Poetry Magazine & the Turn

4 07 2009

JulAug-CoverLG

There has been a great deal of fuss made over the latest issue of Poetry.  The July/August 2009 issue contains a section of poems by poets who are a part of the Flarf and Conceptual Poetry movements, movements which, because of their challenge to the concepts of poetry held by many, tend to cause a stir–especially among those who read Poetry, a magazine generally not given to publishing such work.  (Indeed, Stan Apps’ recent analysis of Poetry‘s latest issue suggests that while the issue (obviously) includes Flarf and Conceptual poetry it also quarantines this, to use Poetry‘s term, “writing,” from the much lengthier collection of what Poetry calls “poems” that opens magazine.)

The debate is intriguing, and worth looking into.  (Some places to start: Kenneth Goldsmith’s introduction to Poetry‘s F-Con Po issue, and Dale Smith’s response.)

I want to take a slightly different tack, though, and argue that this latest issue of Poetry does not only feature F-Con Po: it also features the poetic turn.  Even employing a rather strict definition of what a turn is (here, I’m only counting poems that employ a very clear and significant major turn), I count at least nine poets in the current issue of Poetry who make use of a significant turn in at least one of their poems.  These poets include Tony Hoagland (in “At the Galleria Shopping Mall” and “Personal”), Jane Hirschfield (in “Perishable, It Said”), Charles Simic (in “The Melon”), John Poch (in “The Llano Estacado”), John Hodgen (in “For the man with the erection lasting more than four hours”), Ange Mlinko (in “This is the Latest”), David Bottoms (in “The Stroke”), Robyn Sarah (in “Blowing the Fluff Away”), Jordan Davis (in “Poem for a Sixth Wedding”), and Caroline Bergvall (in “The Not Tale (Funeral)”).  This number (again, the result of very conservative estimations and estimates) means that in the current issue of Poetry there are more “turners” than there are either Flarfists or Conceptual Poets.

To say the above is not to say that all the poems that have significant turns in them are great–this is by no means true.  (I think about three of the turns in the above poems are pretty great; a few are good; a few are so-so; and a few are weak.  The ones I really like are the turns in the poems listed above by Hodgen, Mlinko, and Davis.)

What I personally like, however, I think (and I trust you, not being me, will agree) is much less interesting than some systematic inconsistencies that arise once the prominence of the turn is noted.

For example: why isn’t the current issue of Poetry called “The Turn” issue?  I’m being a bit cheeky here, of course, but noticing both the presence of the turn in the recent Poetry and the absence of any real mention of the turn reveals an inconsistency near the heart of Poetry, the magazine, and poetry, in general.

The presence of the turn in an issue of Poetry is not at all surprising.  Poetry seems to really like turns.  (Important information for those who might have interest in submitting their work to Poetry.)  What’s interesting about this phenomenon is the following:

Though the turn is a real presence in Poetry, it is a largely unacknowledged presence.  Not only has there not been a special section of the magazine devoted to poems with great turns (ahem…), but the Poetry Foundation’s “Poetry Tool”–which allows one to search the Foundation’s extensive poetry archive by various means, including “By Glossary Term”–does not recognize the turn, or particular types of turns, as aspects of poems for which people might want to search.  This is oddly inconsistent: to supply regularly in the magazine an element of poetry which is absent from the Foundation’s other venues and discussions.

What’s happening in terms of turns over at Poetry, of course, happens more generally in poetry.  Though the turn is a vital part of a lot of poetry (T.S. Eliot says that the turn is “one of the most important means of poetic effect since Homer”–a means of poetic effect important even for some Flarf and Conceptual Poetry, it seems), we tend to not talk about it, and focus instead on other matters, often, especially, form.  As I suggest in “The Structure-Form Distinction,” we need to realize the significance of poetic structure (the patterns of turns in poems), and find ways to act on that realization…

What I’m suggesting here is that we at least see the significant role of the turn in the lastest issue of Poetry.  What exactly might be done with such knowledge remains to be seen…


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The Turn-to-Another Structure

3 07 2009

gerhard-richter_1318544c

A new structure has been added to this blog.  It’s called the Turn-to-Another Structure, and it features a number of poems that turn (often very surprisingly, at poem’s end) to speak to a specific addressee who has been absent, hidden, or secret for most of the poem.  Lots of great poems are included in this structure–check ’em out!


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The Turn on the Air

23 06 2009

MakingofaSonnetPbk

In a previous post, I discussed Edward Hirsch and Eavan Boland’s The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology, both praising it and thinking about the ways in which this anthology both privileged the turn in the sonnet but also noting some of the ways this anthology did not quite give the turn its full due.

What a pleasure it was, then, to listen to “The Making of Sonnets,” a show on WBUR’s “On Point,” with Tom Ashbrook, originally broadcast April 1, 2008, and re-broadcast today, June 22, 2009.  Mainly, it was just a pleasure to get to hear Hirsch and Boland read and discuss numerous great sonnets.  However, it also was a pleasure to get to hear a discussion about a central tradition of English poetry that really and truly foregrounds the turn.

Responding to Ashbrook’s request for “a little definition: what’s a sonnet?,” Hirsch responds by noting that, while sonnets are generally difficult to pin down, they can best be considered “a fourteen-line poem, in main, with a structure that turns.”  The early part of this interview,then, especially, pays a lot of attention to the turn in sonnets.

A terrific interview, for a variety of reasons.  Well worth listening to for all those interested in poetry, even moreso for those interested in sonnets, and perhaps even moreso for those intrigued by the feature of the turn in sonnets.  Needless to say, I highly recommend it.


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(Re:)Arranging Poetry Writing Classes

12 05 2009

I’ve recently read, with great interest, Tom C. Hunley’s Teaching Poetry Writing: A Five-Canon Approach (Multilingual Matters Ltd., 2007).  My interest in this book is twofold: 1) I’m personally attracted to the alternative pedagogical system the book espouses, and 2) I think Hunley’s ideas in this book jibe nicely with an effort to incorporate greater focus on poetic structure and turns into poetry writing classes.

The big idea of Teaching Poetry Writing (TPW) is simple: we need to replace a largely ineffective workshop model in our poetry writing classes with what Hunley calls the “five-canon model.”  TPW’s first chapter (the title of which, “It Doesn’t Work for Me: A Critique of the Workshop Approach to Teaching Poetry Writing and a Suggestion for Revision,” says it all) largely is a critique of the workshop model, arguing, “The workshop model was not designed with undergraduates or the ruck of graduate students in mind.  It was designed for gifted, elite writers who needed very little instruction, though they may have benefited from criticism on their manuscripts.”  Knowing that it is not enough to simply critique the workshop model without offering another model which might replace it, Hunley suggests organizing a poetry writing class around the five canons of rhetoric: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery.  That is, according to Hunley, poetry writing classes need to devote much more time to in-class prewriting activities, collaborations, formal play and stylistic imitations, and to the memorization and performing of poems.  (Workshopping and the offering of detailed, specific critiques, according to Hunley, can best be handled in conferences and online, employing instructional technologies such as Blackboard.)

I agree wholeheartedly with Hunley’s take on the need to replace the workshop model.  And I agree very largely with Hunley’s pointing teachers in the direction of an alternative method like the five-canon model.  My own experiences teaching undergraduate poetry writing have confirmed how ineffective the workshop model tends to be, and so I have taken steps in my own teaching to try something new.  Interestingly, my own choices largely have coincided with much of what Hunley suggests.  For example, I now do a LOT in terms of sharing invention strategies with students, and allowing students to practice some of those strategies in class.  And very often I match text-generating invention strategies with a poetic form to help students consider the methods with and by which they might craft their poems.  In fact, one of the big goals of my pedagogy is to get students to see that one very fruitful way to conceive of the task of the poet is to conceive of the poet as someone who gives her/himself creative assignments and then works to complete those assignments.  The pay-off for this kind of approach is immediate: students bring better work and thinking to the drafts of their poems, so, when we actually do discuss them, the drafts generally already are working in some big, vital ways.  (So far, I have not done much with memorization and delivery in the poetry writing class; however, I do teach a literature class called “Poetry through Performance,” and through the experience of teaching that course I know what a powerful pedagogical technique the performance of poetry can be—encouraged by Hunley’s writing, I will certainly consider employing this methodology in my poetry writing classes.)

TPW strikes me as offering something vital for poetry writing pedagogy now—anyone starting to teach poetry writing or beginning to re-think their own poetry writing pedagogy should carefully attend to it.  TPW does the massive work of suggesting the need for a paradigm shift in poetry writing pedagogy, and it does the vital detail work of offering a lot of specific guidance in terms of how to pull off such a shift: specific exercises, specific technologies, specific texts.

Although not mentioned in TPW (perhaps because the books were published in the same year), I think Structure & Surprise, along with many of the other poetry writing books cited and referenced by Hunley, offers many insights applicable to teaching using the five-canon approach.

S&S is most applicable to the second canon, arrangement.  Citing Covino and Jolliffe’s Rhetoric: Concepts, Definitions, Boundaries (Allyn & Bacon, 1995), Hunley notes, “Arrangement occurs in rhetoric when ‘the arguments devised through invention are placed in the most effective order.’  It is ‘the art of ordering the material in a text so that it is most appropriate for the needs of the audience and the purpose the text is designed to accomplish.’”  According to Hunley (who cites the Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition), “Rhetoric’s second canon, arrangement…is ‘the art of dividing a discourse into its parts and the inclusion, omission, or ordering of those parts according to the rhetor’s needs and situation and constraints of the chosen genre.’  The least written about of the five canons, arrangement has always been a sort of neglected middle child, rarely stealing the spotlight away from invention and style, its attention-grabbing siblings on either side.”

Although structure is touched on in a section of TPW called “Arrangement in the Rhetorical Tradition” (in which it is noted, “In classical rhetoric, orators traditionally arranged their speeches into five parts: exordium, narratio, confirmatio, refutatio, peroratio”) and in some of the “Practical Classroom Applications” that grow out of this section, the methods for arranging the content of a poem offered in TPW focus mainly on poetic form, as is indicated by the section title “Arranging Poetry in the Verse Mode: Traditional Forms.”  Additionally, the section called “Arranging Poetry in the Prose Mode: Free Verse” also is largely about form, focusing on kinds of poetic lines and line breaks.  This is, of course, fitting: for a long time now, form has seemed generally to be the way to arrange poems, and form of course offers powerful tools for such arrangement.  However, I’d simply add that poetic structure, attention to the patterns of turns in poems, offers a significant additional way to think about the arrangement of poems, its own practical pedagogical applications (see this blog’s “Pedagogy” page for links to this developing conversation), and a reminder: non-formal arrangement is not only a concern primarily for rhetors but also for poets, who for a long time (Eliot calls the turn “one of the most important means of poetic effect since Homer”) have arranged poems—both formal and free—around turns.

With Teaching Poetry Writing, Tom Hunley has given me a name for what I do (or am trying to do) in my poetry writing classes, and he has given me lots of new information and methods for my teaching.  Perhaps, for others interested in Hunley’s approach to teaching poetry writing, Structure & Surprise (and this blog) can serve as a kind of supplement to the pedagogical model presented in Teaching Poetry Writing, offering helpful ways to think about and to teach another key means of arranging poems: poetic structure, the pattern of turning in poems.


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OKD and the DMS

5 05 2009

olena-kalytiak-davis

In “The Lyric ‘I’ Drives to Pick up Her Children from School: A Poem in the Postconfessional Mode,” Olena Kalytiak Davis includes as a key drama in that poem the unsuccessful effort to give significant shape to the scattered movements of her mind, movements which themselves struggle to reflect (upon) the fragmented state of the life they try to depict.

To convey this drama, Davis incorporates (about half-way through) in her largely associative poem an extended summary of the descriptive-meditative structure, as it is spelled out in M.H. Abrams’s “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric.”  Davis quotes heavily from the same part of Abrams’s essay that Corey Marks uses to summarize the descriptive-meditative structure in his chapter on the descriptive-meditative structure in Structure & Surprise:

“The speaker begins with a description of the landscape; an aspect or change of aspect in the landscape evokes a varied but integral process of memory, thought, anticipation, and feeling which remains closely intervolved with the outer scene.  In the course of this meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem.  Often the poem rounds upon itself to end where it began, at the outer scene, but with an altered mood and deepened understanding which is the result of the intervening meditation.”

Though, elsewhere, Davis clearly and actively employs the descriptive-meditative structure in her poetry (Structure & Surprise includes Davis’s “Resolutions in a Parked Car” in the “Supplemental Poems” section of the chapter on the descriptive-meditative structure), in “The Lyric ‘I’ Drives…” Davis employs a reference to that structure in order to note how that structure “evades her [or, rather, the poem’s “lyric ‘i'”].”  With this reference to the descriptive-meditative structure (which aims at insight, decisiveness, resolution), Davis is able to highlight the forlorn (if occasionally lively, witty) quality of the experiences and the thoughts her poem attempts to convey.

This seems a fascinating use of reference to a structure in a poem.  It is a bold and powerful gesture to say, in effect, I know where I’m supposed to go with this, but to do so would not be truthful to the content of my experiences or my thinking.  However, such a gesture is not totally unfamiliar.  It is, in its own way, a kind of concessionary gesture, one that acknowledges, I know what I should be doing, but I cannot, and/or will not…  And poems often comment on the structural expectations they feel they are evading or revising.  For example, many elegies often acknowledge that they should be aiming at finding some consolation only to admit (or bemoan) that consolation eludes them, or else actively critique the effort to find consolation.

None of this is a critique of Davis’s poem.  Rather, it is only to make note of a significant reference to structure in poetry, and to draw some further attention to a new use of a time-honored (though perhaps little-known) poetic technique.  Additionally, it is to offer one detail regarding the method by which, as Ira Sadoff says in “The True and Untrue Confessions of Olena Kalytiak Davis,” Davis “accounts for the structure of the poem” even though she structures her poem “associatively.”


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Students Don’t Like Poetry? Teach Turns

26 04 2009

 

thunderstorm2

 

In “Why Students Don’t Like Poetry,” a Chronicle of Higher Education blog post from April 19, 2009, Mark Bauerlein argues that students don’t like poetry largely because they are introduced to the wrong kind of poetry: difficult poetry by the likes of John Ashbery, the kind of poetry it’s hard to understand “the basic meaning” of, poetry to which students “can’t relate.”

 

According to Bauerlein, when he “tried a different kind of verse, this one with rhyme and regularity and narrative,” the students took to the poetry.  The poem Bauerlein uses as an example of more student-friendly work is Dana Gioia’s “Summer Storm.”  According to Bauerlein, Gioia’s poem worked in the classroom because it “had rhyme and music,” and because it “had a subject they [the students] all could understand…”

 

While Bauerlein’s post gave rise to many interesting comments (especially by teachers telling about what they’ve done in the classroom to convey to students the pleasures and the discipline of poetry), many of the comments also are predictably polemical.  Some say Bauerlein is right on: poetry should be accessible.  Others argue that he is dumbing-down the real demand of difficult poetry merely to appeal to a generally uninformed audience.

 

Now, I don’t want to say that applying the turn to this conversation would offer a kind of cure-all for teaching poetry, but I do think that some judicious thinking about the turn can offer some helpful insights and ideas about and for pedagogy.

 

Thinking about the turn is called for in this case.  While Gioia’s “Summer Storm” does have “rhyme and regularity and narrative” it also has a clear and distinct turn: at the beginning of the third-to-last stanza, the poem turns from a memory to a consideration of the meaning of memory and the past.  However, as so often occurs in poems with turns, the turn goes by unrecognized as a significant feature in the poem.  (In fact, though he includes a link to the full text of Gioia’s poem, Bauerlein’s citations and summary of the poem include nothing of the poem after the turn.)

 

But, of course, I think the turn should have been mentioned.  Mentioning the turn is simply descriptively accurate: the poem in fact has a turn.  And the turn could have been one of the things the students liked and “got” about Gioia’s poem: Gioia’s poem offers something accessible to many 19 year olds: a story with a moral.

 

But focusing more attention on the turn could have offered even more to the conversation.  If not a cure-all, the turn at least could build bridges, including:

 

1) from the student’s own language to the poem’s maneuvering (students use turns in their own language; they easily can be shown how poems employ turns);

 

2) from a focus on a poem’s meaning to its being—showing students that poems are things that turn is one of the clearest and most succinct ways to show students that poems are more enactments and less easily-paraphrased statements; and

 

3) from accessible to more difficult poetry—aware that one of the key things that poems do is turn, students become better readers of all kinds of poems.  (The turn is at the heart of not only so many of the poems in Billy Collins’s Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry but also the poetics of Rae Armantrout and Jorie Graham.  (For a glance at the turn’s presence in Armantrout and Graham, click here.  Scroll down to read the quotations from Jorie Graham and Hank Lazer on Rae Armantrout.))

 

While Bauerlein’s choice of Gioia as an alternative to Ashbery is polemically fraught, raising specters of the ol’ American poetry wars, and in fact might depend on those old dichotomies (intentionally or not, it pits New Formalism against the Post Avant, and suggests that one way you figure out if a poem is accessible is if it rhymes), focusing on the turn could help to erase those dichotomies: what about teaching some (accessible?) poems that have clear and distinct, easily spotted and discussed turns and then teaching some (difficult?) poems that incorporate more complex movements, twists and turns that the students could work to map out and work through?  In this way, the turn can be used to link seemingly different kinds of poetry rather than contribute once again to problematic and predictable binaries.


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Structure & Surprise: Recommended for Geniuses

22 04 2009

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Cool news: Structure & Surprise is listed in the “Recommended Reading” section of Kim Addonizio’s new guide to poetry writing, Ordinary Genius.

For some time, Kim has been a supporter of Structure & Surprise, recommending it on her web site, but it’s terrific to get this kind of additional recognition.  Thank you, Kim–cheers!


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The Build-and-Activate Structure

13 04 2009

canisminor

 

I’ve added a new page to the “Pedagogy” section of this blog: “The Build-and-Activate Structure.”  Below is the content of that page (links are inserted on the page):

In “Inspiration, Guides, Exercises,” the final section of Structure & Surprise, I offer the following suggestion to help generate a poem:

 

“Invent a new kind of turn by taking your writing further than it might usually go….[W]rite a poem in which you construct a fantastic object or machine, a magical mechanism called ‘The Desire Vaporizer’ or ‘The Memory Box.’  Employ lots of odd, specific details.  At the end of the poem, turn the machine on and say what happens.  Of course, it could be interesting if nothing, or something very unexpected, happens.  If so, you may have a draft of a poem employing the ironic structure.”

 

Here, I’d like to provide an example of a poem which employs just such a turn from building to activation.  It is, in fact, the poem that inspired me to write the above suggestion.  Here it is:

 

 

Scale Model of Childhood

 

 

Who can say what calls me to work

these late hours

by lamplight and magnifying glass?

 

After the ladybug

retracts its long,

knife-point wings beneath its red shell,

 

I use the brush of one hair

to connect the black stars

stippled on its back:

 

Canis Minor,

who licks its teeth,

muzzle still red with Acteon’s blood,

 

Canis Minor,

waiting at the feet of the Twins

for crumbs to fall from their table.

 

In another room,

my parents sleep lightly,

never dreaming,

 

mouths open

as though ready always

to call my name.

 

When my constellation is finished,

I pierce it with a pin,

my little dog,

 

and place it

in a miniature box,

size of my thumbnail,

 

a window for the shoe box diorama

I assemble each night

from tidbits no one will miss.

 

When I was a child

feral dogs ran the woods

beyond our door.

 

Even the hound my father shot

slipped away by morning,

a line of blood pocking the snow.

 

My parents instructed me,

never stray outside.

Nights, my back on the bed

 

and my head tilted back,

I watched stars scroll past

my narrow window’s frame.

 

Once I thought I’d step from childhood

as from a doorway

into a night blazing with stars

 

so numerous

they defied constellation.

I’d stride into the revealed world

 

away from the house

and my parents framed by a window

as they sat at a table

 

holding forks

with no morsels pierced

near parted lips.

 

Pull the lever on the side of the box

and their forks will scrape

empty plates

 

while an unseen dog

howls for its dinner

in an almost human voice.

 

 

—Corey Marks

 

From Renunciation (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois, 2000).  Reprinted by permission of the author.

 

In “Inspiration, Guides, Exercises,” I suggest that poetic structures can be used by working poets in many ways: from inspiration, to drafting, to revision.  “Scale Model of Childhood” seems to me to offer a really inspiring structure for poets and for teachers of poetry, one that has a lot of creative and pedagogical potential, but one which (largely because turns have not been a systematic part of our discussions of poetry and poetry writing) has yet to be as widely employed as it can (and perhaps should) be.

 

A few notes on this poem:

 

First, I have included “The Build-and-Activate Structure” in this blog’s “Pedagogy” section and not in “New Structures” because I’m reserving “New Structures” for structures which have been more widely employed.  (If there are other build-and-activate poems out there, please do let me know.)

 

Second, note that while the turn from construction to activation is vital in “Scale Model of Childhood,” it is not the only poem’s only turn.  The construction section has many important turns in it, as well (including from construction to the sleeping parents to the maker’s ideas of what he thought his childhood would lead to…).  If you’re going to try to make your own “build-and-activate” poem, consider employing some smaller turns within your own “build” section.

 

Third, note that if you like this poem by Corey (who is, among many other things, the author of the chapter on “The Descriptive-Meditative Structure” in Structure & Surprise), you might like to read his poem “Portrait of a Child,” which I’ve included on the page in this blog which I call “Voltage!,” a page that features poems that take particularly thrilling turns.  And if you like these poems, of course, check out Corey’s book Renunciation.  That is, after you write your own “build-and-activate” poem.


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Bill Morgan’s “Ephemeroptera”

20 03 2009

mayflies

Check out Bill Morgan’s “Ephemeroptera.”  Among many other things, it is a great example of a poem using the meaning-to-metaphor structure.


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Joanne Diaz’s “Violin”

12 03 2009

violin

 

Check out Joanne Diaz’s “Violin,” a terrific poem that employs beautifully the metaphor-to-meaning structure.


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