Category Archives: Poetry

Negative space

A recent visit from a poet friend has me thinking I need to change my perspective again–always an important thing for an writer to do. If we don’t shuffle things up once in awhile, we get mired in swamps of the too-familiar and keep resuscitating what we have done before.

Sometimes, that is what needs to be done. But sometimes we need to move on.

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Years ago. when I took visual art classes, my instructors taught me about how to see negative space as a method of considering the subject not as my brain wanted to see it but as it existed in relation to other objects in the visual plane. Those gaps between what we see as objects we automatically assume are “empty” spaces; but once we learn to perceive them, we recognize how vital they are to the composition. I learned that an arrangement–say, a still life–might contain more interesting negative spaces than positive ones. One moment of noticing, and the idea of what I could “see” would be transformed.

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Most people learn about negative space through the Gestalt concept of figure-ground organization principle. I found out about it through teachers who had me draw the spaces between subjects.

What does this have to do with writing or poetry? Here’s a spot I could easily allude to Keats’ famous coinage of the phrase negative capability. But that’s not what I mean.

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Change the viewpoint: new images arise; the shadows differ; the light’s at a different angle. What was ground becomes, perhaps, foregrounded.

Writers need to make these shifts, too. I have spent considerable time learning forms and meters, experimenting with styles and stanzas, working with phrasing and syntax, pushing at fears and feelings, playing with images. That has been all to the good, but maybe I ought to approach the task and process of poetry-writing with an eye to what’s been in the background. Some of it hidden in plain sight, like those negative spaces, some of it skirting behind the plane of the subject, genuinely hidden until the perspective shift occurs.

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~

Maybe what I need is, simply, space.

 

Among & on the milkweed

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Baby box elder beetles?

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Adult box elder beetles. Possibly. (I’m no entomologist.) Milkweed: definitely.

Wandering this evening, down into the meadow, drained of words, exhausted, I found these creatures emerging (and the milkweed silk and seeds emerging, and the katydid songs emerging) and felt I was among the living.

Which I am. And also among the milkweed.

Wasp redux & reading

Last year, I had my first encounter with a grass-carrying wasp.

Today, I noticed some waxy, crumbly, yellowish bits around the post in which last year’s wasp had built its nest. Then I saw an adult grass-carrying wasp hovering to and fro with a stem of grass grasped in its legs, which led me to this year’s nest–in a different hole in our post-and-beam porch. Who knew the wood had so many little holes in it? The wasps sure found them! Today’s wasp has built in a much harder place to photograph, a vertical spot, behind a post. So last year’s photo will have to suffice.

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Isodontia: nest construction in progress

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I am not quick at writing poems in response to events, personal or public; generally I need time to consider deeply, to process. I am glad to participate in an upcoming event, however, taking place in Bethlehem PA as a public response to the Orlando Pulse shooting. LGBT citizens of the region, and families, friends and supporters of compassion and awareness, are gathering for a memorial and celebration of support for everyday Americans, which includes–we must recognize, and it would be wise and sane to accept–people who are LGBT/gender fluid & who are just human beings notwithstanding, as are we all.

For those in the Lehigh Valley area of Pennsylvania, the poetry reading is at Sun Inn’s courtyard on Friday July 1. I may not have a poem of my own to read, but I have been reading through my library and have already located several poems by other writers that will serve well as responses to tragedy, personal or national, or which speak to the human-ness of all of us.

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I am doing a little nesting of my own this week, retreating into a metaphorical burrow for a couple of days, I hope. And with any luck, I will emerge with some new drafts of poems.

 

 

 

On absence

I have experienced a felt absence lately, a sense of missing.

Maybe the world is too much with me. I have responses to the Stanford rape case, responses to the Syrian refugee crisis, to the US presidential campaign, to the mass murder at a gay nightclub in Orlando; responses to some personal challenges, as well–health: my own and loved ones’, among other concerns.

Responding represents the equal and opposite reaction to any action, in a Newtonian metaphor. And what my body and my mind these days are saying to me is “step back, reflect.”

Humans love immediacy–the rapid Twitter argument, the comments on opinion posts, the punch in the gut. Animals need rapid responses in order to negotiate a world of predator and prey; humans, however, (and, more than most of us realize, many other animals) also possess the ability to reflect on what the feelings are. What they may mean. How that meaning may alter our responding mechanisms. We can–if we pause to do so–put ourselves in the place of the Other, imagine different perspectives that may color our responses.

Sometimes, we may need to absent ourselves awhile. To put some distance between our feelings and the conflicts we engage in. We need feelings and we need thoughts, we need responses and we need observation from other viewpoints.

~

It occurs to me that poetry is the conversation between the rational, languaged mind and the mind of feeling and imagery. This effort involves the same mind at work on two or more fronts, the human brain constructed as it is to handle multiple levels of feedback, feedforward, and association.

Poetry isn’t “about emotions.” It’s an art that employs language to represent the tension between the rational and the feeling, the mind’s mighty efforts to engage with the difficult and the heart-stirring.

This is how reading about neuroscience enhances my interpretation and understanding of what poets do. I read difficult books and eschew spending time on the internet. I sit on my back porch and ponder. A buzzard swings to and fro above, gliding on the updrafts. I try to heal myself. I cannot heal the world.

 

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Reflection

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“I have known in my life a number of young poets with immense talent who gave up poetry even after being told they were geniuses. No one ever made that mistake with me, and yet I kept going.” –Charles Simic, “Why I Write Poetry” (2012).

~

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No one ever made that mistake with me, either; and, like Simic (though less illustriously, and less successfully) I keep at it. Lately I have been thinking that perhaps it’s for the same reason that, when I was a teenager, I kept sketching self-portraits. I was practicing observation and trying to capture something: a kind of self-reflection that is not entirely in the mind but can be shared–if done skillfully and with intention. And at the end of the task, there was an object. The picture. The poem.

 

At sundown

The disintegrating physical and mental situation of an elderly best-beloved recently has led me back (after a brief pause) to readings in neurology and consciousness. It has also led me to reflect on the tasks memory accomplishes for us and how the need to tell a story seems to reside deep in whatever “makes us human.” Many poems, perhaps most of them, are “inspired” by memories and a need to tell. So I will indulge myself by giving a narration here, and perhaps poems will follow later.

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The best-beloved has been in and out of hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and so-called independent living placement and appears to have developed a very common but not-commonly-talked-about cognitive disarray, or hospital-induced delirium, that medical personnel call “sundowning” when it occurs in Alzheimer’s patients. But my patient does not have Alzheimer’s disease. Her meshing of realities must have been triggered by something else, but the possible factors are many. We may never figure out what it was that pitched her into delusion and lack of compassion, turning her into a person we barely know.

She took good care of her body. At 90, her physical self is in better shape than many people 20 years her junior. Her brain–and hence, her mind–has not stayed as healthy as the rest of her. Several small strokes deep in her brain began to alter not just her gait but her personal focus. Long years of hearing loss no doubt altered how her brain processes input. The reading I have been doing (most recently Carr’s The Shallows, Sacks’ On the Move, and Damasio’s Looking for Spinoza) indicates that the human brain is “plastic” but not necessarily “elastic.” It can modify in response to damage or training, but that does not mean it will spring back to the way it was before. In extreme old age, the process of adaptation slows. The brain becomes less resilient. For reasons no one really understands–a host of possible culprits includes hormones, glutamates, serotonin production, medicines, genetic predispositions, and environmental factors among others (a perfect storm…)–persons who have been sharp and cogent may suddenly experience delusions, often leading to paranoia, confusion, loss of affect, lack of social filters, violent and contrary behavior.

And we ask, “What happened to the soul I love?”

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If we believe in souls, we have faith that somewhere under the changeling is the best-beloved. In flashes, she may return to us. If we believe that the brain is the person, the transition from best-beloved to aggressive complainer is harder to accept. Damasio seems to believe the brain is the person. I find it hard to agree with him fully, though I have been learning a lot about neurology in the process.

Metaphors or analogies for the situation seldom seem, to me, quite to capture the wrenching feeling I have when encountering sundowning. The idea of disintegration seems inappropriate in this case, because she recalls who we are and her mind is not collapsing so much as morphing in unaccountable ways. Threads unraveling? No, not really; the metaphor of a quilt coming undone, maybe, or an intricately-woven tapestry shredded apart–but that’s far too simplistic.

Think of the mind: it encompasses the brain with its regions for motor, somatosensory, auditory, and visual processing; the body, which takes in those physically-produced inputs; memories; thoughts; feelings, which are thoughts spurred by emotions; and a host of complex inter-relationships we cannot even begin to map. Somewhere in all of this is the person, the “self.” At least, as far as we have so far been able to speculate (though not everyone agrees; see my post on Hofstadter & Parfit. Parfit suggests personal identity is an invalid construct).

Perhaps an environmental analogy would suffice, being complex enough for comparison. She is the planet Earth, aging and adaptable, but not endlessly adaptable; her healthy balance has been thrown off by things she may not have had any control over. In whole regions, she becomes inhospitable. Poisoned. Dry. Hot. Overrun with invasives. She seems not to like us anymore, but that is not what’s going on at all. In fact, she’s dying.

Maybe that’s taking the metaphor too far. But in difficult times, one reaches far. There is hope she may recover at least some of her Self, and in the meantime, we have stories in which she plays a role. Mnemosyne–awaken in the consciousness of those who know her. Telling the stories is a step toward letting go.

 

Diversity of form

“Diversity” is a buzz word among educational institutions these days, and I sometimes get a bit tired of hearing it. Diversity as a buzz word becomes like a dead metaphor; we stop thinking about what it means.

Yet when I am reading about biology or evolution, “diversity” flowers into meaning again.253142_2101392498695_2412222_n

Also, after the reading I recently gave, a thoughtful member of the audience remarked upon how literal and concrete the poems in my first book are–especially compared with some of the more speculative and abstract poems I read in response to the “questioning” theme.

Has my writing become less concrete over the years, I wondered. The response is yes and no. In some respects, my poems convey specific and concrete images and actually-possible events, but a mixing tends to occur between & among the lines. Even in that first book: it is, in fact, about building a house. (Concrete was involved!) As I composed the poems that make up the book, however, I realized how metaphorical the whole idea of house, home, hearth, shelter is. Think of the imagery of a house and ingrained, almost mythical connotations arise. The window. The door. The key. The roof. The rooms (stanza means “room” –even the poem offers shelter).

So back to diversity–there is, in the world of poetry and poetics, diversity of form, just as in biology. There are “set forms” such as the sonnet, which turns out not to be quite as “set” as might be expected (see this entry at The Academy of American Poets and this one by Rachel Richardson at the Poetry Foundation). I love diversity of form and have experimented throughout my life with different strategies of written expression, sometimes sound-based or rhythm-based or image-based or codified by the “rules.” I have also broken the rules just for fun, often to good effect. Free verse, metrical verse, alliteration, allusions, puns…I love them all.

The downside of such play, if this can be considered a downside, is that winging it the way I do–as to formal approaches–means that my collected work does not fit a style. I wonder if that is why my second full-length collection languishes unpublished. It’s entirely possible that the poems in The Red Queen Hypothesis are not very good poems. Critical feedback has suggested that isn’t the problem, though (whew!). The problem may be diversity! Publishers, like most human beings, love to categorize. What does not nestle into categories becomes the odd duck.

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odd duck

The reason I chose these poems for this collection, however, has much to do with varieties. The poems deal with the abstract and the biological, the cosmological and the everyday. They stem from a notion that life evolves continuously, making each object and being individual as part of an ever-changing, meshing, chaotic and– paradoxically, but of course!–unified universe. Uni (one). Verse (a pun). The underpinning of The Red Queen Hypothesis is diversity, though that may not be its theme.

So I am not planning to revise the already-much-revised collection; I’ll just persist in sending it out to publishers while hope springs eternal. In the meantime, I have been pondering where the next set of poems is headed. Possibly along the edges. It will be interesting to find out.

Doubt

The prompt of questioning, and recent reading on ethics, have led me to pose for myself a framework for poems that walk between the abstract (ideas, values, philosophies) and the more concrete, pragmatic phenomena in my life (ethics, gardens, weeds, human beings). I find myself thinking again about edges, about fringes, hedgerows, the between-spaces.

That happens to be where doubt arises, too–when we feel in-between, on the edge, and in all likelihood, uncertain.

Fanny Howe, excerpt from “Doubt”

While a whole change in discourse is a sign of conversion, the alteration of a single word only signals a kind of doubt about the value of the surrounding words.

Poets tend to hover over words in this troubled state of mind. What holds them poised in this position is the occasional eruption of happiness.

While we would all like to know if the individual person is a phenomenon either culturally or spiritually conceived and why everyone doesn’t kill everyone else, including themselves, since they can— poets act out the problem with their words.*

Acting out problems and doubts in words. Yes, that directive works for poetry as I understand it. Theater, a related art, allows an acting out of conflicts employing a method that keeps us from killing ourselves and each other. The same may be said for any art; perhaps even our development of a philosophy of aesthetics offers the possibility of acting out.

And there is always room for doubt, as doubt has a way of making room in us and among us. The alteration of a single word–from you to them, from proper to prosper, from hie to high: in student writing, these are generally spelling errors; in the work of a thoughtful poet, they may signal a change in viewpoint, a pun that twists the initial intention, a turn in the poem’s story or rhetoric, a region of ambiguity. Howe wrestles with doubt and celebrates it:

“Doubt is what allows a single gesture to have a heart.”

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Edges. The meadow’s just beyond.

Any single gesture. The prayer hands, the bow, the outstretched arm, the Mona Lisa’s smile, the inked line, the poem.

The trapeze artist who walks along a genuine edge, balanced.

Doubt may live deep in the center of everything, but it is hidden there. Along the fringe of things, where the meadow and the forest meet, doubts are much more visible and less harmful.

What we learn along the edge we can take with us into the deeps: our doubts and ambiguities go with us, a kind of enrichment we might learn to accept instead of resent, if we are poets. The troubled state of mind persists, but “the occasional eruption of happiness” keeps the balanced hovering possible.

That eruption of happiness? I am familiar with it. Sometimes, when I’m working on a poem, I feel like a kite in an inconstant wind.

~

 

*Howe, Fanny.  Gone : Poems. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 

Questioning

Next week, on May 5th, I’ll be the featured poet for the River Poets of Bloomsburg, PA (info here and here). Bloomsburg is situated along the Susquehanna River, and the region will be beautiful in early May.

Linda Dietrichson, the MC for this event, has posed a theme for the poet (me) to consider when choosing poems to read and to follow up in a Q&A with the audience. The theme is “Questioning.” At first, I read the word as questing–the mythic journey toward some remotely-attainable goal. But question’s etymology offers a varying perspective:

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Quest (n): early 14c., “a search for something.”

This searching comes to Westerners mostly via chivalry’s poems and Arthurian legends, derived from “Old French queste ‘search, quest, chase, hunt, pursuit; inquest, inquiry’ (12c., Modern French quête), properly ‘the act of seeking,’ and directly from Medieval Latin questa ‘search, inquiry,'” according to the Online Etymology Dictionary.

Question, the noun, derives from “Latin quaestionem (nominative quaestio) ‘a seeking, a questioning, inquiry, examining, judicial investigation,’… early 13c., ‘philosophical or theological problem'” with even a suggestion of interrogation (or torture!).*

These definitions overlap in some areas; but the word-basis does differ in the Latin. The act of seeking tends to connote search for an object–a physical search for a physical something–whereas inquiry and examination (yes, even torture) suggest that the “question” has a rhetorical object: the abstract or metaphysical aim (never an answer!) that’s more contentious and usually more ambiguous.

Questioning offers interrogation toward the unknowable, and that is poetry’s territory.

So this is where I begin next Thursday evening’s reading: with the unknowable. Who knows where we’ll go from there?

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*(see the site Online Etymology Dictionary for further brief origins–or any OED).

Poetry Month & Simic’s prose

I have read and enjoyed a great deal of Charles Simic‘s poetry over the years. How did I miss his prose?

I just picked up The Life of Images (2015) and find myself delighted indeed. This book makes a wonderful read for National Poetry Month, despite its subtitle “Selected Prose,” because so many of the pieces in this collection are about poetry or act as prose poems–a form Simic is well-known for.

Every other paragraph or so I find myself wanting to write down a glorious sentence, or a quote I should share with my poetry students, or a concise description that fits perfectly, such as Simic’s observation about Buster Keaton‘s persona in his silent movies: “Bedeviled by endless obstacles, Buster is your average slow-thinking fellow, seeking a hidden logic in an illogical world.”

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Being of a philosophical bent myself, I was thrilled to read and then re-read “Notes on Poetry and Philosophy,” with its foundation of Heidegger and Simic’s sly and humorous references to Hegel, Schroedinger, Shakespeare, Dickinson, Whitman and others. That essay is really a series of prose poems that resemble philosophical puzzles and paradoxes.

His essays here often focus on visual art, as well. Movies, paintings, photographs. The image as metaphor.

“The poet is at the mercy of his metaphors. Everything is at the mercy of the poet’s metaphors, even Language, who is their Lord and master.” Ah, yes. One of many paradoxes surrounding the practice and theory of poetry:

“Everything would be simple if we could will our metaphors. We cannot…It took me years to admit that the poem is smarter than I am. Now I go where it wants me to go.”

“Metaphor is a part of the not-knowing aspect of art, and yet I’m firmly convinced that it is the supreme way of searching for truth.”

~

The usual progression of spring unfurls and blossoms around me, a bounty of images, thank goodness, and Simic has me mulling over my metaphors again.