Category Archives: Poetry

Teaching analysis & meaning

My students want to jump to conclusions.

Give them a text, a work of art to view and consider, a billboard, a musical selection…they will make one observation and immediately either evaluate or interpret. I am pleased that young people want to find meaning in so many things–or at least understand that they might be able to find meanings–but I want to tell them to slow down.

It’s tempting to suggest that “kids today” want instant gratification, are spoiled by having instant Google searches on their iPhones, or have no work ethic. I do not think that is true. Perhaps we have not taught our young people how to look, describe, analyze what it is they are noticing. It’s not that they are incapable of these steps; they just do not know that they know them. I think some of my students don’t even realize that they do notice things.

Really, who has not made snap judgments, or interpreted something–a work of art, a remark in passing–without thoughtful analysis? Guilty as charged, in my own case. But I am still learning, and my patience with my own learning process should carry over to my students; at least, I strive for that.

I notice the urge to leap to interpretation most when I am teaching the survey of poetry classes. Students know that poems are supposed to mean, not be (MacLeish got through); but they lack the confidence to explore meaning on their own, in their own ways. They get frustrated and want to find experts to tell them what the poet meant. Delving into their own uncertainties is frightening to them. They’re just out of high school, where they learned that it’s wrong to be “wrong.”

So many good texts out there try to convince students (or other interested, frustrated readers) that there are other ways to be with a poem, to explore, discuss, notice, and find meaning. I read such books to find inspiration for my teaching, for my students, and for myself. When I have time to get back to this post, I’ll begin a list in the comments box below. Meanwhile, if you have suggestions, add them below. I’m always looking for more ideas, more good books, more reasons not to jump to conclusions.

Poetry Break.

I took a break from difficult reading to read Eluard’s “Last Love Poems” as translated by Marilyn Kallet. Alas that I am mono-lingual and cannot read poetry in any language other than English. I have to take the translator’s word for it (literally and figuratively) that the beauty in the lines can be nearly portrayed in English. The struggle translators must have to go through to transform such a studied thing of language as a poem is into a different tongue amazes me. Inevitably there is some loss of connotation, wordplay, music, rhythm, cultural freight; the careful reader understands that there may be lacunae of some kind, and a mono-lingual reader recognizes that she will not be able to track down where those subtle gaps occur. A good translation, however, manages to maintain the beauty.

“Beauty”—now, there’s a moving target. Quine devotes a few pages to the discussion of the concept in his “intermittently philosophical dictionary.” He writes: “The aesthetic pole is the focus of belle lettres, music, art for art’s sake. But it is a matter of emphasis, not boundaries. Scientists in pursuing truth also seek beauty of an austere kind in the elegance of a theory, and happily some of them seek literary grace in their expository writing.” Quine ends his brief entry on Beauty by suggesting that truth and beauty are not a binary system, that we need not see them as poles apart; yet he does not quite agree with Keats’ conflation of the two. We need ethics and rhetoric in addition to truth and beauty, says the philosopher.

Peter de Bolla, writing two decades or so later, inclines toward a less binary way of looking at beauty and truth when he writes that, since the art of music is  an “articulation of the temporal,” there is a “philosophical argument music makes about relationships between time and being.”  And that argument results in beauty, when it is a well-composed argument, I suppose.

Suddenly the welcome earth
Was a rose of luck
Visible with fair mirrors
Where everything sang to open rose

(“Seasons,” Paul Eluard, tr. Marilyn Kallet)

de Bolla asks: What does the poem know? This poem knows music, and beauty “in the gentle desert of the street” and “beneath life overpowering and good.”

Ah.

ann e. michael, waterfall, poetry

Why read difficult books?

Poetry can be difficult, but I love to read it. Poetry is not the only form of ‘hard reading’ I do, though. Reading a text that’s challenging takes more time and more effort on my part, and for a person who is often pressed for time the question presents itself:

Why do I read hard books?

Bachelard. de Bolla. Girard. Kuhn. I’m immersed in Quiddities by W. V. Quine at the moment. Slow going, though I enjoy his sense of humor, because I’m not as comfortable with philosophical terms as I once was. Next up: Derek Parfit.

Philosophy, poetics, aesthetics…not as easy nor, I suppose, as entertaining as popular fiction. I admit I enjoy how novels erase the boundaries between my life and the characters’ lives, their times and places (historical? imaginary? far from Emmaus, Pennsylvania?); it is easy to feel wrapped up in a novel, and I appreciate being taken elsewhere.  I’m a fan of short fiction, too. It’s easy to love fiction.

That’s not always the effect I seek from reading, however. I read non-fiction to become informed, and I especially treasure information that is delivered in a beautiful, literary fashion. John McPhee, James Prosek, Annie Dillard, Phillip Lopate, Terry Tempest Williams, to name a few. Writers such as these make reading science and politics and biology and culture and other informational material a joy.

I read difficult texts such as philosophy and physics because I love to think. Thinking deeply has always resulted—for me—in new forms of perspective, in inspiration, and in poetry.

Poetry is sometimes difficult to read, as well. Think of the many ways the word “difficult” can mean in this poetic context: Marie Howe is difficult in a different way than Jorie Graham, or Lyn Hejinian, or Ezra Pound, Gray Jacobik, or Gregory Orr’s early collection Gathering the Bones Together.

Stuff that is hard to read can be extremely rewarding. And, when I am puzzled (which I often am), I feel inspired to question and to observe…which leads to writing. Much of what we call “art” is a response to difficulty.

Oh, how I relish the difficult!

Sonnets & talking about the arts

Poet Kim Bridgford is reading this evening at the West Chester Poetry Center in West Chester PA, but I can’t attend because I am tutoring a student. If you haven’t heard of Bridgford, however, you might want to look up her work. For one thing, she is currently the director of the Poetry Center in West Chester; she’s also an educator, scholar, editor and online publisher or the journal Mezzo Cammin, the major force behind the Women’s Poetry Timeline, and an excellent poet whose sonnets may change your mind about “old-fashioned” forms.

Her new book includes sonnets about classic films. Her last book featured a series of sonnets responding to items in The Guinness Book of World Records.

Cool inspirations and material for a centuries-old poetic form. If you aren’t familiar with Marie Ponsot, she’s another poet who’s masterful at contemporary language and situation while using classic forms.

I’ve been reading Peter de Bolla’s book Art Matters and thinking about art and the arts. His book explores plastic and visual arts (sculpture, painting), music, and literature and tries to posit the argument that there are–or could be–ways to discuss the inexpressible “aha!” the audience feels when encountering a significant work of art. He suggest we are possessed of a cultural “mutism” that keeps us from putting into words what it is that moves us about a work of art.

Instead, he says, art criticism and various statements about poetics and aesthetics clutter up the field of discourse so that the “average” person–the non-scholarly, non-critic viewer or reader–feels voiceless or inadequate to the perceived task of describing why he or she gets an almost physical reaction to art, or to one work but not to another work. Good point, that. It follows the I-don’t-know-about-art-but-I-know-what-I-like school of art criticism. More people might enjoy talking about the arts if they felt up to the task.

Perhaps you read sonnets in high school and felt ho-hum about them. Perhaps you think old movies are uninteresting. The idea of reading Bridgford sonnets about Hitchcock might not intrigue you very much. But suppose you read one of them and, much to your surprise, you felt a kind of shiver when you reached the last line. You hadn’t expected the poem to end the way it did. You also understood the poem on the surface, its storyline so to speak, and you “got” something more from it that–you cannot explain.

Mutism. Possibly you experienced it while standing in the mural room of MoMA where Monet’s “Waterlilies” triptych is mounted, or at the foot of “Winged Victory” at the Louvre. Or when you first read Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” or saw an Ansel Adams photo full size, up close. I’ve experienced it many times: Alvin Ailey Dance Company’s “Suite Otis” rendered me speechless when I saw it. I had had some experience talking about visual art and literature; I had little vocabulary for dance. I was, simply, wowed.

De Bolla says what I experienced was a somatic response to art followed by mutism. I haven’t finished his book yet, so I don’t know if he will offer a solution to the problem of how to describe the indescribable. I also am not convinced that the language is necessary. I feel quite satisfied with the frisson.

More about art soon…Steve Tobin’s installation at Grounds for Sculpture is this weekend, and I intend to be there.

100 Thousand Poets, and change.

 Reading, Pennsylvania has had its ups and downs. Recently, it made the national news for the sad distinction of being the poorest city in the USA. But like many struggling cities, it also has its share of citizens who are devoted to keeping the city not merely afloat and economically viable–a tough task in tough times–but also vibrant culturally. Where rents are cheap, artists can find studio space. Colleges can expand because there’s vacant space for parking garages and buildings ripe for re-tooling. Reading’s been host to quite a few poetry events lately, as a result of the aforesaid artist spaces and college expansions. (See GoggleWorks for one example of studio & performance space: http://www.goggleworks.org).

I spent the day at the Reading venue of the global event “100 Thousand Poets for Change.” On this overcast but mild day, there was a little disorganization at first, not uncommon for new festivals…but the  poets found one another, and before long there was a lively little crowd seated and standing near a performance space for what was billed as a series of featured readings with musical interludes but which became an open reading with music as background. And train sounds as background. And car and crowd sounds, and it didn’t matter because the audience members were paying attention to the readers.

At intervals, I wandered away and bought food from the vendors. Reading has some good ethnic food establishments, judging by the Vietnamese spring rolls and the falafel and such.

I sat on a park bench with my friend Marilyn Hazelton, a tanka poet and practitioner of haiku and haibun, and we discussed the young performance poets and the uses of structure in poetry and in life. We had a moment envying the young for simply being young and energetic, and then we spent a few more moments on what we’ve learned and the value of aging. Both of us are teachers, as are Craig Czury and Heather Thomas, two poets who were instrumental in putting the poetry aspect of today’s gathering together, so we also talked about teaching. Sometimes a quiet talk with a good friend revitalizes me. After our conversation, I felt energized enough to read a few more poems to the crowd. A man my son’s age shouted “Good stuff!”

All in all, a good way to spend the first Saturday of the autumn season.

Reading Reading

I love the wordplay inherent in presenting a poetry reading in Reading, PA: a Reading reading.

This Saturday, Reading is hosting on of the sites for a day-long, global poetry event called 100 Thousand Poets for Change. I’ll be reading around 5:30 pm (645 Penn St., if you are in the neighborhood, and you may want to bring a folding chair).

But by all means, come earlier and stay later: there will be music and poetry and other interesting goings-on all day.

Sat, September 24
100 Thousand Poets for Change and Street Music Festival
Courtyard and walking malls in the 600 block of Penn Street, Reading, PA
www.bigbridge.org/100thousandpoetsforchange/?cat=249

Sat, September 24
100Thousand Poets for Change
600 Block of Penn Street
http://iartreading.org/

 

The screech owls were very noisy at 5:45 am, so I couldn’t go back to sleep. Thank you, owls, for reminding me to post this notice about the reading.

Thanks, Dave Bonta!

I’m still trying to get things set up here, virtually, which may take some time since  A) I am technologically inept; and B) it’s early autumn and I have a ton of garden and yard work to tend to before the cold sets in.

It’s all Dave Bonta’s fault, though I may have to blame Celia Lisset Alvarez a little, too, and my offspring. My son refused to rework my existing page at another site. He is “too busy” to spend time on his mother’s home page, (I even offered to pay him!). He told me I ought to learn html myself.

Dave told me that months ago. He’s the webmaster-poet-naturalist extraordinaire behind via negativa (www.vianegativa.us), the morning porch, woodrat photoblog, moving poems, and qarrtsiluni (www.qarrtsiluni.com).

Celia began writing her blog, Writing With Celia, to force herself to get into the creative writing frame of mind and simply to do more writing. Her posts include cultural commentary, books, movies, education, feminism, and tips on writing. She’s writing more than I have been lately, so I guess perhaps she is onto something. (See her blog at www.writingwithcelia.blogspot.com).

Then there’s my daughter, who also bears some responsibility for encouraging me in this technological adventure. She kept a lovely blog, pigsabroad (www.pigsabroad.blogspot.com) while spending a semester in Australia. She says that if she can manage a blog site, anyone can.

I spent three hours weeding and deadheading and shearing shrubs today in the cool, sunny, dry air. What I ought to do now is grade papers from my freshman English class, but instead I am trying to alter the blogroll on my website.

Thanks a lot, Dave Bonta…

Chapbooks still in print

I’ve had five chapbooks of poetry published, but as is not uncommon in the world of small press publications, only a few are still in print. Finishing Line Press published The Minor Fauna in 2006, and it is still available through Amazon.com. More info at www.finishinglinepress.com.

The Minor Fauna by Ann E. Michael

The Minor Fauna, poems by Ann E. Michael

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