Jorie Graham at Illinois Wesleyan

20 02 2011

Poet Jorie Graham will speak at this year’s Founders’ Day Convocation at Illinois Wesleyan University.  Graham’s address (a reading/talk) is titled “The Role of Poetry in a Living Culture.”  The Convocation takes place on Wednesday, February 23, at 11 a.m. in Presser Hall’s Westbrook Auditorium.  The event is free and open to the public.

There also will be a conversation/q&a with Graham on Tuesday, February 22, at 4 p.m. in the Hansen Student Center.  This event, also, is free and open to the public.

One further event associated with Graham’s visit: I’m going lead a conversation called “How To Read a Jorie Graham Poem.”  This event, also free and open to the public, will take place on Monday, February 21, at 4 p.m. in the English House’s Seminar Room (located on the English House’s garden level).

My talk, of course, will have a lot to do with turns.  How do you read a Jorie Graham poem?  You listen for the turns…

I don’t believe this is an imposition on my part.  Graham loves the turn.  It is everywhere in her poetry; in Structure & Surprise, for example, I discuss Graham’s great poem “Prayer” in terms of its relation to the emblem poem tradition, a tradition in which poems turn from a description of a thing to a meditation on the meaning of that thing. 

The turn also is central to Graham’s poetics.  Here are some key passages from “Something of Moment,” the introduction to an issue of Ploughshares she edited:

“In a poem, one is always given, I would argue, a sense of place that matters–a place on suffered the loss of, a place one longs for–a stage upon which the urgent act of mind of this particular lyric occasion (be it memory, description, meditation, fractured recollection of self, or even further disintegration of self under the pressure of history, for example) ‘takes place.’

…A break…can constitute trigger occasions, or situations, or kinds of place from which the spirit in language springs forward into the action of poetry.

All such moments–where we are taken by surprise and asked to react–are marked places in consciousness, places where a ‘turn’ is required.”

And, in “At the Border,” an essay that appears in American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language, edited by Claudia Rankine and Juliana Spahr (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2002), Graham writes,

“The capacity to ‘express’ the ineffable, the inexpressible, the emissary of the nonverbal territories of intuition, deep paradox, conflicting bodily impulses, as well as profoundly present yet nonlanguaged spiritual insights, even certain emotional crisis states–these are the wondrous haul that the nets of ‘deep image,’ ‘collective emotive image,’ haiku image-clusters, musical effects of all kinds (truths only introduced via metrical variation, for example), and the many hinge actions in poetry (turns, leaps, associations, lacunae) bring onto the shore of the made for us.  The astonishments of poetry, for me, reside most vividly in its capacity to make a reader receive utterable and unutterable realities at once.”

Indeed, I first became conscious of the poetic turn a powerful force in poetry when taking a poetic forms class with Graham at the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop, in the fall of 1994.  During the third week of that class, while discussing haiku, Graham introduced me and my classmates to the following haiku by Basho: “Deep autumn– / my neighbor, / how does he live?”

Graham deeply admired this poem because it contained what she thought were the two vital aspects of a poem: an occasion, and a Stevensian cry of its occasion.  In Basho’s poem, the occasion is deep autumn, when the leaves have fallen, allowing one to see the neighbor’s house, and the cry (notice: not statement, or explanation, but, rather, cry) is the urgent, surprising act of the human voice arising from this occasion.

This single lesson struck me to the bone.  It gave me a whole new way to begin to approach reading poems, something new to look for in, and even demand from, poems.  This single lesson was, in retrospect, the kernel of the idea that grew into Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns, and this blog.  Knowing turns certainly will help anyone who really wants to engage Graham’s work.

Work, of course, very worth engaging for many, many reasons.  Jorie Graham is one of the great poets and poetic thinkers of our day.  I invite and encourage you to come to any and all of her Founders’ Day events on the Illinois Wesleyan campus.


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Halliday on Hoagland

2 02 2011

There’s an excellent review by Mark Halliday of Tony Hoagland’s latest book, Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, in the most recent issue of Pleiades (31.1 (2011)).

There are numerous highlights in this review, among them:

–the development of a hilarious new acronym: ICFU, which stands for those who have “Instant Contempt For the Understandable”;

–an amazing, in-depth challenge to certain ways that the criterion of musicality is applied to the assessment of poetry; and, most relevant to the concerns of this blog:

–an admiration of the ways Hoagland’s poems turn. 

Here is a key paragraph:

In Unincorporated Persons the sensation of painfully half-voluntary complicity in political and cultural harm comes across in many good poems, though what the poems express is not simply limited to that sensation.  Such poems include “Food Court,” “Big Grab,” “Hard Rain,” “Confinement,” “Poor Britney Spears,” “Expensive Hotel,” “Complicit With Everything,” “Hinge,” “Foghorn,” “Disaster Movie,” “The Allegory of the Temp Agency,” “Snowglobe.”  There is plenty say about those, and critics should write about them carefully enough to move past categorizing them as “political poems.”  A long article waits to be written about their endings and how, in a poem’s closing lines, Hoagland twists the knife, to make the poem disturb you after you felt sure you knew where he was going.  An example is “The Allegory of the Temp Agency” which, thanks to the machete-slash of its last lines, manages to become both a satirical critique of banal polemical art and a startling reminder that banal political protests against global capitalism arise from horrible inequities that suave mockery cannot remove.

The only online version of “The Allegory of the Temp Agency” I could find is here.  (Sorry.)  But do read it; there is a nice turn in this poem, one that delivers an interesting, insightful moral (one that helps explain why the (admittedly, very beautiful) mural at Goldman Sachs looks like this).  It’s also a self-reflexive turn, signaling its turn with the words “in turn.”

Halliday is right: it does indeed seem “a long article waits to be written” about these turns…  Someone’s got their work cut out for them.


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I Do…like Dialectical Arguments

25 01 2011

I just came across Nick Laird’s Epithalamium last night, while reading some recent issues of The New Yorker (January 24, 2011).  A really fun poem.

The poem makes great use of the dialectical argument structure, its shuttling back and forth between “you” and “I” is a constant consideration and reconsideration of thesis and antithesis.  And the conclusion (“or I am, or you are”) is an effort at synthesis, suggesting that the “you” and the “I” are united in that they, in fact, are potentially (for all their wild specificity) the same.

I think Laird’s poem is incredibly teachable.  For insights on how to encourage and guide students to write a poem like this, check out this blog’s “Teaching Collaborative, Dialectical Argument Poems” page.


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I Have Seen the Light

23 01 2011

Kate Light’s “And Then There Is that Incredible Moment,” seems to me to be

the theme song / fight song / rallying cry / mission statement / motto / ode / passionate acknowledgement / hymn

to / of / about

the power of the poetic turn to surprise / delight / illuminate / inspire / ignite / empower.

I admire this sonnet for how it clearly praises the poetic turn, “that incredible moment, / when you realize what you’re reading…is not what you expected…where you thought you were heading.”  But I admire it even more for the way it clearly and distinctly links passionate reading with the determination to write and to teach, to construct and to share more of those incredible moments, to offer the amazing “ride” of the turn to others, and to encourage those others to share, in turn.

***

To read a few more poems which offer “that incredible moment,” check out Voltage!


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The Filibuster Poem

20 01 2011

 

Why doesn’t the poet just say what she means?  Why take so much time to get to the point?  While such questions may surprise the working poet, who understands the significance of delay and even expansive digression in poetry, such questions can and do arise in undergraduate poetry writing classes, in which students are still figuring out the relationship between suspense and surprise in powerful, moving poems.  One way to answer such questions is to address them directly, by teaching a kind of poetry that depends upon, and even revels in, delay: the filibuster poem.

The glossary of the U.S. Senate’s web site defines “filibuster” as an “[i]nformal term for any attempt to block or delay Senate action on a bill or other matter by debating it at length, by offering numerous procedural motions, or by any other delaying or obstructive actions.”  The history of Senate filibusters is replete with extravagant delay strategies, including Louisiana senator Huey Long’s extensive and creative filibusters (one lasted 15 hours; and Long became famous for reading recipes for oyster dishes during another).

In recent poetry, the filibuster most often refers to a personal delay strategy, a tactic for putting off something one does not want to admit or face up to.  Inevitably, though, the filibuster poem finally does reveal what it was trying to avoid.  Thus, the filibuster poem consists of a two-part structure: an extended transcript or a record of the delay, followed by the ultimate delivery of the material the poem’s speaker had wanted to avert or elude.

As its title indicates, Courtney Queeney’s “Filibuster to Delay a Kiss” (from Filibuster to Delay a Kiss (New York: Random House, 2007)) exemplifies this structure.  The speaker of this sonnet goes to great, Huey Long-style lengths (among other things: reading sections of the dictionary, reading “ingredients from a cereal box side panel,” reading “one page of the phone book,” arguing “against drilling for oil in the Arctic,” waxing eloquent on “ocean reeds,” reciting lines from Woolf and Shakespeare) all in the hopes that a certain “he” would “lose interest, wander off,” and not stopping (though the poem itself does stop at this point, the sonnet’s final, perfect-rhyme couplet) “because at any break / I knew there’d be the hand over my mouth. / There’d be his mouth.”  Another excellent example of the filibuster structure is Austin Smith’s “Instructions for How To Put an Old Horse Down” (from Instructions for How to Put an Old Horse Down (Green River, VT: Longhouse, 2009), which begins, “This is what you need to do: / wait…,” and then offers a list of desperate, heartbreaking avoidance strategies before arriving, 33 lines later, at the devastating conclusion: “[T]hen lead her in. // Then lead her in.”

So: Why doesn’t the poet just say what she means?  The answer the filibuster poem provides is to remind beginning poets that we do not always say or do what we mean or intend, that we very often prevaricate and try to avoid difficult situations, and that poems, which themselves often employ commonly-used speech acts, also can employ these avoidance strategies to admit the truth and to reveal the power, by recreating the drama, of such delay.

***

I’ll present the above short paper as a part of the Pedagogy Forum Session: Poetry at this year’s AWP conference in Washington, D.C.  Stop by, if you can!


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The Monkey & the Wrench

15 01 2011

Hot off the press: The Monkey & the Wrench: Essay into Contemporary Poetics, edited by Mary Biddinger and John Gallaher.  As its back cover material correctly states,

“The Monkey & the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics takes a snapshot of a moving target: the ever-shifting conversation about today’s poetry.  The ten essays in this collection offer reflections and insights, practical advice for craft matters, and provocative points of departure for those who read and write poetry.”

The ten essays include work by some terrific poets and critics, including Bob Archambeau, Elisa Gabbert, Michael Dumanis, Stephen Burt, Benjamin Paloff, Elizabeth Robinson, David Kirby, Cole Swensen, and Joy Katz.  (For a good sense of what’s in the book, go to editor John Gallaher’s blog post on the book, here.)

I was fortunate to have a short essay published in this book, as well.  Last year, with Mark Wallace, I co-organized a panel, called “Hybrid Aesthetics and Its Discontents,” for the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference.  Editor John Gallaher attended the panel, and, afterwards, asked if we might like to publish the papers delivered in the panel in The Monkey & the Wrench.  We took John up on his offer.

The papers included in “Hybrid Aesthetics and Its Discontents” are Mark Wallace’s “Against Unity,” my own “No Laughing Matter: The Humorless Hybrid,” Arielle Greenberg’s “Hybridity in Gurlesque Poetry,” Craig Santos Perez’s “Whitewashing American Hybrid Aesthetics,” and Megan Volpert’s “A Drag Queen’s Lament: Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love my camp.”  Each of these papers, in its own way and to its own degree, critiques the growing phenomenon of hybridity in American poetry, especially as it appears in American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry.  In the words of the introduction to our panel papers:

“In ‘Against Unity,’ Mark Wallace challenges the application of what he sees as the overly simple two-camp model to a much more complex contemporary American poetry scene, and, while he continues to call for hybridity in poetry, the hybridity he hopes for is a stranger, even more monstrous kind of hybridity than is found in American Hybrid.  In ‘No Laughing Matter: The Humorless Hybrid,’ Michael Theune reveals that hybridity, while meant to synthesize, in fact reinscribes a significant division in American poetry: that between the serious and the comedic.  In ‘Hybridity in Gurlesque Poetry,’ Arielle Greenberg considers another kind of hybridity, the Gurlesque, a more extreme and vigorous hybrid than is typically encountered in hybrid anthologies.  Both Craig Santos Perez and Megan Volpert reveal the culturally conservative trends in hybrid anthologizing; in ‘Whitewashing American Hybrid Aesthetics,’ Perez critiques American Hybrid for not representing America’s racial and ethnic diversity, and in ‘A Drag Queen’s Lament: Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love my camp,’ Volpert critiques the relatively conservative sexual politics of hybridity and calls for a poetry of unapologetic, queer difference.” (119)

I hope any and all who are curious about, and perhaps a bit skeptical of, hybrid poetry check out “Hybrid Aesthetics and Its Discontents.”

For those interested in matters of the poetic turn, I’ll simply say that my short essay makes a point that I’ve tried to make in different ways in different venues (including here, and here): that hybrid poetry typically does not (and perhaps cannot) deliver truly amazing, witty, fitting and surprising turns.  From my essay:

“Humor requires great orchestration, the management of great, playful leaps.  What the hybrid, with its recombinations, its disruptions and scramblings (which very often come to seem like, and which hybrid thinking so far has done nothing to differentiate from, mere short circuiting), has real trouble creating is wit.  Wit—recognized as one of the rarest of all poetic achievements; in his essay ‘Andrew Marvell,’ T.S. Eliot calls wit ‘something precious and needed…’ (263)—is such a precious achievement because in order to create it one must create a sense of fitting surprise, a state in which language both delivers on expectations yet leaps beyond them.  As Barbara Herrnstein Smith notes in Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End, ‘A hyperdetermined conclusion will have maximal stability and finality; and when these qualities occur in conjunction with unexpected or in some way unstable material…the result will be wit—which, as many have observed, occurs when expectations are simultaneously surprised and fulfilled’ (206).  Wit requires a real synthesis, and humor requires the skillful, effective combination of attentiveness to the brain and the guts and the groin.  The hybrid offers no vision of what a successful recombination of poetic elements is; though it talks of synthesis, its poems don’t have to have wit’s synthesis, and rather are allowed to be messy amalgamations.  Perhaps exquisite, singular poetic syntheses are omitted from hybrid anthologies because they would put to the test the value of hybridity in general.” (131-32).

Joy Katz’s essay, “Goodbye, Goodbye, Goodbye: Notes on the Ends of Poems,” also contains some interesting insights for those intrigued by turns in poetry.  I hope to discuss her essay in another post in the very near future.


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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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Categories : ironic structure, list-with-a-twist structure, Metaphor-to-Meaning Structure, poetic turn, voltage

Considering “A Display of Mackerel”

9 01 2011

I’ve just updated this blog’s Emblem Structure page in order to include a link to “Souls on Ice,” a reflection by Mark Doty on the process of composing his gorgeous emblem poem “A Display of Mackerel.”  (The reflection and the poem may be found here.)

Of special interest for those interested in poetic turns is the clear delight–and even amazement–Doty feels when he discovers the moments of the poem that become the poem’s major turns.  For example, of an important focusing of the initial description of the mackerel, Doty writes, “There’s a terrific kind of exhilaration for me at this point in the unfolding of a poem, when a line of questioning has been launched, and the work has moved from evocation to meditation.” 

And of the point when the poem’s act of thoughtful (even meditative) description turns to more focused meditation, Doty writes, “The poem had already moved into the realm of theology, but the question that arose (“Suppose we could iridesce . . .”) startled me nonetheless, because the notion of losing oneself “entirely in the universe/ of shimmer” referred both to these fish and to something quite other, something overwhelmingly close to home….”

Mark Doty’s “Souls on Ice” is a terrific phenomenological account of poem-making, one that acknowledges the difficulties and false starts and dead ends of writing, but also celebrates the sense (and reality?) of poetic accomplishment–and particularly the thrilling accomplishment of discovering and then engaging poetic turns.


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The Quarrelsome Poem

3 09 2010

“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.  While William Butler Yeats’s famous formulation is gorgeously and almost convincingly mellifluous, as is the case with so many declarations about poetry in general, it simply is not true: many poems are arguments composed specifically  to quarrel with others.”

So begins my essay, “The Quarrelsome Poem,” just published in Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets, edited by Blas Falconer, Beth Martinelli, and Helena Mesa (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010). 

Mentor and Muse is a terrific collection of truly instructive yet delightfully idiosycratic reflections and writing prompts from a diverse group of 29 poets, including Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan, Mira Rosenthal, Phillis Levin, A. Van Jordan, Elline Lipkin, Diane Thiel, Nancy Eimers, Maria Melendez, William Olsen, and Kevin Prufer.  It’s an honor to have my own work included with theirs.

In “The Quarrelsome Poem,” I define a kind of structure I call “the cliche-and-critique structure.”  As the name indicates, the cliche-and-critique structure “first reveals a problematic, cliched representation and then turns to provide an alternative to that troublesome, overused language.”

There’s a page on the cliche-and-critique structure on this blog (here) that offers reading supplemental to “The Quarrelsome Poem”; however, the essay in Mentor and Muse goes into much greater detail about the structure, both its demands and the great assistance it can offer a working poet.  Additionally, the essay offers in full the terrific “I Don’t Want to Slam,” by Staceyann Chin, one of the great cliche-and-critique poems, but one not readily available online.  And, of course, as hinted at in my opening to this post: I tried to make my own essay an example of cliche-and-critique writing.

So, check out “The Quarrelsome Poem,” and, of course, the totality of Mentor and Muse…much, much, much good stuff there.


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Don’t Just “Use the Force” or “Go with the Flow”–You Gotta “Trust the Turn”!

27 07 2010

My essay “Trust the Turn: Focusing the Revision Process in Poetry” has just been published in Poets on Teaching: A Sourcebook, edited by Joshua Marie Wilkinson (U of Iowa P, 2010).

A version of the essay can be found here, but you should get the book–it’s terrific!  (The good John Gallaher agrees, here.)  Tons (99, to be exact) of great (micro-)essays on teaching poetry by some excellent poets and poet-teachers, including a number of those associated with Structure & Surprise, such as Timothy Liu, Peter Gizzi, Rachel Zucker, Prageeta Sharma, D. A. Powell, and Mark Yakich.  (Not to mention a whole bunch of friends, mentors, colleagues, sparring partners, and role models, including Srikanth Reddy, Laura Mullen, Mark Wallace, Catherine Wagner, Brenda Hillman, John Gallaher himself, Johannes Goransson, Arielle Greenberg, Kent Johnson, Matthew Zapruder, Lara Glenum, Sabrina Orah Mark…the list goes on!)

Do note that–if you do get the book and you are interested in turns–there is at least one other essay that reveals interest in turns: Karla Kelsey’s “Teaching Writing through the Sonnet Tradition.”  Kelsey includes the following among her “favorite prompts”:

“Reconsidering the turn: turn as rhetorical moment, as change in speaker, as change in perceptual attention, as change in visual register…”

Hopefully, Structure & Surprise serves as a good starting point for those who want to (re-)consider the turn!


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