The Magic of Misdirection: Hayan Charara on the Poetic Turn

16 05 2018

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In “Otherwise Unnoticed Insights: An Interview with Hayan Charara,” prompted in part by interviewer Zach Savich’s observation that “[i]n your poems, you sometimes guide the reader by using types of misdirection,” poet Charara states,

I like the way you put it—“misdirection.” I’d qualify it by adding that I don’t deliberately guide readers in the wrong direction, just to other ways of seeing. And most of the time, this is because either I can’t quite put my finger on an experience, or else, if I reach something like certainty, it barely lasts long enough for it to sustain me. I’m much more certain about realizing many possible pathways for thinking, feeling, or knowing an experience. If my speaker says, “This is not about pity” [a reference to his poem, “Washing My Father,” quoted earlier by Savich], it may actually be about pity—I’ve looked down that path, saw what I could see, and—for good or bad reasons—decided to keep looking. And I’ll go further: if a poem of mine serves as a guide and actually gets you somewhere, the very next thing you should do is keep looking. I have—I can tell you that.

And then the conversation turns to the turn. Charara states,

Earlier, you’d asked about poetic techniques. The “poetic turn” is another way to talk about misdirection. Some part of the poem (the “preface” if you will, the opening) builds expectation, then it turns against that expectation—or, the same part of the poem provides a description, then the poem “turns” and reflects on the description. Michael Theune’s book Structure & Surprise collects essays by poets—for students of poetry—explaining a variety of “structures” that rely on poetic turns (be they ironic, descriptive-meditative, retrospective-prospective, concessional, and so on). The poems you mention here, I wrote before reading the essays in Structure & Surprise, but these sorts of structures, we find them in poems old as well as new. And no doubt, I inherited the practices (knowingly or not) from the poets I’ve read.

Turns–absolutely!–are everywhere, and there are, so far as I know, few (if any) interesting poets who have not at least intuited the turn’s power and worked to deploy it in their work. Wherever they come from for him, I love (and, frankly, am honored) that Charara connects his poem’s thrilling shifts and twists to the thinking about the turn in Structure & Surprise. Charara himself, indeed, is a master of the turn. If you don’t know Charara’s work, here are a few links to some masterful lists-with-twists to get you started:

“Elegy with Apples, Pomegranates, Bees, Butterflies, Thorn Bushes, Oak, Pine, Warblers, Crows, Ants, and Worms”

“Mother and Daughter”

“Prayer for the Living”

“The Prize”

Do check them out!


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“If Hitler also Spelled Hiedler,” by Joe Dolce

17 03 2014

dolcephoto

 

If Hitler also Spelled Hiedler

 

Hüttler or Huettler

at seventeen had remained

in watercolour been accepted

at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

even become a priest as once intended

the swastika would still signify

auspiciousness in Sanskrit

Israel wouldn’t exist

no Berlin or West Bank walls

holocaust would refer to

a burnt offering of Moses

WW I would still be The Great War

I would have had one more uncle.

 

*

 

One of the things I like best about my online work with the poetic turn here and over at Voltage Poetry is that it’s allowed me to come into contact with some great folk, terrific artists, poets and thinkers. Most recently, this work has put me in touch with Joe Dolce, who has allowed me to reprint the above poem, which, among other things is a great example of a list-with-a-twist.

A little about Joe:

Born in Painesville, Ohio, in 1947, Joe Dolce moved to Australia in 1979, becoming a citizen in 2004. He is known internationally for the most successful song in Australian music history, Shaddap You Face, number one on the pop charts in fifteen countries, holding the record for the largest selling single in Australian music history for 33 years. Over the past twenty years he has achieved award-winning recognition as songwriter, composer, poet, and essayist. He set fifteen poems of C. P. Cavafy to music as well as works by Sappho, Sylvia Plath, Les Murray, Ali Cobby Eckermann, and others. In 2010, he won the Launceston Poetry Cup at the 25th Tasmanian Poetry Festival. He has had poetry and essays published in Quadrant, Monthly, The Canberra Times, PEN (in English/Arabic translation), Meanjin, Etchings, Overland, Cordite, Journey, Carmenta, Vine Leaves, Eye of the Telescope (sci-fi), Contrappasso and Antipodes (USA). He lives in Carlton, Victoria, a suburb of Melbourne. His website is here.


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Billy Collins on “The Ride of Poetry”

6 11 2013

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I recently read with great interest “The Ride of Poetry: Collins on Metaphor and Movement,” by Billy Collins (in Contemporary American Poetry: Behind the Scenes, edited by Ryan G. Van Cleave (New York: Pearson, 2003), pp. 66-69).  In this essay (a brief afterword to a selection of his poems), Collins discusses his desire for poems to present him an opportunity for “imaginative travel,” to transport him “into new territory.”

Though Collins does not specifically mention the turn in this essay, it’s clear that the turn is implied.  Turns simply are the ways that poems travel.  Collins states, “In teaching or reading poetry, a question I habitually ask my students or myself is how does the poem get from its alpha to its omega.”  And this sounds a great deal like Randall Jarrell, who states (in “Levels and Opposites: Structure in Poetry,” a lecture focused on issues related to the turn), “A successful poem starts from one position and ends at a very different one, often a contradictory or opposite one; yet there has been no break in the unity of the poem.”

Additionally, Collins simply seems to be a fan of the turn.  He employs the turn again and again in his own work.  (Many poems by Collins appear on this blog’s pages devoted to specific kinds of turns, including “Duck/Rabbit” and “Marginalia.”)  And, as an anthologist, Collins tends to select works that feature prominent turns–I don’t think it’s coincidental that the subtitle to Collins’s influential Poetry 180 is “A Turning Back to Poetry.”

Collins’s “The Ride of Poetry” simply further confirms Collins’s interest in, and deep and abiding engagement with, the turn.  Here are some selections from this essay:

“Of the many pleasures that poetry offers, one of the keenest for me is the possibility of imaginative travel, a sudden slip down the rabbit hole.  No other form can spirit the reader away to a new conceptual zone so quickly, often in the mere handful of lines that a lyric poem takes to express itself.  Whenever I begin to read a new poem, I feel packed and ready to go, eager to be lifted into new territory….

“If we view poetry as an affordable–cheap, really–means of transportation, we can see the development of a poem as a series of phases in the journey, each of which has a distinct function.  The opening of the poem is the point of departure; the interior of the poem is the ground that will be simultaneously invented and covered through a series of navigational maneuvers; and the ending of the poem is the unforeseen destination–international arrivals, if you will….I am hardly alone in saying that the poem can act as an imaginative vehicle, a form of transportation to a place unknown.  But I expect my company would thin out if I admitted that I usually fail to experience the deeper, more widely celebrated rewards of poetry, such as spiritual nourishment and empathetic identification, unless the poem has provided me with some kind of ride….

“I do not mean to suggest that poetry is a verbal amusement park (or do I?) but I do hold up as a standard for assessing a poem its ability to carry me to a place that is dramatically different from the place I was when I began to read it.

“To view a poem as a trip means taking into account the methods that give a poem vehicular capability.  It means looking into the way a poet manages to become the poem’s first driver and thus first to know its secret destination.

“In teaching or reading poetry, a question I habitually ask my students or myself is how does the poem get from its alpha to its omega.  Obviously, the question does not apply to the many poems that exhaust themselves crawling in the general direction of beta….”


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Close Reading “Close Reading: Windows”

9 01 2011

As I have stated elsewhere on this blog (such as here, and by including many of her poems as exemplars of particular types of turns), poet-critic Jane Hirshfield is one of today’s great advocates and practitioners of the poetic turn.  Hirshfield’s advocacy for the turn continues in her latest, excellent essay on poetry, “Close Reading: Windows” (The Writer’s Chronicle 43.4 (Feb. 2011): 22-30).

Hirshfield begins her essay, stating, “Many good poems have a kind of window-moment in them–a point at which they change their direction of gaze or thought in a way that suddenly opens a broadened landscape of meaning and feeling.  Encountering such a moment, the reader breathes in some new infusion, as steeply perceptible as any physical window’s increase of light, scent, sound, or air.  The gesture is one of lifting, unlatching, releasing; mind and attention swing open to newly peeled vistas.”

Though Hirshfield notes that such window-moments may be momentary elements within a poem, most often the window-moment is associated with the turn.  Hirschfield states, “In the swerve into some new possibility of mind, a poem with a window stops to look elsewhere, drawing on something outside of its self-constructed domain and walls.  A window can be held by a change of sense realms or a switch of rhetorical strategy, can be framed by a turn of grammar or ethical stance, can be sawn open by an overt statement or slipped in almost unseen.  Whether large or small, what I am calling a window is recognized primarily by the experience of expansion it brings: the poem’s nature is changed because its scope has become larger.”

The relation between the window-moment and the turn is made even clearer when one considers that many of the poems Hirshfield discusses in her essay have major turns, turns which often are equated with the window-moment. 

The turn in the final stanza of Philip Larkin’s “High Windows” is the major window-moment in the poem, the place where, according to Hirshfield, the poem “suddenly turns.”  (In Structure & Surprise, Christopher Bakken considers “High Windows” a poem employing an ironic structure.)  

A vital window-moment in Emily Dickinson’s “We grow accustomed to the Dark–“ (a poem that employs a Metaphor-to-Meaning Structure) occurs at the poem’s major turn from metaphor to meaning; as Hirshfield notes, “‘And so of larger–Darkness– / Those Evenings of the Brain– / When not a Moon disclose a sign– / Or Star–come out–within–‘  With these lines, the poem moves into charged terrain.”

In Wislawa Szymborska’s Some People, a poem employing a List-with-a-Twist Structure, the window-moment occurs at the poem’s final twist.  As Hirshfield notes of the poem’s third-to-last line, “With that line’s grammatical knife-twist, certain kinds of awareness we were not even aware had been supressed rush back into the poem.”

The major turn in Czeslaw Milosz’s “Winter,” again, turns out to be its window-moment.  Hirshfield, in fact, calls the poem’s “mid-point turn to the vocative ‘you'” one of “the most breathtaking transitions and window-openings to be found anywhere in poetry, in its intimacy and in what it summons.”

I learned a great deal from “Close Reading: Windows.”  Not the least of this learning came from being introduced to (or reminded of) of some excellent poems with amazing turns in them.  I added Dickinson’s poem to the Metaphor-to-Meaning Structure page and I added Szymborska’s poem to the List-with-a-Twist Structure page after reading Hirshfield’s excellent, informative essay.  Inspired by and agreeing with Hirshfield, I also decided to add Milosz’s poems to the list of poems on Voltage!, the page of this blog devoted to poems that have truly shocking and amazing, truly electric, turns.

I’ve been deeply impressed by some vital new writing on issues intimately related to the turn, writing such as Peter Sack’s “‘You Only Guide Me by Surprise’: Poetry and the Dolphin’s Turn” and Hank Lazer’s “Lyricism of the Swerve: The Poetry of Rae Armantrout” (collected in Lyric & Spirit: Selected Essays 1996-2008).  Jane Hirshfield’s “Close Reading: Windows” certainly takes its place among these important works, doing its part to help reveal the relevance and the significance of the turn in poetry today.


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