Reading Journal 2009

 

Surrender to your obsession

or

“Are you still writing about your mother?”

MA Reading Journal 2009 - Helen Heath

 

 Form and forms

 

Week one – it’s exciting to actually get started and meet everyone. Finally it’s real. Most of the first class was housekeeping: structure, expectations, and introductions.

We all read out a piece of writing (as a way of introducing ourselves) that Chris had pulled out of our submission portfolios. Mine was the Survival Sestina, which I have a love hate relationship with, however it did illustrate my re-occurring themes of suburban neuroses, science and magical thinking – ha!

Also it was good to introduce myself on a lighter, more humorous note than some scary “dead mother” poem!

The rest of the class seem genuine and interesting, actually what will be interesting is which ones turn out to be “my” readers, the ones who respond most helpfully and “get” my work.

I’m looking forward to discussing my reading list, I feel I need direction from someone smarter than me, I don’t feel very well read.

It’s a bit of a shame that Writers and Readers week isn’t on this year, which would have been a great kick start to our reading journals.

Our first class exercise was to write a one page biographical note written about ourselves in the voice of someone else. I was at a bit of a loss and cobbled together a school report using quotes from real old school reports. The piece was to have three truths and one lie, fun. We handed these out in the first class to read overnight and respond the following day. Some of the class had written a one page short story, Kay had written a one page poem, akk! I felt a bit intimidated! My piece wasn’t really crafted like their pieces had been, ah well, next time…

Speaking of which exercise two is to write a piece with three false starts. The text should be composed of three numbered fragments, yet still somehow seem complete. Length: 2-3 pages!!!!!!!!!!

I have to get over my anxiety about writing longer poems! I have an idea about old boyfriends; I could write a fragment about three different boyfriends and why they never made the grade. This seems a little simplistic but I guess the deeper motif is feminism or misogyny?

Here’s a copy of exercise one below, there wasn’t really much people could say about it except try and guess what the lie was. The popular guesses were Trumpet playing or Cross Country running – what? Do I not look like a runner?! Hmmm, well, no surprises there I suppose! Of course any one who really knows me would instantly say “of course Helen is terrible at Maths!”

 

 

Wellington Education Board

--------

Dyer Street School

1980

REPORT on Helen Heath

S.3 (age 10)

 

Language (including speaking, listening, writing and skills such as spelling and handwriting)

Oral: Speaks clearly and confidently. Always willing to offer ideas. Interesting.

Written: Writes original and enjoyable stories and poems. Some good ideas. Work shows promise of greater development.

Spelling: Is making good progress. Mistakes usually made through carelessness.

Reading: Shows maturity in selection of reading material. Enjoys reading for own enjoyment and to find information. Good comprehension. Continue wide and varied reading to improve standard.

 

Arithmetic

Quick to comprehend; speed and accuracy are excellent. Good progress has been made. Understands most processes and tables work has greatly improved.

 

Social Studies, Nature Study and Science

Is becoming an independent worker, wide general knowledge, research and study skills are of a high standard, has produced some good work.

 

Cultural and Creative Activities (including music, drama, art and crafts, needlework, cookery, woodwork.)

Takes part enthusiastically in all activities, always keen to participate.

 

Physical Activities

Takes part enthusiastically. Enjoys P.E and is well co-ordinated.

 

Personal, Social and General

A conscientious and responsive pupil who has made good progress, has the ability to work well and has proved it this year.

Helen is a very pleasant class member. She is a very likeable girl who has ability in many areas. She is a quiet girl on the whole who gets on with her work.

Helen takes great pride in anything she does. She is extremely reliable. If she commits herself to something she will stick at it.

Two areas of the school programme Helen has become very involved in are music and cross country running, playing trumpet in the school orchestra and representing the school running.

Good luck for 1981!

 Mrs Cook

 

At the end of the presentation I talked about how public documents – forms – held some fascination for me. I like the form of the school report because it seemed to say so much about me but at the same time said nothing at all and needed to be read between the lines.

Forms / form. I guess this is why I wrote Show Your Workings in the form it took and my lost and found poem in the form of a form, also the attraction of sestinas etc.

Considering my motif of magical thinking it was funny to have a moment of serendipity today when I was reading. I’ve been so excited about getting access to the VUW library again, there are quite a few books on Elizabeth Bishop I’ve wanted to get stuck into. I started with Elizabeth Bishop: the Geography of Gender and spent a few hours in the library taking notes, reading about Elizabeth and thinking about how restrained she was. She said publically on many occasions that her poems were totally literal but she lied! There was a close reading about “In the Waiting Room” which was quite interesting in this respect. Elizabeth used form, very strict form; everything was between the lines – in the absences. She censored herself. Her strict form use suited her style but she still had “Flickers of Impudence”, little bird droppings sprinkled through the poems. She was not as discrete as she was made out to be by many critics.

Why did she talk her self down in that way – saying that her poems were just accounts of real events? I guess many poets use real events as starting points, and embellish to illustrate a point. I realise as a friend of mine says “the event may be part real but in writing the event she drew from memory and imagination–so that the poem’s tied to the event but is also another event that takes place in both the reader’s and the writer’s imagination: imagination’s the thing wherein we catch the consciousness of the poet”. Still she wouldn’t acknowledge that. Why? Was she trying to add mystery, magic to her work? Like some poets claim that their poems come fully formed? *ha!*. She, however, was the queen of revision, whittling and binding until sometimes original meanings were reversed and a tidy tight nugget remained.

I jotted these notes down on the way home:

 

Form/forms

• Public
• formal
• strict
• instructive
• structured
• say everything yet nothing
• between the lines
• restraint
• censored
• prescriptive
• jargon
• nonsensical
• weird grammar

It might be quite fun to tease out a bit more from these ideas, I can imagine a series of fake forms.

 

 

Journals and Letters

 

I’ve been reading Sylvia Plath’s journals for the first time (Faber, 2000). Oh how self indulgent! I’m glad I burnt my earlier journals; I couldn’t bear for anyone to be going through them. They are so THEN, which you may think is a good thing but I’m not sure. Teenaged angst! Bluurk!

I see some similarity between her and Elizabeth Knox – not in the angst but rather they both seem so self assured, on a deeper level, that they are destined to be great (even though SP was depressive). Perhaps I’m too humble or self doubting to be a great writer. I certainly feel I must be too down to earth! I am what I am. I can’t produce an air of fey writerlyness.

I’ve been reading Elizabeth Knox’s personal essays The Love School (VUP, 2008). I’m enjoying them, probably more than her fiction, which I sometimes find a bit self indulgent. Even as I write this last statement, I know this is actually a statement about my upbringing and my parent’s dislike about anything remotely resembling indulgence.

In her essays EK is so sure of herself, so determined, resolute, certain. It makes me realise how, all my life, I’ve undermined my own certainty. Perhaps it’s the influence of science on me. You can only disprove things, theories are always being challenged, improved, nothing is set in stone, few things are certain apart from the laws of physics and morals according to my parents.

In EK’s world Elizabeth is a hero, sometimes frail of health, but always strong in her mind, certain, confident in her opinion and action. Or so she says. I start to realise that I could write my present, re-write my past with that attitude too, if I want. No one questions my authority but me.

I had to re-read The High Jump after I read her essays, it added some depth I guess but mostly it was a comfort re-read, it’s my favourite book of hers.

And this leapt from the page at me:

 “The ghost of protestant secret keeping – the notion that all private life is secret and all strong feeling shameful” – The High Jump, VUP, 2000.

I’m such a WASP!

I might re-read some of my old travel journals at some point and ask Marja-mia for some more of hers from the 60’s. I wish Nora had kept journals, at least Dad kept notes of their discussions.

I’ve been working on a piece for her about her abortion in the 1940s.

 

In comparison to Plath, Elizabeth Bishop’s letters (One Art: letters, Giroux, 1994) are all about what’s not said, exactly like their poetry, I shouldn’t be surprised. Although EB does say a lot more in letters than in her poetry.

Then to look at Ted Hugh’s Birthday Letters, (Faber & Faber, 2002) well, I partly feel sorry for him, spending so much time trying to say “it wasn’t my fault”. In a way they are as bad as each other (Plath & Hughes). There’s not much space left for their craft after all the personal dramas.

 

The exercise for week two is False Starts

Write something (either prose or poem) that consists of three false starts. Your text should be composed of three numbered fragments, yet still – somehow – seem complete. Give the overall piece a title. Length: 2-3 pages. Chris suggested developing the second piece more.

Pins, hooks and needles

 

 

In my hands

your hands

those hooks

those needles

what we craft.

 

We make our beds

and sometimes

we bleed on them

a stain of things

absent, absence

 

like a slipped stitch

or booties for other

people’s new arrivals.

You and me

we pricked ourselves

 

silly girls should

be more careful.

 

 

Fundamental Forces of Nature

i.
Strong Interaction boyfriends are intense
but short lived.
They’re basically attractive but
can be repulsive in hindsight.

Electro Magnetism boyfriends are long lived
but less intense.
They can start off attractive but
end up repulsive.

Weak force boyfriends
are responsible for
relationship decay. They are short lived
and, well, weak. You wonder why you bothered.

Gravitational boyfriends
are less intense
than Strong Interaction boyfriends
but very long term.
Furthermore they are always attractive and
definitely best prospective husbands.

 

ii.
The hills are my father
with a shotgun
as I write you a letter
about intense interaction

The train running at his feet
is probably Freudian,
my reflection in the window; Jungian.
I send the letter anyway.

Your trite ‘Auspice from the Cage’
runs several pages long –
the sparrows, the wire and
can I bring you sunscreen?
I shouldn’t even bother writing this poem.

There are things that should be noted:
a mattress on the floor;
windows without curtains;
your friends in the next room;
the state of the carpet.

 

 

 

iii.

We come together and apart

on tides

and sleepless nights of sandy erosion.

 

We sway, flotsam

bumping into one another

in the hall.

 

I am kissing the shore

of your brow

and we have it.

 

Until someone cries

and we start

all over

again.

 

 

 

Thoughts on being a mother and a writer

At the beginning of the year I went on a mission to tidy up “The Shed”, I should call it the studio or something that sounds arty but here in New Zealand “The Shed” has connotations of ingenuity and pottering about, which is true to me.

Ever since I read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of Ones Own I’ve had a language for this desire, this need to have my own work space. In New Zealand “The Shed” is traditionally a male space. We had a garage we didn’t use and converted it into an office for my partner when he worked from home. Now he works in the town office again and I reclaimed the shed as my own. I moved all my things into the shed ages ago but it was a huge mess for ages, I couldn’t find anything and I realised how much I have hoarded kept for prosperity.

My partner often says “Put your own oxygen mask on first”. What he means of course is that you have to look after yourself so you can look after those who depend on you. That’s easier said than done when you are a mother. I just had a few days away from the family and almost immediately solved a problem poem that I couldn’t face at home. I often find I have to remove myself physically from the family / home before I can just focus on myself and my writing. Kids take as much as you’ll give them, which of course is natural and excellent for their survival but you have to learn how to take breaks and replenish for your own survival.

I admire and respect mother/writers who have produced books while bringing up small children. Mother/writers must be driven, compelled to write and to snatch time for themselves to do so. I guess we are lucky that we are not made to feel guilty about it to the same extent as mother/writers of previous decades. Often we are all too happy to put guilt on ourselves. I like to think that my children benefit from my writing in that the satisfaction I get from following my dreams makes me a nicer person to be around and hopefully a good caring feminist role model.

 

Notes on Boolean Logic (As given to me by Dan.)

Computers store information in “bits”. They are either on or off depending on the direction of the current or magnetic polarity = binary.

 

Inside processors there are logic gates, which carry out operations

(operators in maths are: + ÷ – ×).

 

With Boolean logic 0 = false, 1 = true.

 

The two main operators are AND & OR but also the exclusive OR (XOR).

 

AND Operator

0 AND 0 = 0

0 AND 1 = 0

1 AND1 = 1

(“Do you like sweets and savouries?” “No.”)

 

OR Operator

0 OR 0 = 0

0 OR 1 = 1

1 OR 1 = 1

(“Would you like a tea or coffee?” “Yes.”)

 

XOR Operator

0 XOR 0 = 0

0 XOR 1 = 1

1 XOR 1 = 0

(“Would you like tea or coffee?” “Yes.”)

 

Binary

1001011

AND    0100111            SHIFT 10

            0000011

 

0                     0

1                     1

2                     10               10

3                     11               «

4                     100             100

 

Computers multiple by 2 by left shifting digits. Shift right = ÷ by 2

 

Thoughts

 

Digits                - fingers

multiple by 2      - procreation

= He shifts his fingers to the left and they multiple by two.

 

No truth = No truth

Partial truth = truth        OR Op

Total truth = truth

 

No truth = No truth

Partial truth = No truth   AND Op

Total truth = truth

 

No truth = No truth

Partial truth = truth        XOR Op

Total truth = No truth

 

The whole truth is a lie? Will you tell the truth, the partial truth and only bits of the truth?

He’s an OR operator, an ORRRRR operator (sung Sade style)

2 rights sometimes make a wrong but 2 wrongs never make a right under any operation.

Binary Love (Draft 1)

 

Inside the processor

there they are together

at the logic gates

its all very Boolean

He’s an OR operator

Would you like tea or coffee?

Yes

She’s got her bits

he has his

it all depends on the direction of the current

He’s shifting his digits to the left

things are multiplying by 2

2 wrongs never make a right

under any operation

but sometimes the whole truth

is a lie.

 

9/03/09

 

Art & Memory

This week I’ve been reading more about Elizabeth Bishop and taking notes from Art and Memory in the work of Elizabeth Bishop, (Jonathan Ellis, Ashgate, 2006).

 

“The notion of poetic form as a hiding place for autobiographical secrets, somewhere to absorb, codify and often re-imagine memories, not just of friends and relatives but of other painters and poets” – Ellis, p15

 

Life and the memory of life gets so compressed that they turn into each other. Which is which? These ideas tie back to what I was thinking about Elizabeth Knox making me want to re-write my past. EB seems to be very certain of her memories and their clarity, to have easy access to them. But they are more than just memories.

 

“Memory becomes a synonym for art, for that which is alive forever rather than bound by mortality. It takes on the indeterminate form of a ghost or zombie, something that has a relation to life but is, at the same time, on the other side of the immortal or unloving.” –Ellis, p21

 

The past needs to undergo transformation though, to be transformed into art. EB uses memory but transforms hers by placing formal constraints on them. I read her poem In Paris, 7AM.

here’s the first stanza:

 

I make a trip to each clock in the apartment:

some hands point histrionically one way

and some point others, from ignorant faces.

Time is an Etoile; the hours diverge

so much that days are journeys round the suburbs,

circles surrounding stars, overlapping circles.

The short, half-tone scale of winter weathers

is a spread pigeon’s wing.

Winter lives under a pigeon’s wing, a dead wing with damp

            feathers.

 

She is playing with clocks and time, looking out from a confused interior, which seems to confuse the exterior, it is quite surreal (although she is not a surrealist). The title is certain of time and place but the content of the poem blurs this reality.

 

Rather than evading limitations of time (and space?) clocks, all telling different times, seem to lead, via “endless intersecting circles” into a dizzy solipsism. What do we really know? What is real? Does anything really exist? Are past and present separate? How can anything be truly communicated?

 

Her ideas are so big and this poem is quite depressing, they both make you feel so small and uncertain, vulnerable in the world.

 

Co-incidentally the exercise of the week is also about memory.

 

Remembered Space (an exercise adapted from Mark Doty)

 

Note: This exercise is in two clear stages, produced over two days.

1. First sketch the floor plan of the first house you can remember. Next fill it in with details of objects, placement of furniture, etc. Next pick up one of those objects and do a quick mind map – a free-associated list of words based on the object. When done, flip to a blank page and write (for 20-25 minutes) based on this. Write in first person, present tense.
2. Next day, make something finished (no more than three pages) from your previous day’s writing: an autobiographical sketch, a poem, a story.

 

I sketched my childhood house and focussed on the mantelpiece and a clock on it, of course’ after reading Paris, 7AM. But it’s awful to read after that, I feel like a child writing one fragile, simplistic layer of a poem while EB has written a multi-layered, brainiac poem.

 

 

I friend just sent me this quote:

 

Don't worry about things not making sense; a journey only makes sense if you finish it.
- Jose Saramago

 

Sounds like good advice for this year!

 

The Persistence of Memory

 

My hand

rests on the plain

solid mantle

with its finish

of white high

gloss enamel.

A finger taps

out Morse.

 

Dead centre

of the mantle

the clock

my father

inherited

from his mother

and I will inherit

from him.

 

As an adult

I will take

the key

and wind so

carefully

I wont

over-wind

and break it.

 

Wooden, with

sloping shoulders

coming down

from the curve

of her face.

So of her time and

somehow an essential

part of home.

 

I still imagine

writing my name

on a piece

of paper and

taping it to

the underside.

 

If I open

the glass front

of her face

and pull

her hands around

with my finger

the time will

be right.

 

If she is set

to chime the sound

can be heard all

through the house

so she’s been

kept silent

– all it takes

is a flick

of a small

metal switch.

Notes from joint reading programme meeting 11/03/09

Damien Wilkins and Chris Price

In a kind gesture of solidarity Chris and Damien read extracts from their works in progress today.

Damien started his reading with a quote by Henry Green about how prose is “a gathering web of insinuations”, great quote.

Atmosphere sets tone and reappears through the novel, providing continuity. His novel has questions of identity and vulnerability associated with laying open your soul. How tied to the self is the voice? What assumptions do people bring on hearing your voice? Voice and silence. Author’s voice, character’s voice. The book is about a woman her gets a head injury and wakes up speaking in foreign accents. It got me thinking about finding your voice as an author and the role cultural identity has to play. I wonder if the novel is a metaphor for the act of writing as an antipodean author and finding your voice, free of the dominant cultures of England and America.

Damien said the novel should never forget itself, that themes need to repeat, return like jazz improve. The same can be said of any writing.

Chris read from her book The Blind Singer, which is at the printer, so not quite work in progress. She’s been writing other people’s lives transformed to art. She read Black Sun, a poem about French painter Hugues de Montalembert, who was blinded by muggers who threw acid in his face. She found the first drafts were a simple re-telling of the documentary she’d seen and questioned the point of this and stalled. Later she merged de Montalembert’s story with Diogenes the Greek philosopher and gave it depth. Where do you go when your eyes are switched off and your other senses are engaged? The poem finds its own identity, letting the poem find it’s own shape, say it’s own thing - new and separate from it’s starting point. Perhaps I can apply this to my Greek poems?

Writing is a process of discovery, first writing fragments and then seeing if they connect with each other. Monstrous detachment is needed. Black Sun in draft form had syllabics in it so she tried pushing to full syllabics, which created unusual line breaks. Line breaks should add depth, should be meant and intended and heard in the poet’s voice. This poem isn’t read as it is written. Then why write it in syllabics? It tilts the poem slightly off kilter by not doing the obvious; it keeps the reader off balance, wriggling out of chronology.

Fragments of digression with repeated motifs – new work, creative non-fiction, essays, biography. They are not confessional poems, so do they map your intellectual life? asked Damien. Not consciously. They are driven by the subconscious and attempt to make a pleasing and finely crafted object. Nice.

 

Science & Poetry

Cilla McQueen,

 Anti Gravity, McIndoe, 1984

Her science poems aren’t obvious. Some have titles that point to scientific content then wander through the poet’s world, having fun with language and metaphors, then only at the end does she connect the rest of the poem with the title.

McQueen’s unusual images, syntax and line breaks lend a dreamlike quality to much of her work. – She’s connecting science with the real world through dream states? In Kinetic Dislocation she has no commas within lines where a sub-editor would put them, what effect does this have? – Disjointed. “Feathertips” – fingertips – feather – merging of two ideas to form one new word – an economy of vocabulary. Some work like Trapeze Artists is stream of consciousness, free association. I find her work slightly irritating. I imagine it would be great in performance but it is almost as if each word has too much space around it on the page and stands alone. The poems feel disjointed and staccato – bang – bang – bang. Big personality poems, she doesn’t flow, she’s prickly.

Now I’m reading Wild Sweets, McIndoe, 1986, which is concerned with concision in a reference field of quantum physics.

“Other poems draw distinctively on modern science, generating tension when science’s analytical perspective meets the poet’s idiosyncratic view, the finite mind’s attempt to impose order on the infinite universe. ‘Quark Dance’, for example, suggests the absurdity of scientific investigation, and delights in the world of subatomic particles: ‘here come the colours / to settle on our lips and eyes / and rainbow lighting all the edges’. One symbol that she has made her own is the ‘meniscus’: ‘See, Ben, the water / has a strong soft skin, / and all the insects dance / and jump about on it’ (‘To Ben, At the Lake’). The proposition behind her ‘meniscus’ poetry is that if this barrier (at times permeable and at others impenetrable) fails to hold, chaos results.” - The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, edited by Roger Robinson and Nelson Wattie (1998)

Why doesn’t water lie flat? Well, it has to do with the nature of the water molecules and glass molecules themselves. Water is made up of polar molecules, which have positively and negatively charged ends. Since opposites attract, the positive sides attract the negative sides, and all of the molecules stick to one another. This is why water droplets can form. Glass molecules also happen to be polar. Again, since polar molecules like to stick together, the water in a glass tube will actually tend to stick to the sides of the tube! You can see this at the top of the graduated cylinder, where the water will slightly creep up the sides and form a curve, which is the meniscus.

 

Anne French,

All Cretans Are Liars, AUP, 1987

I read French’s poem Simultaneous Equations in an anthology after I had written Show Your Workings. They had such similar essences I felt like people would think I’d ripped her off. I felt disappointed that I hadn’t had an original idea. Who was it that said there are no new ideas?

There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt. – Audre Lorde (thank you google). French has another poem in this collection with numbers in it (untitled). The numbers fall between words and the line breaks veer all over the page (in a pattern), numbers 1-9 each stanza. What is she trying to do? The poem is about skirting around subjects, perhaps stilted language. Why is she counting to 9 though? Trying to calm herself? Why doesn’t she get to 10? 9 months – a baby? Form:

                                                Centre1

                                                Centre2

                                                Centre3

                                                                        4Right aligned

                                                Centre5

                                                                        6Right aligned

                                                Centre7

                                                                        8Right aligned

9Left aligned

 

Lavinia Greenlaw,

Night Photograph, Faber & Faber, 1993

Galileo’s wife knows more than him, radium kills, the first dog in space is left to die, plastic surgery has advanced before antibiotics. Science doesn’t seem friendly in this collection, it is distrusted, ruthless, has warped priorities. In Science for Poets the poet seems to miss, not the point but the thrill. Science to her should be high school dissection; acetone is for removing nail polish, sulphuric acid is for serial killers. “but the air/ is civil service/ and the furniture, an indigestible brown.” This is what non-scientists do when confronted with science, try to place it within their realm of understanding but still it remains unpalatable, boring. Frequent use of tercets, some quatrains, some blocks, notably a poem about the Thames, which is long and wide, like the river. Years Later is one poem where science lends a touching image – the idea that sometimes pairs of stars pull each other into orbit, forever unable to touch or pull apart. She relates this to a past relationship quite fondly. I love Greenlaw’s poetry and forgive her not being a blatant science lover.

Notes from joint reading programme meeting 18/03/09

Paula Boock

Script writing is a very clear process, no room for experimentation due to finances. Characters need to be very strong.

 

With her novel, she may know the beginning and end and a couple of points along the way but the rest she writes as it goes along but novels can benefit from thematic structure. It’s good to work it out sooner rather than later!

 

YA novels 40,000 words max.

 

There is no screenwriter’s voice, its all dialogue and what people see. You can progress with nice prose in a novel but every word has to earn its keep in a script. Show don’t tell to the extreme (unless a voice over is used, which is considered lazy by some).

 

Golden Rules of screenwriting – start as late as possible and get out as early as possible but breaking the rules sometimes can be good. If there is downtime people might want to change channels.

 

Character has to be the first thing you get right. The Big Print are the instructions in a script, if they are written well they can be part of your marketing.

 

Ask yourself - Where is the moment? – mine the emotion.

 

What’s the difference between writing for YA and adults? YA books endorse the world view of the YA narrator but adult fiction can be ambiguous. The sensibility of the character’s world needs to be authentic to their age but in adult fiction the communication between writer and reader needs to be adult.

 

Paula likes 1^st person use to explore the character’s imaginative world.

 

 

True Stories – Chris’ Reading Packet for 25 March - Responses

1. Do the fiction writer and the poet owe anything to journalistic or historical truth, or is aesthetic truth paramount?

 

I think you need to remember that journalism and history are both written by people and all people have a bias. The post-modern dilemma is how any one person can really tell the whole truth. What you select and leave out of the history books or newspaper article can make it untruthful or a partial truth. What is truth? Even statistics can be used to say anything.

 

1. If a memoir is imaginatively true, does it matter if it’s not literally true? What about a poem?

 

I think if you are writing about people who are real and alive there are ethical issues to take into consideration. Otherwise I’d make aesthetic truth take priority. A poem isn’t art unless it has been transformed from its starting point.

 

1. How does tone affect how we read a literary work? What about context? the genre-label?

I remember the public outcry when it was revealed that Jim Crace had invented insects in his novel Being Dead. I couldn’t understand this. A novel is a work of FICTION. What is this current desire for “reality novels” like reality tv?

 

I had a strange reverse outrage when I first found out the In a Fishbone Church had unchanged extracts from a real diary throughout the novel. It didn’t seem right that she could dump lots of real extracts to bulk up her novel or give it a crutch like support to her novel. “They aren’t her own words” I thought. I’m a bit more forgiving now.

 

I can understand outrage surrounding the exposure of Norma Khouri because of the way it was promoted. Khouri was toured and deliberately misled in interviews and collected money for “charity”. At least Lloyd Jones was upfront about what he was trying to do. I don’t want to be told too much before I pick up a book. Perhaps the reading public needs to be educated in this post modern dilemma?

 

I want to be able to trust journalists and historians as much as possible in this on-line-photoshop world of altered truths. A literary truth is not the same as a literal truth and the priority of these depends on the genre. Composite characters in journalism are not new and seem to play an important role in communicating multiple truths in a condensed form. Perhaps we need a better definition of those works that straddle the boundaries.

Like conceptual visual art; essayists like Eliot Weinberger can paint with facts.

1. What effect does the blurring of genre-boundaries have on you as a reader?

We spend so much time filtering information off the internet and new applications like twitter are creating a snowball effect. So much information is either false or spin, you need trustworthy sources to make the best of your surf time. Trust needs to be established.

I don’t really want to read reality novels; a work of art needs to transform fact.

 

I think, as writers, we need to take the reader into consideration. I don’t want to totally isolate my readers or irritate them. I would still write if no one read my work but really, in all truth, I think writers write for readers and if no one want to read your work then you’re just talking to yourself. Writers need to establish a relationship of trust with their readers.

 

However, I want books to excite and challenge me and pushing boundaries is a big part of that. The world would be a very boring place without books like Biografi for instance. Sometimes I think most of the outcry is because people don’t want to expend energy on actually thinking about what they are reading; they want a safe predictable read. Safe and predictable is not what comes to mind when I think about what makes literature great.

 

I found the class discussion really interesting and I have a feeling that it will creep into my writing this year.

 

Class exercise

 After reading this week’s packet I then attempted the exercise for week 4: “True Stories

Choose a photograph from the newspaper and write a piece of fiction that imagines the lie behind the official truth. Limit: no more than two pages.”

 

I read most of my news on the internet these days. I don’t usually buy newspapers. That got me thinking about how all these issues affect the internet and I ended up reading about Jean Baudrillard’s theory of Simulacra and Simulation, which I found very interesting and relevant to the reading packet.

 

“third order simulacra are part of our postmodern era; the image is said to completely precede and determine the real, such that it is no longer possible to peel away layers of representation to arrive at some original.” (Wikipedia, does that count?) J

 

Of course this sent me spinning down tangents of The Matrix and science fiction. Before I knew it I had a funny little short story come essay, which I hope meets the criteria of the exercise. Either way I had fun coming to this point.

 

Class exercise 4 in which I write a true story about Facebook and the meaning of life.

 I’m bombarded everyday with clips of cell phones popping popcorn, pink dolphins, you name it. The internet and Photoshop have got a lot to answer for. I’m slowly entering the world of the Matrix, Twitter is streaming endless bites down my screen. I am Neo, filtering information, finding truths in the code; the digital rain.

 

I’m sitting in bed with my laptop and wireless connection, writing a fictional true story, no, being a fictional true story. While I write I discuss concepts of truth and reality in fiction and nonfiction on facebook. I've set up my facebook account to automatically update my twitter account so I am also discussing the same concepts on twitter simultaneously with six friends. We mostly agree. We all want truth in our journalism but are all feeling manipulated by the press and that poems are art before all else and isn't it sad about Natasha Richardson?

 

I’m experiencing the simulation of reality, the simulacra. I’m living on-line, reading news feeds from spin-doctors and multi-national marketing campaigns. I have snopes.com open in one window while reading web gossip passing for news in another. Is this why you can't run an election campaign appealing to trust?

 

I’m writing a poem, it maps my empire. The map of my empire is growing as big as the empire itself, which is decaying around me. There is no longer any God to recognize his own, nor any last judgement to separate truth from false, everything is dead and risen. Except me, I'm still in bed (with the laptop).

 

I’ve got an original painting on my wall, it covers the window and a crap view of an alley way. It's a Karl Maughan, I love his hyper-real style. I prefer it to what's behind the canvas, mind you I haven't looked behind the canvas for a while now, so I'm not sure what's there anymore. Karl paints flower gardens and is married to Emily Perkins, I googled him and her, now I know what school their kids go to in Auckland, that's the truth.

 

I check my Facebook news feed, all my friends are taking quizzes. Three quizzes later it seems I am Patti Smith, a poetic Baba Yaga. In the world of post-identity, facebook and its quizzes are really the only lights that we, destitute of faith and self, have to go by. If only there was a quiz to help you decide which quiz to take next. I'd take that. I decide to write a quiz about what kind of quiz taker the end user is. Then I create a randomly generated album cover for a non-existent band and tag my friends to do the same. Art is random after all.

 

I post my true story onto my blog and catch up with my bloglines subscriptions, I comment at The Handmirror blog about the right for breastfeeding mothers to have avatars of themselves breastfeeding then join the protest group on facebook and also black out my avatar to protest about the Guilt Upon Accusation law. There's an excellent podcast on Craftivism, which I download for my i-pod, the Craft Cartel plan to throw knitted bombs at shopping malls later this year.

 

I get a pxt from a friend; an image of her in the civic square, she is holding the giant silver ball of ferns between two fingers. I txt back “Lol ;) ur sch a tourist!” She txts back “mt me @ lib caf?” “Srry gt 2 mch hmwrk!” I txt back, then notice she is twittering from her mobile in response to my earlier questions about truth and fiction. “What about the reader?” She twitters “Does the text exist if no one wants to reads it?” “Oh please!” I twitter “If a tree falls in the woods, yadda yadda. Who cares what the reader thinks?!!!”

 

Science & Poetry 2

 J Bronowski, Magic, Science and Civilization, Columbia University Press, 1978.

The central opposition between magic and science is the opposition between power and knowledge. Science has one logic, there is only one form of truth; there is no distinction between man and nature. Magic has two kinds of logic, a natural logic and a supernatural logic.

 

Newton’s laws of motion

1 Every object in motion will stay in motion until acted upon by an outside force.

2 Force equals mass times acceleration

3 To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction

 

Newton and Gravity

Every particle of matter attracts every other particle with a force that is directly proportional to the product of the masses of the particles and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. The particle with less mass/density will accelerate more than the other particle, that’s why light objects fall to earth faster than the earth falls towards them. As objects get further apart the force of gravity drops very quickly.

 

Einstein’s theory of general relativity

Stretch a sheet out flat, attaching the corners to secured posts. begin to place things of various weights on the sheet. The heavier the object, the greater the curvature of the sheet. Smaller objects slip along the curvature of heavier objects. The curvature of a light object doesn’t affect the heavy object much but the curvature created by heavy objects is what keeps us from floating off into space. The curvature of the earth keeps the moon in orbit but at the same time the curvature of the moon is enough to affect the tides.

 

I like these explanations. I had a conversation with my father about “what scientists know”

or scientific truths. I like that there are natural laws.

I’m trying to grow the one ghazal for my father into a series, thinking about “Truth” and what scientists have faith in, or take as a given. There isn’t much. The conversation got quite philosophical (as in logic and probability).

 

(Super)Natural Logic – maybe that’s the title of my book?

i

The truth about stones is

some fit in my hand, some under.

 

If you press a stone with your finger

your finger is also pressed by the stone.

 

If you pull a stone on a rope

you will be drawn back to the stone.

 

If you carry a stone in your pocket

you can rub your thumb across it whenever.

 

I collected small beach stones from Ithaka

and intended to bring them home.

 

 

ii

The truth about beds is they

are better when you share them.

 

If your partner is heavier than you

you will slip into their curvature.

 

The curvature created by your partner

keeps you from floating out to space.

 

If you dance with your partner

you’ll stay in motion until someone cuts in.

 

If something isn’t there you can’t ever

know if you’ve proved its absence.

 

 

iii

The truth about earth is

you’ll be drawn home.

 

If you travel along one latitude, eventually

you’ll return to your starting point.

 

If you stay in one place

the continents will still drift.

 

If you dig a hole all the way through

you don’t end up in China.

 

Once you have been conceived, then

at some point you will die.

 

 

 

Phyllis Webb

The Vision Tree: Selected Poems, Talonbooks, 1982.

Water and Light: Ghazals and Anti-Ghazals,Coach, House Press, 1984.

Nothing But Brush Strokes: Selected Prose, NeWest Press, 2003.

 

Phyllis Webb is this year’s happy find for me. Several people suggested I read her and then repeated the suggestion when I started writing Ghazals. I started with her selected poems - The Vision Tree: Selected Poems, as that was the only thing available at VUW library, WPL or the MA library. Webb is Canadian, born in the 20’s, writer, broadcaster and creative writing teacher at Victoria (BC). Sharon Thesen in her introduction to The Vision Tree wrote:

What we are often most grateful for are the poem’s open completions, which do not stop the poem, but which cast their strange felicity back over the other lines, so that the whole poem is gathered into a unity without proposing a closure.

I read and re-read this volume. You just can’t read her work once, it is dense and surprising and multi-layered. I kept coming back to one of her earlier poems “Patience”:

 

    Patience is the wideness of the night

                 the simple pain of stars

                 the muffled explosion of velvet

                 it moves itself generally

                 through particulars

                 accepts the telling of time

1. (stanza 1)

These metaphors are startling for me. Then the last four lines. Patience isn’t concerned with details or comparison, Patience is vast, thick and heavy, sharp and piercing. What else is vast? The wide night sky is vast. What are in the night sky? Stars. What goes on for eons? Starlight.

“The muffled explosion of velvet” I imagine the night sky as a big piece of thick, heavy velvet that is shaken out with a crack / snap and once laid over you is so thick and heavy it almost suffocates.

This is clever because instead of using three un-related metaphors for Patience she has used three that are intertwined and the third is a metaphor for her first metaphor – the night sky. So it is all woven in on itself. Makes me dizzy!

Then when she expands the rest of the stanza it is as if she is talking about Einstein. She is talking about time and space. The last word of the stanza – relativity, (the theory of which describes how things stay in orbit) again going back to the night sky and space and also relationships.

This stanza is extraordinary! I wasn’t sure at first if that was what she intended or if I was just reading my own interests into it but I later read an essay of hers in which she odes say she is influenced by “Field Theory” much to my satisfaction.

The second stanza goes on:

 

But more than these accommodations

            patience is love withdrawn

            into the well; immersion into

            a deep place where green begins.

It is the slow beat of slanting eyes

down the hearts years,

it is the silencer

and the loving now

involves no word.

Patience is the answer

poised in grief – the knowing –

it is the prose of tears

withheld and the aging,

the history in the heart

and futures where pain

1. (stanza 2)

 

This stanza is quite different from the first, it comes not only down to earth but then down a well. It becomes less abstract and more human – love withdrawn is a very human condition. Silent years of wordless, withdrawn love grieved. Tears withheld as years pass and on into the future, where pain is still a ‘lucid cargo’. You need patience to endure never-ending heart break.

So, I’m thinking stanza one, two people are in orbit – in love, then in the second stanza love is withdrawn so patience morphs, earths. The second stanza is also longer than the first, which intimates that the loss and suffering goes on for much longer than the time of being in love. The lines get shorter too. ‘pain is a lucid cargo’ - Christ!

Chris lent me her copy of Water and Light: Ghazals and Anti-Ghazals as it is out of print and not in any of the libraries. The selected poems had some Ghazals in them but not the whole lot. I have to say that I was not as drawn to her Ghazals as I was to her earlier work. I really enjoy the way each couplet in a Ghazal is a leap, 5 or more seemingly unrelated topics each contained in a separate couplet, which then combine to create an over-reaching deeper meaning. They where helpful to read while thinking about writing Ghazals and thinking about what Ghazals may or may not be but they seemed to lack the crazy multifaceted nature of the earlier work to me.

Dinah lent me Nothing But Brush Strokes: Selected Prose also by Phyllis Webb, which has some great essays. I ended up using an extract of ‘Up the Ladder: Notes on the Creative Process’ for my reading packet handout. It has in it a poem called ‘Field Guide to Snow Crystals’ and her notes say it is about the Field theory of poetry. This got me excited. The physics of Quantum Field Theory originated in the 1920’s and influenced a poetics of connection that Muriel Rukeyser described as “not a point-to-point movement but a real flow in which everything is seen as deeply related to everything else”. William Carlos Williams said in his essay The Poem as a Field of Action that “The only reality we can know is MEASURE”. He saw structure (not subject matter) as being the poet’s contact with reality, the only way we can modify it. This has been making me think about form, because of course the Ghazal is Field Theory in action.

 

 

Louise Glück

Proofs & theories: essays on poetry, Hopewell, N.J. : Ecco Press, 1994.

Vita Nova, Hopewell, NJ : Ecco Press, 1999.

The wild iris, Hopewell, NJ : Ecco Press, 1992.

Averno, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.

 

Well, I tried, I really did. I can’t connect with her work. Averno was the best of a bad bunch, it was more tentative, questioning, mysterious, abstract, pleasing.

Some of her poems just seem like essay notes with poetic line breaks. “They are aspects of a dilemma or conflict” (‘Persephone The Wanderer’ Averno p17). It just doesn’t sound so pleasing. And then: ‘Three parts: just as the soul is divided, / ego, superego, id. Likewise /’

Preachy essay. But then in the same book ‘October 3’ (p9) ‘Sunrise. A film of moisture / on each living thing. Pools of cold light / formed in the gutters / I stood / at the doorway, / ridiculous as it seems. /’

This, for me, works so much better. Some of her work I read and though ‘So what?’

She says in Proofs and Theories she always preferred ‘the simplest vocabulary. What fascinated me were the possibilities of context. What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate by means of a words setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word’s full and surprising range of meaning. I liked scale but I liked it invisible. I loved those poems that seemed so small on the page but that swelled in the mind; I didn’t like the windy, dwindling kind.’  (p4-5)

The essays are interesting and intellectual and resonate with me, I wish I could have connected like that with her poetry. Another great quote:

“It is analogous to the unseen for example, to the power of ruins, to works of art either damaged or incomplete. Such works inevitably allude to larger contexts; they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied: another time, a world in which they were whole, or were to have been whole, is implied. There is no moment in which their first home is felt to be the museum. … It seems to me that what is wanted, in art, is to harness the power of the unfinished. All earthly experience is partial. Not simply because it is subjective, but because that which we do not know, of the universe, of mortality, is so much more vast than that which we do know. What is unfinished or has been destroyed participates in these mysteries. The problem is to make a whole that does not forfeit this power.” (p74-75)

 

Marina Warner, Italo Calvino and Dennis Potter

 Not exactly poetry but relevant to magical thinking (and science). I’ve been re-reading From the Beast to the Blonde: on Fairy Tales and their Tellers, Vintage, 1995 by Marina Warner. I want to do a series of fairytale poems that play with ideas memoir and memory being flawed.

I bought Calvino’s Complete Cosmicomics, Penguin, 2009 at Unity today, it’s a lovely production. The Guardian says of it: Calvino made it his ambition to create a literature that could reflect complex advances in science without losing a sense of lightness and play. It’s pretty clever and funny and original.

Also this week I’ve be re-watching Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective, BBC, 1989. He is amazing, again the idea of flawed memoir or perhaps persona being played around with?

 The combination of these three pieces has me thinking about memoir and science and magical thinking all over again. How the hell can I come up with something original? Or fresh? There is something in the surreal or the hyper-real but I write in a fairly realist manner. I dunno.

 

Kirsty Gunn - Notes from joint reading programme meeting June 3^rd

Whoa, mama, what a whirlwind. Kirsty Gunn is exploding with contagious energy and enthusiasm but full of contradiction. In her ex Queen Margaret College and Oxford

plummy accent she decried the ‘bourgeois’ and had a wee post-punk rant about her mate’s band the ‘groovy’ Raincoats and how she read ‘Sudden Fiction’ to their music in a groovy little club in Paris darling “Do you write lots of Sudden Fiction here? No?”

Obviously she is cutting edge.

 It was a bit hard to take her seriously. She didn’t want to call herself a novelist but rather ‘an artist’. She ripped apart one of her students who was writing ‘genre’ fiction as ‘entertainment’. This might be a touch of sour grapes or tall poppy syndrome but she came across as a social climber. Having said that it would be interesting to study under her because she was so evangelical and enthusiastic. Just better not be writing ‘entertainment’.

 Quote of the day: Poetry is useless, and indispensable. - Jean Cocteau

 

On Libraries I have known

 How old was I when I got my first library card? I’m not sure, maybe six? It was the 1970’s; everything was burnt orange and chocolate brown. I remember being very pissed off that I couldn’t borrow adult’s books with my junior library card. I remember reading all the Cricket magazines and scores of fiction. I would usually read a book a day.

 

Mum worked her way through the entire Crime Fiction section; they all had yellow hard covers with a red stripe. I don’t remember what Dad got out but he had stacks of science books by his side of the bed, Richard Dawkins and the like. My older brother liked Science Fiction and my younger sister had new readers like Hop on Pop. She was quite precocious and memorized Dr Seuss books from an early age, in fact we all learnt to read before we started school, thanks to Mum.

 

We were members of the Lower Hutt war memorial library, opened in 1953. The main entrance of the library has two huge murals, the first – “Their Sacrifice” – with service men and women looking bereft under a tree branch with barely a leaf and the second – “Preserved Freedom” – with happy children and respectful, prayerful adults, some harvesting fruit (presumably the fruit of the servicemen’s labours). “It was theirs to make but not to share the morrow” carved in stone underneath.

 

Oh! The WASPy guilt I felt each time I passed it. Was it disrespectful to look at it for too long? Was it disrespectful to not look at all? Of course it was fitting to have such a serious, massive piece of art in such a serious, massive (to a child) public building.

 

The legacy was one of knowledge, guilt, duty, humility, things my parents also felt were important, things they would have been taught in their formative years.

My father has an old brochure calling for financial support for the new library and attached Little Theatre. Titled A Call to Sacrifice, it begins thus:

 

“This brochure is a naked and unashamed call upon you, in the name of the City, to make a sacrifice, and its purpose is to inform you why. It makes no appeal to your personal self-interest, does not offer you something for nothing and asks you to give not necessarily that you may receive.”

 

Can you imagine that kind of appeal now? What a joke. Why not let the rates pay for it? Because:

 “a cultural centre such as is proposed will serve to remind us that they that have left us “shall never grow old,” for culture, like the spirit of man’ is of abiding value.”

 

And why should they make this sacrifice?

 

“In memory of others who gave up to six years of previous life, in the heyday of youth, toiling in the hot and arid deserts or in the bitter cold of stormy mountains, and enduring the suffering and dangers of the battlefield that you might enjoy bountiful prosperity and the comforts of home.”

 Whoa! I don’t think I remember reading a brochure with that kind of language printed in my life time. Finally some of the weirdest sentences that came from my parent’s lips began to make sense.

 

What has this got to do with reading or libraries? I guess we should be grateful that we have access to these kinds of cultural havens, acknowledge that knowledge is power and also be grateful that this knowledge is available to all members of the community no matter what their income. Mind you the kind of knowledge available in 1977 or 1987 in the Lower Hutt library seemed, even from a child’s perspective, to be limited. What did they want us to know? What was safe for us to know? What was missing?

 

Still libraries have always been a special revered place, a family outing; a church for atheists like me perhaps? Maybe that’s why it seemed appropriate to me to have such mixed feelings of lust (for knowledge), guilt, pleasure and worship all mixed up together.

 

There was also a secret code to learn when you joined the club – the Dewey Decimal System from 000 – Generalities to 900 – Geography & History (821 – Poetry in English).

And index cards filed in wooden drawers, you could flick through all the books with the tips of your fingers and find what you wanted. I still love index cards.

 

It was not just books either, this was the place I discovered The Face magazine, Paul Kelly and the Coloured Girls alongside Mervyn Peake and Elizabeth Smither (once I’d graduated to an adult’s card in the 80’s). All these things seemed so far removed from my everyday reality. I couldn’t afford to dress like the cool things in The Face, I couldn’t find any cool records in the local record stores, I’d never be Fuchsia in Gormenghast and I’d never be a published poet. Not while I was still here anyway.

 

It was inevitable; I moved to the Wellington Central Library and never looked back. It was an old classically styled building near the old town hall; surely the classical styling would transmit knowledge by osmosis? The steps echoed as I walked up to the fresh index files. There were notices on the wall for Spanish language teachers, guitar teachers, you name it. I felt smarter just being there. Then, glorious! I discovered you could borrow art prints, I was cultured!

 

Then the library got cultured, or rather modernised and moved to a new designer premises. Style seemed to rule over substance, it seemed they’d blown the budget and couldn’t afford any new books. Lucky for me I had a card for the Vic Uni library.

Non-fiction ruled; anthropology, feminism, literary criticism, theory, theory and more theory, until I was ready for real life.

 

I didn’t belong to even one library while I travelled, I was doing my practical. I still read of course but my unsettled state didn’t allow for the ties of membership. Finally I arrived back home and settled in a small seaside village. I was ready for membership but all previous memberships had lapsed. I began with the Paekakariki village library (about 3M x 4M in size) I got out picture books, that’s all I read for several years.

 

I joined the Paraparaumu library too, it wasn’t much bigger, I moved onto parenting books. Paraparaumu library was relocated into much larger premises, the extent of their collection was revealed. I started comfort reading; YA fiction, DIY, recipes and craft books. I was almost ready for adult fiction again. 

 

Multiple memberships became addictive, I got an out-of-town membership back at Wellington Central, and the catalogues were now all on-line. I was inter-loaning, reserving, you name it, I was click-happy on the internet. I was really in the zone again, from feminism to craft to poetry to self-help to fiction to YA fiction to DIY to zines to DVDs to CDs. Maybe I was ready for theory again?

 

My multiple memberships extended to include one more, back to Vic, where the juicy ‘Lit Crit’ awaits. On the same campus a small but perfectly formed graduate’s library at the Institute of Modern Letters delights me. I recently returned to the Lower Hutt library to check out their revamp after visiting my father. The index files were gone, the children’s section was moved to a mezzanine, even one of the large murals was moved from behind the issues desk to a far wall. I’ll be betting they don’t use a date stamp now. But the huge murals in the formal foyer still totally overwhelmed me.

 

 I took a photograph. Was it disrespectful to photograph it? Was it disrespectful to not remember? Familiar feelings of guilt came over me, I was ready to be told off by a librarian but they were too busy being nice to little kids. The rest of the building had, of course, shrunk with age, like my father has lost inches in height. It’s a suburban library, nothing more, nothing less. I walked out through the back entrance and wandered through the historical graveyard, kicking up leaves. It was time to go.

 

Lorine Niedecker 

From This Condensery: The complete writing of Lorine Niedecker, the Jargon Society, 1985.

A little too little: Re-reading Lorine Niedecker, by Jenny Penberthy, http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/niedecker/

Lorine Niedecker's "Folk Base" and Her Challenge to the American Avant-Garde, by Peter Middleton, http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/niedecker/

 

I really like her style – spare, in the natural world, with a scientific eye but a surreal influence. This is similar to what I intended my own approach to be. Her metaphor of the ‘Condensery’ for poetry is very apt – her work is extremely condensed. ‘Lake superior’ was written from 300 pages of field notes and research condensed into a 5 page poem, which she thought was an epic.

I can identify with this. I also like the way she didn’t want to fit / sit inside only one box – Objectivist / Surrealist, although Pound and Zukofsky bullied her away from surrealism.

“Niedecker's surrealism was not a poetics of the image of dream and hallucination but a pursuit of the non-expressive, a shift beyond the personal, lyric voice towards a patterning of sound and rhythm. It was a surrealism based in language and in the capacity of language to register objectively different levels of consciousness. She had been reading Virginia Woolf’s 1930s novels and was busy exploring the poetic compass of what she called the "monologue tongue." A depersonalized study of the self, of what Carl Rakosi would identify as the antithesis of Objectivism: "the streaming consciousness." In this and many of the subsequent poems of the early period, the sentence predominates, as both syntactic and rhythmic unit. She explores, for instance, how far the imprint of syntax can be traced into the further reaches of the mind. Dream, she finds, is full of syntax.” (A little too little: Re-reading Lorine Niedecker)

 

James Longenbach

The Resistance to Poetry, University of Chicago Press, 2004.

“a poem’s power inheres less in its conclusions than in it’s propensity to resist them, demonstrating their inadequacy while moving inevitably toward them.” (p10)

On Dickenson, Dante & Horace – “Their poems are nourishing because of the fervour with which they confront themselves, harnessing the inevitable tendency of language to mean one thing because it threatens to mean another” “Poets fear wisdom” (p10-11)

I liked this book so much I bought a copy.

--------------------------

Selima Hill 

 

Bunny, Bloodaxe, 2001.

Chris suggested I read her after she saw my poem ‘Plum’ about sexual abuse. A lot of her poems in this book are very small, long lined couplets. The book is almost one long poem but has been broken up into 74 separate pieces. The blurb says “What the house contains, it cannot hide”. There is a terrible building of menace, and impending doom: “what she gets is toothpaste, / and the lodger, / who thanks You for inventing thighs, O Lord.”  Then in turn humour of childish behaviour: “She’s the only child on earth / who’s not allowed ice-cream.” The silly and mundane along side the menace makes the poems more intense. The juxtaposition between harmless and harmful is extreme, there is such a fine line. When the poems are longer, bigger blocks of text, they really let rip – spilling the darkest details of abuse and self abuse. There are re-occurring motifs: the colour blue; boiled sweets; cherries; fire; water; babies; rabbits; lambs & violets.

 

Louise Glück – revisited

Lannan Foundation Video

The first five books of poems, Carcanet, 1997

Meadowland, Carcanet, 1998.

It was interesting to watch the interview with Louise Glück after I had such trouble connecting with her later work in print. Listening to her read her earlier work I could see why she is highly thought of, with lines like: “the wind leaves through the body of animals”, “trailing the twisted signature of it’s root”, “tulip a red claw”, “the gods walked down from the mountains we built for them”, “the bread and milk laid like weights on the table” – just beautiful.

I’m not sure what happened with her later work, perhaps it just became too abstract. The only downside was that her broad New York nasal monotone.

It was interesting, she said of her book Descending Figure, and of the use of extended form, that in the past she had a compulsion for a poem and that it usually ended with the poem but that this was the first time that the compulsion wasn’t exhausted at the end of one poem but rather, at the end of a series of connected poems. “Normally when a lyric finished itself the compulsion that gave the form was exhausted”. I found this resonated with me, I’ve been feeling the same extended compulsion while putting together my portfolio. Another interesting thing she said was that she looks at her books after they are finished to see what she does and doesn’t do then tries to break habits and try new things in her next book.

After I watched the video I found a copy of The first five books of poems in the library and had another go, I liked The House on Marshland, Descending Figure and Ararat. From the introduction she says of her first book: “I try to cultivate an attitude of embarrassed tenderness”. After her first book she set herself the task of writing poems as a single sentence because she’d found herself “trapped in fragments”. After The House on Marshland she tried to wean herself from “conspicuous syntactical quirks and recurring vocabulary – what begins as vision degenerates into mannerism”. What she was getting at in the video interview.

Helen Vendler in the New Republic describes her work as “neither “confessional” nor “intellectual” in the usual senses of these words”. I guess this is a good description. The closest she gets to confessional is in Ararat, which is very family focussed but examines the relationships of parent and child somewhat clinically rather than emotionally.

 

Widows          

 

My mother's playing cards with my aunt,

Spite and Malice, the family pastime, the game

my grandmother taught all her daughters.

 

Midsummer: too hot to go out.

Today, my aunt's ahead; she's getting the good cards.

My mother's dragging, having trouble with her concentration.

She can't get used to her own bed this summer.

She had no trouble last summer,

getting used to the floor. She learned to sleep there

to be near my father.

He was dying; he got a special bed.

 

My aunt doesn't give an inch, doesn't make

allowance for my mother's weariness.

It's how they were raised: you show respect by fighting.

To let up insults the opponent.

 

Each player has one pile to the left, five cards in the hand.

It's good to stay inside on days like this,

to stay where it's cool.

And this is better than other games, better than solitaire.

 

My grandmother thought ahead; she prepared her daughters.

They have cards; they have each other.

They don't need any more companionship

.

All afternoon the game goes on but the sun doesn't move.

It just keeps beating down, turning the grass yellow.

That's how it must seem to my mother.

And then, suddenly, something is over.

 

My aunt's been at it longer; maybe that's why she's playing better.

Her cards evaporate: that's what you want, that's the object: in the end,

the one who has nothing wins.

 

She also uses Myth a lot in her poetry, which was of interest to me with regards to my attempts to do so in my work.

“The poem that mistakes noble utterance for perception, conviction for impassioned intelligence, has located a wisdom it means to confer on its readers. Although such a poem may be organized dramatically and will likely have its climactic moment, it lacks drama: one feels, too early, its intentions. Nor does deep familiarity with its design suggest that the poem has tapped into myth: myth is not formula. Such poems substitute the adjective for the noun; they offer the world draped in mythic reference. But in their willfulness, they lack myth’s fatedness, myth’s helpless encounter with the elemental. Instead, everything has been invested in conclusion, in axiom, in heroic grandeur. Poetic intelligence lacks, I think, such focused investment in conclusion, being naturally wary of its own assumptions. It derives its energy from a willingness to discard conclusions in the face of evidence, its willingness, in fact, to discard anything.”

    From Louise Glück, "Introduction," The Best American Poetry, 1993 (New York: Macmillan, 1994), xx

I think this is what Bill Manhire was saying to us in class at the beginning of the year and I didn’t really understand what he was saying. It’s not that poems / poets can’t strive for wisdom / knowledge but more that they need to acknowledge their failure / inability to really gain that wisdom.

I don’t think I’m using myth in my work to appear grandiose but rather to add to a feeling of me struggling / failing to gain wisdom. I hope that’s how it comes across.

I spoke to Chris today and she said she didn’t enjoy Vita Nova as much as some of her earlier work either, which I found reassuring. I was starting to worry that only liking the earlier work of a poet was symptomatic of me being an under-developed reader.

 

Jorie Graham

Lannan Foundation Video

The Dream of the Unified Field: selected poems 1974-1994, Carcanet, 1996.

 

Bill Nelson mentioned Jorie Graham on his blog and I looked her up, her style took my fancy so I thought I’d watch her interview. She has a reputation for being difficult to read, in response she said that an apprenticeship to the work of the poet is often required to gain understanding. You need to become acquainted with their collected work, their obsessions, language etc. Things unfold after in-depth reading, try reading all their work in chronological order as fragments will be more difficult. This did make sense to me, especially in light of my experience with Louise Glück. She also discussed difficulty of subject “If people don’t have the knowledge (eg classical Greek myths) to understand my poetry that’s not my problem” Ha!! I do angst about the scientific content of my work and if readers will comprehend it. It’s quite liberating to hear poets say things like that. It is quite an elitist attitude and one that I have some problems with, yet when she said that I couldn’t help thinking “YES!” On language she said something like – understanding the complexity of language leads to an understanding of the complexity of your inner world. She wants to challenge people to extend themselves and surely that can only be a good thing?

She also said “abstracting emotion doesn’t work, rehearse your vocabulary on the concrete first before you approach the ‘invisible’ – internal or abstract. Approach the invisible via the senses, read Hopkins, for example.” I think this is probably good advice for me to follow. With my Elemental sequence they only started working once I added concrete, sensual connections.

 

After watching the video I trotted over to the library and got out her selected poems for a read.

The title immediately appealed as it harked back to the Field Theory of poetry that Phyllis Webb talked about. The blurb reads:

 “Jorie Graham’s poetry insists that ‘the visible world’ exists: but what is its existence? Beyond the subjective, the merely lyric, she ventures with philosophical rigour into an area ‘saturated with phenomena’, in Helen Vendler’s phrase, a place of shifting perspectives, vertiginous reversals, but always moving towards possible celebration. Those who argue that poetry and science are at each other’s throats find here a poetry which brings into tense equilibrium science philosophy and history.”

Well, I’d love someone to say that about my work.

It’s interesting to see her form change over time, her lines grow longer and longer. Couplets and stanzas disappear, poems grow longer.

In the late 90’s her lines get so long and the last word or words of the line tab out to the

                                                                                                                        end, like this

or sometimes she tabs

            like this

and then goes on

            like this, then breaks

 

a stanza

            like this – en dashes too.

 

I like it; in fact I tried it out on some new poems this weekend.

Her poem ‘I watched a snake’ is interesting, each stanza introduces a notion of sewing, stanza 2 – thread, stanza 4 – knot, stanza 5 – stitch, stanza 6 pattern, final stanza: stitches, pattern, fastens. In addition the snake has duel meaning of biblical lust versus work and then: “Desire / is the honest work of the body”, Passion is work / that retrieves us,” This is overlapped with an Elizabeth Bishop style of observancy. In the Lannan interview she talked about “Self” and separation, body / spirit / mind. In this poem she seems to be trying to stitch them all together – very clever.

Self Sown

 I’ve been looking at the garden for the last six months, thinking how I should’ve really pulled some weeds so I could plant some more veges. I promised myself that I wouldn’t make my self feel guilty about things like that in such a busy year but I was a little sad that I wouldn’t be picking fresh veges from my plot.
Today I grabbed a few handfuls of chickweed out of the vege patch to feed the chooks and noticed as I got up close: lettuce, celery, carrots and in another corner broad beans!
These little seedlings are making their way despite the weeds, on their own accord; plants that had self-seeded from the previous crops. I just need to do some minimal weeding and they’ll take off. The prognosis wasn’t as bad as I had imagined.
When I first started my MA this year I was worried – would I be able to keep up with the workload, would I get writer’s block, would I remember anything, would my brain still work, would all the bright young things leave me in their dust?
I’m sure all mothers experience a similar mix of these anxieties when they return to work after a period of time away with children.
What I discovered was I had 8 years worth of ideas that had been germinating in the dark recesses of my brain, which only needed the slightest stimulation to take off (and that motherhood gives you an amazing stamina!)
I’m slowly starting to realize that it’s okay to let your land / mind lay fallow for a while, in fact, it may even be beneficial – not stripping all the nutrients from extensively working your plot.
I’m sure I won’t be able to (and don’t want to) wait another 8 years before the next intensive work effort but I will be less anxious about the wait, happier to see it as part of the process in the future and able to trust that a few self-sown seeds will make their own way to the light.

Mid year break

 I’ve tried to do some different things to keep me going over the break, like watching some of the Lannan videos and listening to podcasts. I’ve also just spent a long weekend away with Emma, Meg, Francie and Mel from Damien’s class for a bit of intensive reading and writing with a workshop atmosphere. It’s worked so far, I haven’t had time to miss class. It’s good having time away from reading other peoples writing and reading packets.

 

I’m glad I handed my reading packet out before the break so I wasn’t wasting time fretting about it. I’m feeling good about my portfolio so far, I have about 60 pages of poems in three sections with a sequence of Ghazals in the middle section, hopefully to be the gem that the book hangs on. This takes the pressure off for the second half. I like to spend plenty of time revising my work and there’s still time to come up with some better poems so some of the weaker ones can drop out.

 

A couple of my poems have been accepted for online journals Swamp and 4th Floor, which is encouraging and I’ve got a couple of readings lined up for later in the year – Writers on Mondays (which, of course, is part of the class requirements) and Stand Up Poets at the Palmerston North library during the mid-term break next semester. The other good news is that Helen Rickerby asked to publish a chapbook of my work through her publishing house Seraph Press and we are at page proof stage with that.

 Next week we are back to our safe little cluster in class. Kay has sent out her next batch of poems for us to read (lovely) before we discuss in class and I’m getting reading to lead a discussion on how poets have been influenced by science, incorporated it into their use of form and language.
I hope I can pull off two hours worth, gulp!
In three weeks I need to hand out my last bunch of work for class discussion, nothing like a deadline to get you going!

Here are some quotes from my reading packet to tease you:

“Only fables present the world as it should be and as if it had meaning,” – Kurt Gödel (Austrian-American logician, mathematician and philosopher)

“The original Muses might be imaged now as little Apples, home-computers wired into the great mother memory bank of the world, promiscuously fingered by the swift digits of the global villagers. But a computer does not a muse or music make.” – Phyllis Webb

“We have to break down poetry into its elements just as the chemists and physicists are doing in order to reform the elements.” – William Carlos Williams

“Sir: In your otherwise beautiful poem ‘The Vision of Sin’ there is a verse which reads – ‘Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born.’ It must be manifest that if this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill… I would suggest that in the next edition of your poem you have it read – ‘Every moment dies a man, Every moment 1 1/16 is born.’… The actual figure is so long I cannot get it onto a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry. I am, Sir, yours, etc., Charles Babbage”
– Charles Babbage to Tennyson, 1851

And a poem:

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—
– Emily Dickinson

Christopher Reid

 July 24^th – 27^th Lecture on Ted Hughes, Masterclass and Writers on Mondays with Bill Manhire.

 Notes from Friday’s lecture:

Ted’s voice was physical, theatrical, had a sense of the dramatic and also worked on dramatic translation later in life eg Lorca’s Blood Wedding. Crow was a definitive publication at the time, there is a suppressed prose narrative in Crow, under the song. Hughes had bad punctuation and spelling but his raw style was preserved in his letters. He argued for the intuitive, the physical need to read aloud to add aural depth to poetry writing – said the eye was speculative & objective, the ear was subjective & intuitive. Hughes used quasi-pseudo-science reasoning to his explain his use of intuition. There are hidden patterns in the structure of his books – Crow – Taro Cards.

He enjoyed offending logic, rebelled against it and had a love of tall stories for their own sake. Hard to tell what was actual synchronicity and what was self mythologizing in his tall tales. He seemed to truly believe that writing the stories could make things happen – bcame the tormented bull he wrote of. Birthday Letters described as autobiographical but are also translations of Plath’s work – re-workings – a continuing argument with her but not overtly, more subjectivity addressing his evasion, his fallibility.

The Myth doesn’t separate itself from the ‘truth’.

 

Masterclass notes:

Martian poetry label not one he likes or uses ‘Our Commune’ from Arcadia typical of his early work. Arrogantly thought they were doing something totally new and fresh – he knows he wasn’t now but then he just wasn’t reading widely – ignorant. European poets (eg penguin series) saying things without saying it for political reasons influenced him. Wit and insight into human nature – what’s the difference between light humorous verse and his work? He’s happy to accept his can be seen as light but others wouldn’t. In Six Memos for the Millennium, Calvino writes on qualities needed for literature – 1^st is lightness. Wit vs. Feeling.

Story of Lunch – a joke but a sad joke and that makes the poem. Really about his wife’s death, in hindsight. A Scattering (4 elegies) are poems about his wife’s death and show progression from wit to feeling and his growth as a poet.

Says – trust your subconscious when writing about grief. A Scattering is left hanging in the air (air kisses). Story of Lunch actually deals with it’s final closure. Self pity repels the reader, beware. Show, don’t tell.  When writing he begins with a line or phrase and that suggests a form, from perhaps it’s rhythm. The sense of the size of the idea and therefore the length of the poem is intuitive for him. He works in a range of forms, almost restless, like freshness and variety. His translation poems were a way of writing himself out of a rut. Some of his work intuitively develops others start with a clear concept. Monologues – show his pleasure in inhabiting other peoples voices. Browning – My last Duchess, Pound – Seafarer, Kleinzahler etc. Another way of liberating yourself – freedom to say and do other things you may have suppressed. Mr Mouth gave him permission to be naughty. 

 

The master class itself was intense, we worked through all of the class’ poems line by line (except mine, which was weird) and read them for sense. It was a good exercise but I left feeling exhausted and a bit deflated. I have no idea what he thought of the pieces I wrote.

 

Writers on Monday with Bill Manhire, notes:

Christopher feels that too many of the earlier pieces he wrote don’t carry enough emotional weight, that they were just machines for audacious metaphors.

Bill noted a connection between CR’s wife’s profession as an actress and CR’s many voices and roles that he creates. His degree is in anthropology? Recording the everyday is in that spirit – our rituals and customs – highlighted makes poetry.

Organic development in poetry is important. A long poem being a contradiction as it unfolds.

 

Christopher Reid was a delight to listen to and learn from over the last few days.

 

Transition

 I guess because the MA is nine months long there are inevitable analogies of pregnancy and childbirth connected to the process. Lately I’ve been feeling like I’m in labour with this book. I’m pushing and huffing and hurting. I don’t know what’s going to come out, or if it will have any birth defects.

 

There’s a point in labour called transition, you can tell you’re in it when you start whinging “I can’t do it, I caaaaan’t!!! I never want to do this ever, ever again!” It’s the most intense part of labour; some women vomit or shake all over. Midwives like this point because they know it means any minute a head will be making its way out.

 

I wonder if Chris sees herself as a midwife of books? Either way I feel like I’m in transition with my manuscript, I’m tired, I caaaaaan’t!

 

To get me through I’m trying to remember how the post-birth adrenalin felt, a massive surge invulnerability and awesome, death defying prowess. ‘I made this!’ And you are looking down at your ugly purple squished up crying bundle covered in cheesy looking vernix, thinking it’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. You forget the pain and decide they need a sibling.

 

Robert Hass

Lannan Foundation Video

Time & Materials, Ecco Press, 2007.

Praise, Ecco Press, 1979.

Human Wishes, Ecco Press, 1989.

Sun under wood, Ecco Press, 1996.

Twentieth Century Pleasures, Ecco Press, 1999.

 

Robert Hass, what a lovely man! Jorie Graham came across as a bit crazy interviewing him, her questions were so extremely long and complicated and she was sitting twisted up all legs and hair, which was a shame because after you got past the hair and translated the questions they were interesting. Hass often comes out of reading the poem to talk about poetry – deconstructs or reveals himself mid-stream, then goes back to his conversational style with little pockets of higher tone. “squid like the looseness of a dream” – love that line!

Narrative vs. Lyric is common in his work. He says “Prose is the brush not the palette” that he gets the rhythm of prose, that essay writing moved him into prose poetry and that he “couldn’t face the intimacy needed in verse”. He transitions between prose and verse within poems. He said “the rhythm of verse goes straight to the heart”. He’s trying to mix things up to get “closer to the reality” and that the shifts were temporal as well as in intimacy levels. He also said he only thinks about structure during revision, it made me think about trying to write in prose more and then editing it into verse.

 

In Sun Under Wood there are a few poems about his mother, which I found useful for thinking about my own work. In Dragonflies Mating he re-tells the creation story of Coyote on a mountain who had to pee “and he didn’t want to drown anybody, so he turned toward the place/ where the ocean would be.” (p7). In this poem there is also the church and Franciscan monks alongside the Native American myths and then he leaps to his mother, the drunk, his creator.

 

They meant so well, she said, and such a terrible thing

 

            came here with their love. And I remembered how I hated it

            after school – because I loved basketball practise more than

            anything

            on earth – that I never knew if my mother was going to show up…”  (p8)

 

This is so clever. Firstly he is using the Franciscan monks and the diseases they unwittingly brought with them as a metaphor for his mother’s destructive love. Secondly he is making connections between his own creator (his mother) and Coyote not wanting to drown people in piss. And then there are the line breaks! Meaning well becomes a terrible thing. He hates ‘their love’ and he loves basketball more than perhaps his mother.

 

            Study the orange rim as if it were,

            which it was, the true level of the world, the one sure thing

 

            the power of my hands could summon. I’d bounce the ball

            once more, feel the grain of the leather in my fingertips and shoot.

1. (p9)

 

I just find this astounding every time I read it. Again, the line breaks and then shooting his mother along with the ball. He has such a light touch, yet it is unflinching. He manages the whole Sharon Olds Love/Hate thing but with even more finesse and layers.

I wish I had more time to digest all this and take it into my own work. I wish I had read more of his work earlier on in the year.

 

 Elizabeth Nannestad

 If he’s a good dog he’ll swim, AUP, 1996.

 From the back cover – Elizabeth Nannestad writes:

“These poems were written 1993-94, after a time when people around me had died left, right and centre. I can recommend them as being not too many or too long”

That’s a great quote, I hope I can say the same thing about mine when it’s finished.

Nannestad sets the scene well. The collection starts with half a dozen love poems. I probably need a few “before she died” pieces to establish my relationship with my mother before she died and organise the pieces to mark transition.

 

From A Portrait of My Mother (pp 20,24)

Her hands

She particularly liked her long handled pruning shears

with which she could cut anything down to size.

It encourages them, she’d say

and tie her hair back from her face

to mind the bonfire in the back yard.

 

I need this kind of thing in my work. Also from the another section of the same poem in the section Ashes, This great line:

            I have to admit that I never

            understood her, how she could treasure

            material things – the clean-lipped, unused china

            and yet be

            empty-handed to face infinity.

 

Such great stuff! Perhaps Pins, hooks and needles needs to go into a wee series of Nora poems and be identified as such. I must go back through my journal when we packed up her house.

 

From Immediately After:

Immediately after my grandmother died

we saw that nothing had ever held her house together --

where we had visited her

for years and years,

the cunning old thing, time's unresisting

favoured daughter,

the path beside the house

was cracked, not even a path,

the boysenberry vines in the old chookhouse

not a garden,

and what we thought was a house

is only broken pieces of board, making no effort

to lean together.

 

Her grandmother poems are great like that. “She took on her listener as a fly-fisherman the trout” – from Talk Talk. Also from that one:

Oh would that we had had

a mental can-opener to open the old girl up.

She could bowl me at any time –

at ninety-three, she lay too weak and sleepy to move

but not to talk

and I crept up beside her onto the bed.

She happened to say, ‘when I was engaged to Reg –‘

Reg, Nana, Reg? Who was he?

                                    Oh, it was just the thing

1. (p 31)

 

This is just how I’d like to write about Nora, in fact, this could be Nora she’s writing about. The problem is how do I write something like that without being totally derivative? Sigh.

 

Surrender to your obsession (“Are you still writing about your mother?”)

In two weeks we need to hand in our journals. Mid-term break has begun and I’ve just had a meeting with Chris about my portfolio. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s time to surrender – to the narrative, to the organic will of the collection, to admit ownership of certain pieces and that there are only so many balls I can juggle. This might not be the book I intended to write, I may have expectations of my work that are beyond my current skills but that doesn’t mean this year’s work is crap. It has potential.

I’ve been resentful and angsting over the extent to which my dead mother has hijacked my manuscript. Tony Hoagland has a great little essay in Real Sofistikashun about obsession. He says:

A real die hard, indestructible, irresolvable obsession in a poet is nothing less than a blessing. The poet with an obsession never has to search for subject matter. It is always right there, welling up like an Artesian spring on a piece of property with bad drainage… The danger of obsession, of course, is the potential for redundancy: immobility, stagnation, narrowness of aperture, confinement, paralysis, arrested development. Neurotic recitation can be boring. (pg 81)

I hope I’m not crossing the line into neurotic recitation. I tied myself up in knots, trying too hard to make a sequence that was ultra-tight then found it was so tight that nothing could develop. I think I needed to go through this process to write the material but now it’s time to blow it all open and deconstruct it in order to get closer to what I want.

I have lots of anxieties as a writer. I’m afraid of over-writing, I worry that my style is passé and not experimental enough to be fresh, I worry I’m no good and that my subject matter is of no interest to others, I worry that I’ll come across as self-indulgent and out of control.

Hopefully by the end of this year I’ll feel a bit more confident about what I’m doing and my abilities as a writer. This year has been so fantastic, I want to bottle it like peaches so I can go back and taste what it was like in the future and remember these little revelations.

 

Sharon Olds

Strike Sparks:Selected Poems, 1980-2002, Knopf, 2004.
Lannan Foundation Video

I’ve been re-reading Ms Olds, The Father in particular; the hate and the love together. She doesn’t shy away from things; she names them in plain language, which does become heightened in places. There are some unusual, fresh metaphors and similes but otherwise simple and honest.

“she hated, her face rippled like a thin wing, sometimes, when she happened to be near him,”        Waste Sonata (p77)

I read an interview with her in The Guardian online last year in which they discuss intimacy and use of autobiographical material. I found it really useful thinking about my own work:

"I've tried to make sense of my life… make a small embodiment of ordinary life, from a daughter's, wife's, mother's point of view. A work of art not polemical in intent, maybe more elegiac, maybe just wanting to preserve a moment or a feeling, to swim upstream against the current of time… And once a poem is written, and I like it enough to type it, and it's rewritten, and maybe published, and I'm in front of people, reading it aloud - I'm not too embarrassed by that," she goes on. "It doesn't feel personal. It feels like art - a made thing - the 'I' in it not myself anymore, but, I'd hope, some pronoun that a reader or hearer could slip into. But how much can a poem reflect or embody a life anyhow? You can want to come close, but it's so profoundly different - the actual body, the flesh, the mortal life."

View: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jul/26/poetry

There is a line in one of her poems Little Things that goes:

I am
paying attention to small beauties
whatever I have – as if it were our duty to
find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.

I hope I can get somewhere close to this idea with my work. I don’t want to be known as a confessional poet. Olds puts it like this:

"Poems like mine - I don't call them confessional, with that tone of admitting to wrong- doing. My poems have done more accusing than admitting. I call work like mine 'apparently personal'. Or in my case apparently very personal."
                                       View: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jul/26/poetry

I don’t think that’s splitting hairs, its one thing to say “I did this” another to say “you did that”. Also I think it is acknowledging the transformation of raw material into art. The other thing, which I think sets her apart from poets like Plath is that she has a sense of humor; from The One Girl at the Boys Party:

When I take my girl to the swimming party
I set her down among the boys. They tower and
bristle, she stands there smooth and sleek,
her math scores unfolding in the air around her.                          

In the Lannan video she spoke about the first poet who really influenced her: Muriel Rukeyser, about feeling idolatry while being at shoe level to her. In class Muriel taught her what it is to ‘know’ a poem. They tried to remember in class a poem they had read - word by word and understand why it was ordered the way it was. This was a revelation for her, a new way of thinking about reading and writing. I like the sound of the combined close reading and aural memory to understand poetry. She describes a poem as being a fossil imprint of a voice, great image! Sharon Olds has been a favourite poet of mine for a while but she has slipped down in my rankings a fraction this year behind Phyillis Webb, Jorie Graham and Robert Hass (hard acts to follow).

 

Rita Dove

 Mother Love, W.W.  Norton & Co, 1995.

Chris lent me a copy of this after our last meeting, it obvious from the blurb why. She writes mainly in sonnets with modern setting and language, exploring cyclical betrayal and regeneration:

Calling upon the ancient Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, Mother Love examines the love between mother and daughter, two tumblers locked in an eternal somersault: each mother a daughter, each daughter a potential mother. In settings as various as a patio in Arizona, the bistros and boulevards of Paris, the sun-drenched pyramids of Mexico—and directly from the Greek myth itself—Rita Dove explores this relationship and the dilemma of letting go.

I think she has captured the betrayal well that Pat was talking about with me the other day. Pat said “there’s a betrayal in your work and it wasn’t done by your mother” Bloody Pat, he always gets even our own work better than we do. He’s right; I’ve only touched on it - the betrayal of daughters leaving mothers and killing them by doing so; and probably, if I’m honest, the betrayal of men to women.

She does something interesting with the section “Her Island”. There are sonnets in which the closing line of each one becomes t6he opening line of the next. The final words “the ground closed.” the first words in the book? “A flower in a weedy field” - very clever.  I think Christopher Reid did something similar with A Scattering. I might have to have a go too.

 

Farewell

Well my friend, its time to wrap you up. Or rather print you off and bind you. You’ve been a good sounding board and stopped me from getting too self-absorbed this year. Journaling has been a good exercise in discovery through rambling. I think it has helped me gain perspective.

I got back last night from being guest poet at Palmerston North Library’s Stand Up Poets. Just before I left Helen Rickerby managed to get a few copies of my freshly printed and bound chapbook Watching for Smoke and I took some up to sell. The gig went really well; I got a really good response from the audience and they bought chapbooks. It was quite a buzz. Getting ready to read helped me get the “Mother Poems” into a better narrative order and I feel better about reading in front of more people on Monday.

I haven’t written about every single book or author I read this year (eg Bernadette Hall, Michael Palmer, Sharon Thesen, loads of popular science titles) but I think this’ll do. I’ll leave you with this cartoon called Sheeple, although I’m sure it’s really about poets on Wellington transport!