come to realize that I cannot grant her this wish. I am happy when I am free to relax my tense face muscles in a solemn expression. Indeed, even other people's laughter gets on my nerves. It reminds me too much of my profession. So our marriage is a quiet, peaceful one. Now my wife has also forgotten how to laugh. Now and again I catch her smiling, and I smile, too. We speak in low tones. I hate the noise of the nightclubs, the noise that sometimes fills the recording studios. People who do not know me think I am taciturn. Perhaps I am, because I have to open my mouth so often to laugh.

I go through life with a calm expression. From time to time, I permit myself a gentle smile. I often wonder whether I have ever laughed. I think not. My brothers and sisters have always known me for a serious boy.

So I laugh in many different ways, but my own laughter I have never heard.

Neruda on Film

2009-09-08T14:49:00.000-07:00

Speaking of Neruda, have you seen il Postino? It's a good film about poetry, as well as about love, and a good fictionalized but historically rooted story of Neruda himself. Here's a clip:

Neruda's poetry is also featured in Patch Adams. Here's one clip; compare it to the funeral scene I posted earlier -- with the Auden poem:

Neruda

2009-09-08T14:41:00.000-07:00

We've had a few love poems in the Workshop; there are many good model poets to read, and I have mentioned a few in my comments on the Workshop. Here's one to study, partly because his point of view is very masculine, you might say -- and also vvery much informed by his somewhat surrealistic, "tropical" imagination.

Pablo Neruda: 100 Love Sonnets (Stephen Tapscott translation)

This is a Google Books preview only; look for the whole book in print!

Ezines

2009-09-08T10:46:00.000-07:00

There are hundreds of "ezines," or online literary publications; many are good, some are not -- but of course, to each his own!

Some of the online literary sites are companions to traditional print journals. Many of these have been around for decades; some are "establishment" publications, and others are more open to new and young writers.

For many print publications, you still need to snail-mail your submissions; but usually, they provide guidelines online for how to get through the door. Look for "Submission Guidelines" or "Submit" on the site.

Many, though, allow emailed submissions; there are still guidelines to follow -- carefully, to avoid going unread altogether. Some also have a Submissions Manager tool -- you upload a file and can track it through the Manager.

My recommendation is to do a lot of reading of these ezines (and print journals) before submitting any or your own work. It's all subjective: editors are not gods, but they sometimes act like they are. Check the guidelines regarding format, number of pieces, method of submission, aesthetic preferences, genre preferences, submission period, simultaneous submissions, and other matters.

Borders, Brazos Bookstore, Barnes & Noble carry some print journals. Also, the public library has some, but to see the greater number, go by the UH, TSU, or Rice libraries, and ask the librarian (or search the catalog) to find call numbers for most literary journals. Give yourself an afternoon to browse, and find ones you think are worthwhile -- for reading, perhaps subscribing, and eventually, for submitting.

Here is a site that lists a lot of lit mags:

http://www.newpages.com

...but google "ezines" or "literary journals" yourself, and you'll find specific sites as well as other directories that are worthwhile. None lists everything; so, search a few, at least.

And here are a few online mags worth browsing:

http://www.bornmagazine.org/

Born specializes in multimedia presentations;

http://thediagram.com/

...experimental work, for the most part;

http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v8n1/

..."establishment" writers -- the traditional Creative Writing world, online -- but you'll find some of the best living American writers here;

http://memorious.org/

...young writers, heirs to the Establishment;

http://www.aprweb.org/

American Poetry Review -- the Establishment, and then some -- this is the main print publication for academic poetry;

http://www.bu.edu/agni/

...another key player in academic poetry, but a bit more open, perhaps;

http://callaloo.tamu.edu/

Callaloo specializes in African American writing;

http://www.gulfcoastmag.org/

...one of our local journals -- but of national reputation; run by the grad students, but professionally;

http://www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity/

..."creative nonfiction" done concisely;

http://www.webdelsol.com/

...the anti-establishment, but successful enough to have become Establishment Alternative; this is a clearinghouse site, so take time to explore;

http://www.drunkenboat.com/

...a wide range of academic and more freewheeling writers.

Derek Mahon's "Matthew 5 v. 29-30"

2009-09-05T09:34:00.000-07:00

I'll post an exercise for this next week; but it's here as an example of hyperbole, or perhaps reductio ad absurdum:

Matthew 5 v. 29-30

Lord, mine eye offended, so I plucked it out.
Imagine my chagrin
when the offense continued.
So I plucked out
the other; but the offense continued.

In the dark now, and working by touch,
I shaved my head.
(The offense continued.)
Removed an ear,
another, dispatched the nose.

The offense continued.
Imagine my chagrin.

Next, in long strips, the skin--
razored the tongue, the toes,
the personal nitty gritty.
The offense continued.

But now, the thing finding its own momentum,
the more so since
the offense continued,
I entered upon a prolonged course
of lobotomy and vivisection,
reducing the self
to a rubble of organs, a wreckage of bones
in the midst of which, somewhere,
the offense continued.

Quicklime then, for the calcium, paraquat
for the unregenerate offal;
a spreading of topsoil,
a ploughing of this
and a sowing of it with barley.

Paraffin for the records of birth, flu
and abortive scholarship,
for the whimsical postcards, the checques
dancing like hail,
the surviving copies of poems published
and unpublished; a scalpel
for the casual turns of phrase engraved
on the minds of others;
an aerosol for the stray thoughts
hanging in air,
for the people who breathed them in.

Sadly, therefore, deletion of the many people
from their desks, beds, breakfasts,
buses and catamarans,
deletion of their machinery and architecture,
all evidence whatever
of civility and reflection,
of laughter and tears.

Destruction of all things on which
that reflection fed,
of vegetable and bird;
erosion of all rocks
from the holiest mountain
to the least stone;
evaporation of all seas,
the extinction of heavenly bodies--
until, at last, offense
was not to be found
in that silence without bound.

Only then was I fit for human society.

Derek Mahon

Brown Reading Series

2009-09-03T13:44:00.000-07:00

I will post messages over the next few days about resources for hearing fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in Houston. Here's the first:

Margaret Root Brown Reading Series

This is the most notable literary-reading series in Houston, bringing nationally-renowned writers to read at the Alley theater downtown most often; check the details). The primary force behind this series is a nonprofit organization called Inprint, Inc; more about them in a later post.

Two Good Online Resources

2009-09-02T08:51:00.000-07:00

Here are two useful sites, which I have already directed you to in the exercises thus far:

The Academy of American Poets: poets.org

and:

The Annerberg Foundation: learner.org

Poets.org has audio, video, and numerous poems, essays, and other resources relating to poetry. Learner.org is mainly an education site for all levels, but has many good video resources. In particular, you can find full-length episodes for the 13-part "Voices and Visions" series, which is about modern American poets such as langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whotman, and others. It is very well made, entertaining, and instructive about poetic craft.

Flannery O'Connor's "Revelation": An Excerpt

2009-09-02T08:48:00.000-07:00

THE doctor's waiting room, which was very small, was almost full when the Turpins entered and Mrs. Turpin, who was very large, made it look even smaller by her presence. She stood looming at the head of the magazine table set in the center of it, a living demonstration that the room was inadequate and ridiculous. Her little bright black eyes took in all the patients as she sized up the seating situation. There was one vacant chair and a place on the sofa occupied by a blond child in a dirty blue romper who should have been told to move over and make room for the lady. He was five or six, but Mrs. Turpin saw at once that no one was going to tell him to move over. He was slumped down in the seat, his arms idle at his sides and his eyes idle in his head; his nose ran unchecked.
Mrs. Turpin put a firm hand on Claud's shoulder and said in a voice that included anyone who wanted to listen, "Claud, you sit in that chair there," and gave him a push down into the vacant one. Claud was florid and bald and sturdy, somewhat shorter than Mrs. Turpin, but he sat down as if he were accustomed to doing what she told him to.
Mrs. Turpin remained standing. The only man in the room be¬sides Claud was a lean stringy old fellow with a rusty hand spread out on each knee, whose eyes were closed as if he were asleep or dead or pretending to be so as not to get up and offer her his seat. Her gaze settled agreeably on a well dressed gray haired lady whose eyes met hers and whose expression said: if that child belonged to me, he would have some manners and move over there's plenty of room there for you and him too.
Claud looked up with a sigh and made as if to rise.
"Sit down," Mrs. Turpin said. "You know you're not supposed to stand on that leg. He has an ulcer on his leg," she explained.
Claud lifted his foot onto the magazine table and rolled his trouser leg up to reveal a purple swelling on a plump marble white calf.
"My!" the pleasant lady said. "How did you do that?"
"A cow kicked him," Mrs. Turpin said.
"Goodness!" said the lady.
Claud rolled his trouser leg down.
"Maybe the little boy would move over," the lady suggested, but the child did not stir.
"Somebody will be leaving in a minute," Mrs. Turpin said. She could not understand why a doctor with as much money as they made charging five dollars a day to just stick their head in the hospital door and look at you couldn't afford a decent sized wait¬ing room. This one was hardly bigger than a garage. The table was cluttered with limp looking magazines and at one end of it there was a big green glass ash tray full of cigarette butts and cotton wads with little blood spots on them. If she had had anything to do with the running of the place, that would have been emptied every so often. There were no chairs against the wall at the head of the room. It had a rectangular shaped panel in it that permitted a view of the office where the nurse came and went and the secretary listened to the radio. A plastic fern in a gold pot sat in the opening and trailed its fronds down almost to the floor. The radio was softly playing gospel music.
just then the inner door opened and a nurse with the highest stack of yellow hair Mrs. Turpin had ever seen put her face in the crack and called for the next patient. The woman sitting beside Claud grasped the two arms of her chair and hoisted herself up; she pulled her dress free from her legs and lumbered through the door where the nurse had disappeared.
Mrs. Turpin eased into the vacant chair, which held her tight as a corset. "I wish I could reduce," she said, and rolled her eyes and gave a comic sigh.
"Oh, you aren't fat," the stylish lady said.
"Ooooo I am too," Mrs. Turpin said. "Claud he eats all he wants to and never weighs over one hundred and seventy five pounds, but me I just look at something good to eat and I gain some weight," and her stomach and shoulders shook with laughter. "You can eat all you want to, can't you, Claud?" she asked, turning to him.
Claud only grinned.
"Well, as long as you have such a good disposition," the stylish lady said, "I don't think it makes a bit of difference what size you are. You just can't beat a good disposition."
Next to her was a fat girl of eighteen or nineteen, scowling into a thick blue book which Mrs. Turpin saw was entitled Human De¬velopment. The girl raised her head and directed her scowl at Mrs. Turpin as if she did not like her looks. She appeared annoyed that anyone should speak while she tried to read. The poor girl's face was blue with acne and Mrs. Turpin thought how pitiful it was to have a face like that at that age. She gave the girl a friendly smile but the girl only scowled the harder. Mrs. Turpin herself was fat but she had always had good skin, and, though she was forty seven years old, there was not a wrinkle in her face except around her eyes from laughing too much.
Next to the ugly girl was the child, still in exactly the same posi¬tion, and next to him was a thin leathery old woman in a cotton print dress. She and Claud had three sacks of chicken feed in their pump house that was in the same print. She had seen from the first that the child belonged with the old woman. She could tell by the way they sat kind of vacant and white trashy, as if they would sit there until Doomsday if nobody called and told them to get up. And at right angles but next to the well dressed pleasant lady was a lank faced woman who was certainly the child's mother. She had on a yellow sweat shirt and wine colored slacks, both gritty¬ looking, and the rims of her lips were stained with snuff. Her dirty yellow hair was tied behind with a little piece of red paper ribbon. Worse than niggers any day, Mrs. Turpin thought.
The gospel hymn playing was, "When I looked up and He looked down," and Mrs. Turpin, who knew it, supplied the last line men¬tally, "And wona these days I know I'll wear a crown."

Ekphrasis: An Example, with Image and Annotations

2009-08-25T09:54:00.000-07:00

Here is an ekphrastic poem of my own, with an image of the subject painting; and a link to a wonderfully informative blog post at a site called "Bioephemera," that is itself a good source of creative inspiration; click the home link after you've browsed the "Stone of Foly" informaion and check out the blogger's other posts.

The poem:

“The Stone Surgery” by Bosch

Doctor
cut the stone of folly
from my skull
make me a rill
for kingdom’s coming.

Let the engines of the sky come down
to nail and helmet me
funnel me
beneath a metal mouth
an eye.

Fill my simple mind
with wisdom of the stars
give me knowledge
pure, celestial
like yours.

Take up the scoring blade
Doctor
and core the stone from me
the less, the more
than me.

The image:

The post at Bioephemera:

http://scienceblogs.com/bioephemera/2008/08/the_stone_of_madness.php

Afterthought: The Auden Poem

2009-08-23T09:58:00.000-07:00

You can hear this poem below -- and see it recited; here is a link to an online print version at the NPR web site.

Lorrie Moore on Writing Short Fiction

2009-08-23T09:48:00.000-07:00

Here is some tongue-in-cheek advice on writing from Lorrie Moore, a popular fiction writer...

"How to Become a Writer"

Auden's "Funeral Blues"

2009-08-23T09:37:00.000-07:00

Two of my loves are poetry and film; so, it's great when the two work together. I will present some samples this semester of ways that filmmakers have used poetry and viewed poets on film. To start, here is a clip from a popular '90's film, "Four Weddings and a Funeral." In it, a character reads and recites a poem by the British/American poet W.H. Auden. This is a kind of elegy. I will post some exercise ideas on the Syllabus on the class web site. Meanwhile, consider looking up other elegies, and other poems by Auden. Auden is important in many ways, but among them is his broad and masterful practice of traditional prosodic forms. His poetry is good to read and borrow from in your efforts to learn.

Here is the clip, found on Youtube:

Blanton Poetry Project

2009-08-10T13:01:00.000-07:00

Earlier this summer I published a poem in the journal Borderlands (out of Austin). On their web site, you can find a link to a related effort called the Blanton Poetry Project:

http://blantonmuseum.org/elearning/blantonpoetry/index.html

It's a media-rich presentation with images, text, audio and video.

The Blanton Museum of art is on the University of Texas campus; check it out the next time you're in Austin.