Part three

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Concentric Circles

 

Journal and art
by David Belcher
© 2016

Introduction

For several years I have been a member of the poetry forum PoetryCircle. I kept a journal and recorded in it everything I found exciting. I am grateful to all of the forum’s members and the forum’s founder for sharing their knowledge and their experiences.

What isn’t said

On the subject of what we don’t say, or what we say in the spaces between words, Edward Naughton said, ‘…the spaces in between are filled with dirty silence.’

Poetry is memorable

Desiree Wright wrote that she loves constraints, that for her constraints enhance creativity. And I agree, try writing a poem without the letter ‘I’ or write a poem with only five lines, and five syllables on a line and you’ll be forced to think in new ways.

Desiree goes on to say ‘I don’t believe that poetry should sound natural, conversation is natural. Poetry is memorable.’

Something of significance

Lance Jencks wrote, ‘We write and write and write and write and then, one day something of significance happens.’

The poet Philip Larkin makes a similar point in his poem ‘Compline’
‘…nature spawns a million eggs to make one fish.’

I’ve always found that thought comforting when I’m staring at the seemingly endless list of poems I’ve written over the years.

The Critic

I love criticism, I really do. I am excited by a critical response to something I’ve written because I know I might be about to learn something and be changed for the better.

Having a positive attitude to criticism is vital. All artists seek not just to reflect the world but to change the world, or to change our perception of the world. Isn’t it right, therefore, that the artist should also be willing to be changed by the world?

Developing a strong critical ability is essential for every artist. When we train ourselves to see the mistakes and weakness in the work of other writers, we are able to see those flaws in our own work.

I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, but these things are worth keeping in mind. A poet is also a critic.

 

Instant gratification

I read a quote by a published poet, I can’t recall his name, he was asked… “A stranger can read one of your poems two or three times and fail to understand it, what do you think of that?”

And the poet suggested “Read it a fourth time.”

I’ve done this, read a poem four, five… ten times and more but that’s only because I’m interested in writing poetry.

Poems should have depth, it should be possible to discover something new in a poem ten years after you first read it. But I admit I also want instant gratification. I want to understand a poem on a first read and I believe so do the majority of readers.

I believe that poetry should be accessible, I admire poems that can be carried in your head, on a daily commute to a mundane job, or while you’re doing housework or rushing off to pay a bill. We aren’t living in a pastoral age, time is a commodity and no one wants to spend their free time worrying over a poem they might never— never— gain anything from or fully understand.

Poetry is thought in its purest form and speaking for myself, I only ever recall and cherish thoughts that don’t waste my time.

Working on ideas

Do people in general believe that poetry is the product of magical thinking? I admit, I sit and write what is in my head and poetry arrives; I’ve compared poets to prophets whose knowledge is delivered through the medium of dreams, or from a voice emanating from a burning bush.

Poets are not prophets. Poets are more like philosophers: poetry comes from learning and experience. Poetry is wisdom not magic. Poets take an idea and work on it until it feels like magic.

The inventor Edison spoke of working on ideas, he asked questions, appropriate questions, if they lead nowhere he would start again, until he found a useful answer. It is the only way to work out a problem, and I think, it’s the only way to write a useful and therefore meaningful poem.

 

The Outsider

Many poets think of themselves as outsiders, by choice or because they are naturally contrary, they stand apart from the usual way of living and thinking.

The outsider’s point of view can be difficult to grasp. In a story by the philosopher Plato there are a bunch of men who have lived all their lives in a cave, they’ve never seen the world outside. One day a man goes outside and sees the sun. Dazzled by the light and excited the man returns to the cave to tell the others what he’s seen, but they take one look at him, stumbling in the dark and breathless, and they think he’s gone mad.

Poets could learn from this story. The outsider is the man who’s been outside the cave. Now what would you do? If you’re only interested in expressing yourself, then you can stumble about and be as incomprehensible as you please, and if you’re entertaining you might find an audience, people might listen to you.

But if you want to pass on a thought, an experience, say something difficult to grasp, if you’re playing the role of the subversive, the dissident, the contrary voice, then you must do all you can to make yourself clearly understood, to make what you say memorable, to write with feeling and stir up feeling.

How would you describe the outside world to a bunch of men who’ve lived all their lives in a cave? How would you get such men up off their butts and outside? What kind of outsider are you?

The experience of reading
or listening to a poem

I’ve been questioning what it is to experience a poem. I found an essay “Someone is writing a poem” by the poet Adrienne Rich which I found helpful.

Adrienne starts out by saying that in the modern world people are mostly passive spectators, they wait to see what will happen next. But poetry is not a passive experience, poetry pushes against modern ways…

“The reading of a poem, a poetry reading, is not a spectacle, nor can it be passively received.”

Poetry “…takes that old material utensil, language, found all about you, blank with familiarity, smeared with daily use, and makes it into something more than it says… Poetry…it’s not just words.”

A poem “…has to travel from the nervous system of the poet… to the nervous system of the one who listens, who reads, the active participant, without whom the poem is never finished.”

The reader, listener asks “But what has this to do with me? Do I exist in this Poem? …We go to poetry because we believe it has something to do with us. We also go to poetry to receive the experience of (not me) enter a field of vision we could not  otherwise comprehend.”

“…a partly common language exists to which strangers can bring their own heartbeat, memories, images. A language that has been learned from the heartbeats, memories, images of strangers.”

Poetry is and always has been an internal experience.

“…it’s notable that the making of and participation in poetry is so independent of high technology…Poetry reading can be heard on tape, radio, recorded on video. But poetry would get lost in an immense…performance scene. What poetry can give us has to be given through language and voice not…as a mere adjunct to spectacle.”

In the modern world we are surrounded by spectacle. So much seems out of our control or beyond our understanding, the natural response is to sit back and let everything wash over us, let it carry us along with it.

Adrienne goes on to say that poetry is a “performance” that takes place inside the reader or listener, it’s a dance between the poet’s thoughts and the thoughts of the reader or listener.

Adrienne writes of …the theatre of a poem… how the force of an idea is made visible to a reader, to one listening to poetry, it’s not a force that washes over us, it stimulates our imaginations through language, it touches on shared experiences and emotions. Readers and listeners are not passive spectators, they are a part of the experience of the poem.

Or to put it another way, an effective poem builds a bridge between us and the world.

The mind’s eye, the mind’s ear…

In an essay about the poet Larry Eigner, Jay Dougherty writes of “What we can do with a snippet of standard conversation…” how we can elevate it to poetry by letting our minds run away with it “…taking it to places we couldn’t have imagined when we started.”

Jay writes of Eigner’s line breaks, how one line runs into the next, and how what Eigner chooses to leave out “…forces the reader to make connections between lines and words when they might not exist.” And “One is forced to take a different approach to the poem, an approach that forces the mind to let go of grammar, sentence sense and approach the piece in a free-association way…”

I read an essay “Sight Specific, Sound Specific” by the poet Nathaniel Mackey, in which he writes of “the innate life of the word”  writing that “…words on the page have a…life of their own…” and they “…do not depend upon (the poet) walking up and down on a stage doing things.”

Mackey writes of listening to a poem and hearing the word “stare” as “Stair” and how that created a surprising image in his mind. There shouldn’t be any need for a poet to perform, the poem is the performer. Poets do not only write of things they we can see and hear, touch and think, the language they use allows the mind’s eye, the mind’s ear to make other connections. Mackey writes of a poem by Lorenzo Thomas “The Leopard” and how he plays with the words “leopard” and “leotard” and how the words “crouch” and “crotch” seem to collide in the line “the leotard crouches up on her thigh.”

A poem is a performance, on the page and in the mind.

The sublime in the commonplace

I read a poem by Miya Ko in PoetryCircle in which she connects a full moon reflected in a mirror with a memory of a persimmon in an orchard, and this got me thinking: what raises an experience above the commonplace?

A dictionary definition of “sublime” is something that inspires awe, something pure, noble, powerful… but these are only words.

To find the sublime we have to look past appearances and find the connections between what we experience and what we know. Our personal memories and what we learn of Human history and the natural world add to what we see, hear and feel. Revealing those connections shines a new light on the commonplace.

The ego

Jim Aitken wrote, “I think critique and suggestions, often very useful, are easier to take when one is not vested in a piece to the extent that one cannot separate it from ego.

…sanguinity comes, I think from just being older and not so full of fire… and from a foray into writing for television. My scripts were routinely butchered before going into production.”

I’ve come to regard ego as a pest. Poetry comes from the poet but after that first draft a poet can get in the way of a poem being completed. I can smother a poem, stunt its growth, when I can’t let a poem be itself. As Jim said, separate the poem from ego.

Consistency

‘…poems should be fully punctuated in the correct way,  or use no punctuation at all.’ said Lance Jencks. ‘Why should this be? Because unity of form promotes beauty, and beauty is the central aim of poetry. Unity of form reveals discipline, and discipline follows freedom as the second most important principle of poetic composition.’

Poems can be complex things and as a reader I appreciate a consistent poem, a harmonious poem, one with a solid identity, this applies as much to free form poems as it does to regimented verse.

Love and bread

In response to Tom Riordan’s poem “Goddam Universe” Anna Ruiz quoted Corinthians 13.1. “If I speak in the tongues of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.”

To which Tom replied, “If I come with a heart full of love  but no bread, I am full of shit.”

There are a couple of good lessons in there.

Ass-backwards literature

How many times have you read a poem, come to the end and wondered… What?

There are published poems I’ve never understood, and likely never will, but Lance Jencks said something I’d like to repeat. This approach would certainly help me understand what I was reading.

“I will now be blunt by saying the Narrator has his literature ass-backwards because… the Narrator is attempting to give corporeal form to abstractions, and this is exactly the wrong way to write a poem.

…we want to begin at the corporeal, real, material part of life, describe it, then allow our descriptions of material reality to pass into the abstract world of symbols and ideas.

…we describe the real to call forth the abstract… recording real things then allowing these descriptions to stand in for something larger…”

 

Reading out loud

I’ve been reading poetry out loud. Lifting words from a page is an art form, one acquired through learning and practice.

I’ve spent a little time trawling through essays on this subject and have scribbled down some helpful ideas.

• Think about what you’re reading. Notice the poem’s shape, how it’s presented? What does it bring to mind? What is the tone of the poem? And the title, what image does it bring to mind? Allow the poem to make an impression on you.

• Read the poem out loud and listen to your voice, listen to the sounds words make coming from your mouth. Pay attention to words or collections of words that catch your interest. Listen to what’s going on. Check the meaning and pronunciation of unusual words.

• Pay attention to punctuation. If you’re not sure what a punctuation mark does, find out. Punctuation helps you understand how a line should be read.

If there is little or no punctuation then pay attention to the line, how is each line presented? Where does a line end? What word? Pay attention to the spaces between words and lines. Experiment, try pausing after the end of a line, or where there are longer spaces between words. Go with what you think works, what is effective, most interesting.

Playing with the sound of verse leads to a better understanding of a poem. But remember, you are trying to express an idea, an image, experiment, play around but focus on expressing yourself clearly.

A poem’s meaning may not be obvious, some poems are obscure revealing only a little of themselves each time they are read, but if you practise reading a poem over and over you will discover things, and you’ll pass on those discoveries when you read to others.

• Pay attention to breathing. When reading out loud, singing or playing a musical instrument you must learn to breathe in a measured way. Read a poem over and over again and you’ll discover rhythms, patterns and you’ll learn where to take a breath.

• Ultimately, remember you are reading to other people, you are a voice giving life to words.

More than recitation

On the subject of putting your heart and soul into your poetry, Holmquist wrote, ‘Poetry should be more than a recitation of events…’ it should  “…reveal or at least suggest the universality…  mutability of personal experience.’

 

Prose and poetry

On the subject of turning prose into poetry Lance Jencks said, ‘What I want to do for poems is elevate my writing to make it more symbolic, less prosaic…

Prose explains everything in detail, while poetry explains nothing. Instead of detail we compress down to a dense symbol which winds up being richer and more expressive than prose…’

Lance takes a line from Michael Ashley’s poem “true enuf”

‘The shop is empty, I go to the booze section.’

Lance said, “One word makes this line prose, —section— drop that one word… it makes the Narrator more colourful, more a poet.”

‘The shop is empty, I go to the booze.’

 

Accidents happen

In a comment following his poem “Here’s my butt and here’s my back, pressed against wooden slats” Lance Jencks wrote, ‘Between you and me I posted this today as an afterthought… Rescued this one from my Paris file…  a last minute ploy to win favour today, I’m afraid.”

Afterwards, I wondered why we feel apologetic when we create something almost accidentally. I do. Lance did, but it must be a common and important part of invention, why not embrace it?

Lance went on to write, ’The Narrator may have a seriousness of purpose the author of this piece has yet to grasp or appreciate.’

Accidents happen and we don’t always know what we’re doing, or why, we’re following an impulse, experimenting, and that’s a part of the act of creation.

New language and fixed points

After encountering the word “soul” in a poem Jenn Zed wrote, ‘There is no right or wrong way of writing poetry, generally speaking, no right or wrong words to use, but there are those which are diffusive, clichéd and so overly used that we can and need to move on from their use, into new language… using your own voice, rather than relying on signal words to shape and design your thoughts…

The word “soul” is… for me… shapeless and borders on the entirely vague in intent and purpose in writing.’

Jenn goes on to say that there has to be some fixed point around which an emotion, a thought can become poetry. Without that fixed point the reader is left to bounce around within the poem.

How to say what you really mean

I read an article about Ted Hughes and his book “Poetry in the making” and I jotted down what I found interesting.

A poet is “The voice of what is neglected or forbidden.” Through the poet the neglected and the hidden is allowed to speak.

Hughes had more faith in “…the visionary poet not the craftsman.”

To capture something true the poet must focus on their subject until they feel a tremor of excitement and then capture the thought, the feeling.

“That process of raid, or persuasion, or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender is the kind of thinking we have to learn and if we do not somehow learn it, then the mind lies in us like the fish in the pond of a man who cannot fish.”

 
Giving a crap and a reason to keep writing

In a conversation between Jay Dougherty and Douglas Goodwin, Doug said, ‘I don’t write poetry anymore. By about 1994 I’d had enough of the whole thing. Bukowski died and he sort of took any impetus for giving a crap about poetry with him. Maybe it was an overreaction, but you can’t keep doing the same thing forever…”

Jay replied, ”  I too left poetry… for oh, 15, 20 years… it just got old, the dearth of good writing, the abundance of inflated egos…horrid greeting card verse almost everywhere’

Jay explains he created PoetryCircle to see if “…something worthwhile could take shape.”  And then said,  ‘..if inspiration strikes you again put pen to computer and see what happens. Sometimes inspiration results from community, or the context provided by other writers… The main reason I stopped writing… as you said, was because I was no longer in a community
in which writing was taking place on a regular basis. Here it is.”

On the subject of why he gave up writing, Doug went on, ‘It just got boring. All these fake-tough guys talking about how bad they were… writing down every mundane thought…” it was  “…lame and false and empty. It was disgusting… Flushing it all away was the right thing (for me) to do at the time.’

To which Jay replies, ‘...writing becomes a momentary stay against whatever else there is out there that you’d rather not be a part of at the moment, or that you’d like to process or make fun of or just discover some truth about, and sometimes the writing is a way to get through to that… There’s also a certain joy in creation…for some that’s enough. I think Bukowski could be counted among those -some- he said as much many times. I think it would be the same for you… there’s a music in your lines, rhythm… style, which might, in great part, come down to knowing what to leave out, or when to stop.’

How it is unafraid

Michael Ashley made this comment after reading ‘Junk calls’ a poem by Holmquist. ‘…love…how this is unafraid’

We should keep that in mind. Don’t be afraid to be provocative, to be frowned at, to be a rebel, to be funny or a little sentimental. If  nothing we say is a sham, nothing is faked, if we are being honest with ourselves our words will ring true.

Today I’m reminded why I’m here 

Read any novel and at the back of the book you’ll find the author saying thank you for the help they were given while writing.

And that’s why I’m here. PoetryCircle is the place I go to when I have a problem with a poem and can’t see a way past it.

We all need a space where we can show off our work and a place where we can ask for help. Thank you for sharing your ideas.

Poetry keeps me sane

I know it’s generally believed that you have to be crazy to be creative, the tortured artist cuts off his ear but they really live a beautiful life. The world does make me crazy, but not art, not poetry, not being creative.

Being creative is a discipline, there’s a process, a way of doing things that imposes order on a dishevelled mind, and when I get lazy, slack I can depend on other creative minds to set me straight, point out my mistakes and offer a little inspiration.

It’s poetry that keeps me sane and stops me cutting off an ear.

Thank you for reading

If you enjoyed this you might want to read
Concentric Circles part four