POEM: Commuter by Angela King

Commuter

Sinking downwards, the spirit falls unkempt

through regular staged compromising doors.

I say what I have always said, that you

are no less, maybe more. But my money

wields a choice already made. This new suit

fits me well. I stand straighter. Buy a house.

Give money to the poor. My signature

states which pew I have ascended to. Side-

on I am thin as a coin. Hobbies tailor

my tunnels of air & time. I bring nothing

here but my mind, clearly defined and raw.

POEM: Gentle by Angela King

Gentle

If we are no more than this, one small fold

of sagging flesh – one breaking bone of mind

to prop us up against the fall – one eye

that puckers blind in noon’s false clarity –

How can one more day reveal us, give space

to what totters insensible inside?

Yes strive, & fall, & strive again – decline

each small disdain of life, & cry against

the turning sun, though glib fools say it comes

often enough, & enough for us all.

Divine Muses IX

On National Poetry Day, last Friday night, I attended a reading by 6 NZ poets in the Gus Fisher Gallery in Auckland city. This was a popular event - around 60 people attended - and in the black foyer the poets reading under a spotlight rose to the occasion.

As a regular event organised by Siobhan Harvey, this was MC'd by Penny Summervale and Rosetta Allen. The theme of this reading was autobiography in poetry, which prompted comments from the poets and the choice of poems.

Readings began with John Pule, who read several poems in a shy but entertaining fashion, including a moving one for his father -  "the rising saliva of misfortune."

Sue Fitchett was next, and quoted Milosz, saying "we do not witness our poetry, our poetry witnesses us." She was a confident performer, using concrete gestures as though laying her words down on the paper as she spoke. She commented on her poems as bones in a lot of white space, so that the reader is prompted to see what is not there, not remembered or non-existant. As she read her sequences, each poem growing smaller, each surviving word became potent.

Iain Sharp was entertaining, possibly the audience's favourite of the evening, with his dry self-poking humour and expressive voice. He began with "The Iain Sharp Poem", commenting that a review by Lauris Edmond saying that his favourite subject was himself is true. Further poems were also entertainingly read, included this line "it's all crap anyway, he cackles, & scratches his protuberant gut."

Siobhan Harvey read next. She said that a newspaper had called her a Confessional poet, and that she would embrace that mantle & move on. She read several recent poems about her son, which had many striking lines, such as "his brain is fluent with storm / his tongue is slick with blue-bladed invective." Siobhan finished with her self-described motif poem, "Waiata tangi for Cris & Cru."

Riemke Ensing was a witty performer, clearly prepared for the evening, and gave a personal, open performance of several memorial poems, including for Charles Brasch ("certainly there's more to life than words & pounds of fudge to keep you satisfied") and her brother ("this almost impossible promise of spring"). Riemke commented that she had almost given up writing, but as a reader of her work, I hope that she will find that even though "conditions of writing could not have been more dangerous", this is when the truest and most alive work can happen.

The final reader was Harry Ricketts. Harry commented that the idea of autobiography in poetry began with the Romantics, quoting a critic that "Wordsworth liked to confess to virtue, Byron liked to confess to vice". His casual, energetic, even fidgety reading of several poems springing from a book in a secondhand bookstore, two paintings, and experiences with his son, showed that autobiography could be, as he mentioned, a spring to the creation of a poem, and not necessarily the content.

At the end of the evening, the results for the 2012 Emerging Poets Poetry Competition (Auckland University Press & Divine Muses IX) were announced, with first prize going to Elizabeth Welsh, and second prize to Alana Bruce. The judge's report by Anna Hodge can be read here.

Review : The Pathos of Space

NZ poets Jan Kemp and Siobhan Harvey have recently completed a project to improve the selection of NZ poets on the UK poetry archive, and this was celebrated with a launch in Auckland. I reviewed the launch and readings for POTROAST.

Auckland Writers and Readers Festival 2012

The AWRF 2012 kicked off on Thursday and ran until Sunday the 13th. I was lucky enough to be able to attend some great sessions on poetry-related subjects and saw some great performances of spoken word and some great poems read by skilled New Zealand and international poets.

Reviews of the events I attended can be read on the University of Auckland's student perspectives page, along with others by my fellow Masters of Creative Writing students.

A voidable heart - the danger of poetry

Much has been written about whether poetry is flourishing or decaying in our consumerist technology-addicted culture. Trends in poetry are generally agreed to be towards the opaque, the intellectual, the poetry-as-game. Humour and references to other texts are frequent. While formalism has made a small come-back, free verse and the excuse it provides to the lazy not to examine line structure and length still predominate. This is a contrived excuse, of course. Good poetry is good poetry and there is plenty of good poetry in free verse being written. And the increase of poetry with Pasifika roots and other cultures than English can only be a good thing.

What puzzles me though is an attitude I have come across time and again in online forums, interviews, readings, generally the panoply of literary culture. Where writers treat poetry - their main creative endeavour - as a source of comfort, a tamed pet that usually behaves itself, and if it wees on the carpet is given a telling-off. A safe environment where the good poetry of today is read and applauded, but not attacked, and where purpose and meaning of the poetic effort is never discussed.

Maybe this attitude is assumed for the purposes of communal events, to boost the writer's self-esteem, or to play along with the etiquette of being confident about the worth of your own work or the work being displayed.

But the problem of this attitude is that it avoids the possibility of deep emotional connections, which are never safe, and always change the people involved. Connections to the works you read, and to works you are writing. How can your poems possibly attain greatness if you are fundamentally untouched? Would you recognise it and be affected by it if you see it? Greatness, which is not about how well the poem is written, but the purpose of the poem itself.

The classic essay by Donald Hall "Poetry and Ambition", talks about the difference between good and great poetry and the worthy aim (if difficult and unsure) of writing great poetry. He is right to say the poem, not the poet, will be what remains, one of "the stars in the sky". And it is entirely reasonably and even probable to think that all our efforts are for nothing, and that we haven't succeeded.

But we still need to question, rigorously and continually, the purpose of our poetic efforts, and of each poem we write. What does it contribute? This is a hard question to answer, striking as it does at the root of our self-esteem as writers. And difficult as these things are to discuss publicly, we need to discuss them for writers like myself, still an apprentice, to understand that greatness, rather than publication or fellowship, is the ultimate aim. That technical skill is only an intermediate step.

As a writer, this is the first danger of poetry. It throws into question the focus I have put on my life and ensures I can never stop questioning it.

The second danger of poetry is as a reader. If I don't feel that what I am reading is somehow dangerous to me, challenging me in some way fundamental to how I live, it can only be a comfort in the way pulp fiction is a comfort, or junk food. It can't be art.

Of course in this relationship the reader must play their part, or even the greatest poems will go unnoticed. To read poetry attentively and openly means taking your time, rereading, registering the twitches of your sensitive nose-hairs to the fluctuations of allusion, metaphor, rhythm, structure. Thinking about what you have read, and thinking whole-heartedly, that is with your mind and your heart open.

This is demanding stuff, and no wonder people select the things they put their energy into. But it is still essential for the great works to live. Will we look back at the poetry of the 21st century and be able to pick out the great poems from the wealth of published material? Critics and poets and academics perform this function by praising, reading, referencing, and teaching, and by these means some work survives in our culture, and some doesn't.

So be a reader that demands greatness as well as skill. Be a writer that demands these things from yourself. Strive for what you can never achieve, and you may achieve something worth reading.

The marriage of sound and sense

Unlike temper and policy, sound and sense usually make for good bedfellows.

The following describes briefly my own understanding of the concepts and choices around sound and how they affect sense.

Other writers would describe it differently, and probably better. Nevertheless everyone needs to understand these things in their own way, and incorporate them into their poetic practice deep enough to be (in part) almost without thinking. While I have separated these ideas out individually, in reality they work together so closely it's not clear where one finishes and the other starts. I find these are things best taken into account at the revising stage of writing, and over time if you continue thinking about them, hopefully good choices happen earlier and earlier in the drafts of your poems.

Sound can be examined at the following levels:

Individual words

Apart from the meaning, the sound of consonants and vowels contributes to the experience of the poem; and when the poet manipulates patterns of words to form sequences of sound like alliteration and assonance, this contribution increases. Alliteration and assonance can support or undercut the poetic form or genre, and contribute feelings of closure or relationship in unrhymed poems. Some simple examples are using letters like s, th, ck, sh, to indicate a physical sensation of sliding, stickiness, snake-like movement; or round vowels like o, ou, ow, to indicate a balanced openness. Where you may want to temporarily break free of a chosen form, these devices can preserve the general feeling of unity of the broken section with the rest of the poem, such as Milton's use of the following words in a description of Hell, where he breaks the blank verse meter he is using:

Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and shades of death

(Paradise Lost, 2.621)


I find the best way to begin being aware of the feelings associated with consonants and vowels is to find the words you already use and examine the effect they have. An example is the phrase I used above: a balanced openness.

The balance is expressed in the sound by the two 'a''s either side of the 'l'; in addition the heavier stress on the first syllable is "balanced" by the longer although lighter second syllable. The past tense use of the word by adding the letter 'd' means the word does not end with a trailing off sound of 'nce' but the complete ending of 'd'.

Openness obviously starts with the wide mouth of the 'o' which rounds down into the 'pen' and stretches out with the 'ness' to make it more than describing the quality once or of one finite object. The repeating of the 'e' vowel sound helps bring to the second and third syllables a continuation that also contributes to the effect aligning with the meaning of the word.

Combining these two words as a phrase, therefore, combines these two experiences of sound to create a specific effect that may or may not fit into the poem you are creating.

Whether this applies to languages other than English I do not know, but generally I have found that the sound of individual words (nouns and adjectives especially) often can be felt to contribute to our experience of their sense.

Individual lines

This is where meter comes in explicitly. Above I started to talk about combinations of sounds within and between words. Looking at a line of poetry, the alliteration and assonance within words and between words is one layer of sound; the other is the manipulation of meter (and by association, line length). A poem being in free verse does not mean there is no meter or the metrical effect does not matter. It simply means the poet has no explicit grid of meter to write on top of that is universally recognised; the poet may have - often does have - their own habitual regular or irregular meter(s).

The sound of individual lines by meter can be harder to assess because it is a subtler effect and can be drowned out by alliteration and assonance. I find it useful to think of the background meter as the drumbeat underneath the clash of cymbals (alliteration and assonance), and the flowing melody (actual words chosen).

I'll only discuss this briefly, because there is so much written on the use of meter to contribute to the effects of poetry (see Shaw's Blank Verse text as an example that focuses on one poetic form).

In non-free verse, the meter is an externally imposed idea that the actual poem must treat with but not completely live up to, so that its fluctuations become expressive and not monotonous or robotic.

Continuing with the blank verse examples (as this is my favourite form), substitution of any of the five "feet" of the iambic pentameter line alters the expected meter and helps express what may be happening in the poem, or sometimes in the relationship between the reader and the poem.

Keats with his exquisite sense of metrical manipulation provides any number of useful examples of different forms. One of my favourites of his, Ode to a Nightingale, includes these lines when talking of his morbid invitation to death:

Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain -
To thy high requiem become a sod.

The two strongest metrical effects here, in my opinion, are the substitution of the first iamb foot of the first line with a trochee, emphasising the 'Still' over the 'wouldst', as the strong answer to his preceding question, and in the second and third iamb feet of the second line, trochees again, this time expressing the sense of rising with the word 'high' and the falling of from here through the 'requiem' emphasising falling down to (literally) earth with the word 'sod'. In terms of word choice, the sybillance of 'still', 'wouldst', 'sing' and 'sod' both approach the melodious idea of the nightingale's song, and form links between these words that are so important in the meaning Keats is making. The rhyme of 'thy' immediately preceding 'high' increases the effect of the trochee substitution.

With free verse, the reader must go with the poet's meter and be thrown up and down and sideways as the poet chooses (rather like the expressiveness of classical music compared to the regular beat of pop music).

The long and flexible lines of Whitman in his deservedly adored Song of Myself shows how this can be well done.

Again examination of Whitman's meter has been done in more detail elsewhere, so I will just note that his changes of metrical emphasis can match his meaning, such as in the last line of the first section of this poem:

Nature without check with original energy.

I interpret the sound effects as follows. The stresses on the words 'without' and 'with' are arranged in the line so that the stressed 'out' of without appears stronger after the unstressed 'ure' and 'with' preceding it; and later in the line, 'with' appears a little stronger by preceding the (again relatively) unstressed 'o'. The repetitive use of the 'g' in particular, in the words 'original' and 'energy' help combine and heighten the focus on this phrase.

Stanzas and overall poem:

The sound effects of groups of lines and the poem as a whole rely on the work done we have just discussed - individual word choice, and relationships between words in terms of stress and alliteration/assonance.

Looked at in view of a number of lines, the progression of the reader's expectations of meter, and their experience of the variations or effects of sound becomes cumulative, and this can be used in terms of progression, and unity.

Progression of meaning of the poem can be matched and expressed also in the progression of sound effects. For example, moving from a regular, lightly-stressed, buoyant stanza full of o's, l's, n's, r's, etc, to a more irregular, highly-stressed stanza using u's, z's, hard g's, ck's etc, starts to create a story, and the thoughtful poet will have done this deliberately, perhaps to reflect a change in feeling in the meaning of the poem, an event or a change of speaker, or perhaps how much we should rely on the sincerity of the words.

At this stage examples can become time-consuming to explain, and probably unnecessary anyway. I would suggest taking a look at some sonnets of Shakespeare for a manageable hunk of words.

You may be asking "where are the contemporary examples?". Go look at your favourite contemporary poems and figure out how their sound affects their sense. One of the tests of good poetry, in my opinion, is whether the sound actually contributes to the sense, or seems random, with opportunities for emphasis lost.

Poetry about death

Whew! I've spent the last few months finishing my degree, but now can focus again on poetry, so.. up first, a subject I've been thinking - and writing - about.

How many poems are about the inevitability of death? Quite a lot.

Billy Collins said "there's one subject in lyric poetry, and that is you have this existence and at the end of it you're going to experience non-existence" (The Independent, 31 May 2003).

Well, that's a theme in many of the poems I've read, from Keats' mellifluous descriptions of life as "where men sit and hear each other groan" in Ode to a Nightingale, to Larkin's Aubade, where death stands "plain as a wardrobe, what we know and have always known".

Death can be longed for, fetishized - Anne Sexton's death baby, for example - or desired as certainty or absence of pain (Keats), or feared (Bowers in Autumn Shade). We don't actually know it since we only experience dying and cannot fully experience it through another's death.

I think of Stevens' Sunday Morning, a defence of atheism, arguing that "death is the mother of beauty", though in this schema Christianity is all about Jesus' sacrifice, death and morbidity, so to argue that this changeless immortal paradise - where ripe fruit never falls - is inadequate because we need death to appreciate life, or that beauty can only exist in relation to its end, seems contradictory...

Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn moves from appreciation of the urn's figures' stability to their static lifelessness, implying change is life, hence death is indispensable, even as he writes "beauty is truth, truth beauty". In Larkin's Aubade religion is a "vast, moth-eaten musical brocade created to pretend we never die".

Stanley Kunitz said "there's always an element of the erotic about death" (The Wild Braid), and how many love poems are based on the changefulness of the adored person, or the speaker themselves, or love? So many of Shakespeare's sonnets are on this theme (such as sonnet 18, where poetry is the only way to freeze time - "thy eternal summer shall not fade".

A collection of poems about death and dying was published in the last few years in NZ (Moonlight, 2008, edited by poet Andrew Johnston), but this was more about grief, and more personal. I must say I've only flicked through it in the bookstore, so this is not a criticism.

The reason this theme has been on my mind is that I've been thinking about subject and purpose of poetry. What do we write and read about, and why? Poetry itself, an expression, a communication, an art. Do we write it to make ephemeral things more permanent? Interesting logic. Shakespeare and other famous poets may have their works live long after their death, but for most of us obscure people what we write might have a zenith as a poem or two in a local literary magazine, that if valued might be archived by a public library or national cultural archives. I know when I write a poem it sets down something, but the poem itself, the words on the paper, last as long as the paper is preserved or the digital file saved, which might not be for very long. You could argue, and I have, that this real poem is a shadow of the poem that the writer had in mind, and that 'Poem' is immortal, being an idea. What Shakespeare had in mind as he wrote that sonnet will never be known. All we have is the real poem. This 'Poem' is of value for the writer and the writer alone.

So we struggle against the death we know is coming, and whether religion comforts us or not (and increasingly in poetry it is not), poetry can be written as an attempt to deal with the experiences or emotions raised by this thought. Does the poet think this poem itself will cheat death? Keats used poesy to try to escape the thought of death in Ode to a Nightingale, but it didn't work, and that failure is the haunting end to the poem. "Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music - do I wake, or sleep?"

Gelatinous sheen

Some thoughts on the texture of language...

Poetry needs its web, its texture, its spin of faintly disturbing sounds layered on associations and structures of meaning and emphasis.

Language poets use can be deceptively simple,

I can find my way back. I know
I will recognize the store
where I used to buy milk and gas.

(Jane Kenyon, from "Back".)

richly discordant,

o brilliant kids, frisk with your dog
fondle your shells and sticks,
bleached by time and the elements,
but there is a line you must not cross,
nor ever trust beyond it
spry cordage of your body to caresses
too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.
The bottom of the sea is cruel.

(Hart Crane, from "Voyages".)

smoothly triumphant,

I am the daughter of earth and of water
and the nurseling of the sky
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores
I change, but I never die

(P.B. Shelley, from "The Cloud".)

and varying degrees of rough:

they never liked you
they are dancing and stamping on you
Daddy daddy you bastard I'm through

(Sylvia Plath, from "Daddy".)

But this sheer sound of language, used most deliberately and self-consciously in poetry, moves us without always realising why. Like reading Proust, whose long sentences wind and unwind in your brain (especially if like me you need to acclimatise to the long sentences and dense pages), but the delicate whiff of a language used to imply nostalgia without overpowering us with it builds from the back of your throat to the tip of your tongue.
This approach is much more effective than if he had talked directly about the loss of times he can never experience again, or even understand, since what he is doing is acknowledging his memory is a fiction. For a long time I used to...

In a similar way swear words need to be used carefully. Repetition, expectation, nulls their effect and they just become another word. Sometimes you can use this to comic effect, playing on the word 'fuck' for instance, breaking past that initial shock and possibly offence, getting us to see the word and it's use in a different light. (I had a vague memory of a poem here, but I haven't been able to locate it.)

What good are the arts?

Learn a poem by heart, and you have it forever.

Comments on and quotes from John Carey's "What Good Are the Arts?", a 2005 book mentioned in my previous post.

What is a work of art?
Carey begins with a very interesting chapter how how we define a work of art and gives his own definition - that is "A work of art is anything that anyone has ever considered a work of art, though it may be a work of art only for that one person." Here his balloon-pricking is hilarious - what things cannot be works of art? Excrement, perhaps? Empty space? An unmade bed? Unfortunately not, according to the activities of artists and acceptance by museums and galleries.

My favourite story was Aaron Barschak, who was charged with criminal damage for splashing red paint on a work of art in an art gallery, the gallery walls and the artists in 2003. His defence was that he was creating his own artwork, just as the artists had done by using etchings by Goya, and that he "intended to enter his work for the Turner Prize".

Other interesting points - "high art" vs "low art" as "what I feel (in response to high art) is more important, special & interesting than what you feel (in response to low art)." But the point Carey hammers in all the way through the book is that we can't know what other people feel, only guess. Sometimes, in some ways, that guess is pretty good. But it's never complete because we can't literally feel what they feel, only what we imagine they might feel based on what we know about them. Relativity is all. Which makes his focus on literature in the second half of the book very interesting, though he admits it's a personal bias in just this way, to prefer one kind of art over another.

Debunking some pro-art arguments
Art as religion : "Artists, as Jacques Barzun has observed, are popularly credited with the divine powers formerly attributed to religious figures. They are expected to be 'demanding' and obscure, like ancient oracles. They are always 'ahead of their time' like Biblical prophets."

Art in the community, not imposed on them but part of all our lives. Art as a part of the usual tasks we do - decorating our homes, for example, tatooing, and other times when by making something special we are creating : "Arts research needs to change direction, to look outwards, and - following the example of Laski and Bourdieu - investigate the audience not the texts."

Literature & self-criticism
"Literature is not just the only art that can criticize itself, it is the only art, I would argue, that can criticize anything, because it is the only art capable of reasoning."

You could argue that self-criticism is present in an ironic installation piece taking the piss out of an artistic theory. Carey says : "Pieces of music can parody other pieces, and paintings can caricature paintings. But this does not amount to a total rejection of music or painting. Literature, however, can totally reject literature, and in this it shows itself more powerful and self-aware than any other art." And goes on to name a number of pieces in literature that reject writing and reading. That the coherent argument against something can only be present in literature (or words borrowed by opera and film). Music is empty of meaning, consisting of sensations that may or may not be interpreted similarly by different listeners.

Literature & indistinctness
The vital element in literature, indistinctness, which forces the reader to use their imagination and effectively create the story in their heads. As in Blake's Sick Rose:

O rose, thou art sick:
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy;
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

What or who is the worm, why is it invisible, and since a worm does not fly in the night, what does it mean? Carey argues that this indistinct imagery forces us to create the story for ourselves, to a greater or lesser extent. Most interesting here is that he traces the flowering of indistinctness in literature to Shakespeare.

More books on reading and writing poetry

After a long hiatus (study commitments..) I needed some poetry back in my life. Blackmail Press #28 came out recently in which I modestly appear; a kind gift by a family member means I'm attending a 2-day poetry course over the summer - so I picked up a few books. Okay, that's not always necessary, but who could resist?

When considering buying books (not just on poetry), I always think in terms of what I would want to refer to again and again. A short term read is better coming from the public library rather than a bookstore, unless I plan to pass it on in some way, or want to support the author.

There are some recommended books by the course tutor which I bought, not because you have to have them but because my poetry collection is looking a bit sparse at the moment. I've weeded my books twice in the last year or two and try to borrow rather than buy, as I've just said. I also picked up a few others that looked intriguing...

The distinction between books on poetry and books of poetry isn't clear-cut, in my mind. If you want to learn more about writing poetry you need to read poetry. If you're not reading poetry, why on earth would you bother trying to write it?

So here are the books sitting on my desk at the moment, waiting to be read properly, and later joined by a couple of others I'm waiting on from Fishpond.

Strand, Mark. & Boland, Eavan (eds). The Making of a Poem : A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. New York / London : W. W. Norton & Co., 2000
"If example is the best teacher..." I'd never heard of this book before I came across it in Borders yesterday. But I'm always interested in learning more about forms, and when I opened it I realised it was chockful of poems arranged by form, and not just sonnets, villanelles, heroic couplets etc, but also the elegy, the ode, the pastoral, and a section on open forms. Less technical perhaps than other books but all the basics are here and then some.

Fry, Stephen. The Ode Less Travelled : Unlocking the Poet Within. London : Arrow Books, 2005
I'd knocked around buying this one for a while but was always put off by the author. Why would I want to learn about poetry from Stephen Fry, despite his perfect performance as Jeeves? But looking through it again in Unity Books recently, I realised how unpretentious and downright funny he was about poetry - and we all need that. I certainly do. How about his 3 Golden Rules for reading his book?
1. Take your time
2. Don't be afraid
3. Always have a notebook with you.
Rules for life, in fact. And he isn't afraid to talk technically. So a breath of fresh air.

Harvey, Siobhan (ed). Our Own Kind : 100 New Zealand Poems about Animals. Auckland : Godwit, 2009
Recommended reading for the poetry course, whose tutor incidentally is Harvey herself. I do come at this book from a strong animal rights perspective, being a vegan for ethical reasons. On the whole I thought I couldn't pass this one up, and when browsing it I came across several poems that prompted me to bring out my notebook and pen - a sure sign of success. In particular the strong bitter ending of Brian Turner's Pig, Fleur Adcock's Crab which talks about eating the "permitted parts of the crab" (I doubt the crab permitted it), and Our Cow by Cilla McQueen, which after reading a couple of times unfastened itself for me and began to spread in lots of possible directions, including a respect for the cow itself. Plus the book has lots of cute black & white pictures of animals (and people interacting with them) by Mark Smith.

Green, Paula. & Ricketts, Harry. 99 Ways into New Zealand Poetry : over 85 key poems plus 25 poets talk about their work. Auckland : Vintage, 2010
Recommended reading again. Anthologies about New Zealand poetry are frequently published, with different slants (spirituality, animals, Auckland, Wellington etc) but this book intends, according to the preface, to open up rather than fix, celebrate rather than criticise, and introduce rather than assume. When looking through it I'm struck by how little I know about the poetry scene in New Zealand. This book covers the usual suspects like form and effects, but also has significant sections looking at the history of poetry in NZ, and other ways to look at poetry by "identities" - ethnic identities, New Zealandish, women, children. These aspects are what most interest me at first glance.

Carey, John. What Good are the Arts? London: Faber & Faber, 2005.
This is a question I ask myself often. Carey also had some controversial reactions to this book, and when I began to read I found out why. He does prick the balloon of pretentiousness that exists around (seems chiefly the visual) arts. Claims of spiritual eminence and elitism etc. He also has a great sense of humour, particularly when talking about what a work of art is. I want to write about this more in a later post, and I'm only half-way through, so all I'll say here is that he starts by asking what a work of art is, then examining the usual arguments around the arts (high art vs low art, scientific work on arts, do arts make us better, art as religion), and then talks specifically about literature (including poetry), and why he thinks literature is better than all the other arts. A couple of interesting concepts here are - literature's ability to criticise itself, and the idea of indistinctness (see my comment on Cilla McQueen's poem from the animals anthology).
Not specifically poetry, but very relevant.

The scholar of one candle

I have been thinking about readers of poetry, and a phrase by Wallace Stevens keeps occuring to me - "the scholar of one candle" in The Auroras of Autumn. Various writers have interpreted this as Stevens himself, the poet, and the reader...

.......He opens the door of his house
On flames. The scholar of one candle sees
An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame
Of everything he is. And he feels afraid.

(Auroras of Autumn, section VI.)

The scholar, here most identifiable as Stevens/the poet, only has one candle, a meager source of light (truth), energy, force, beauty, transformation, power. As a late poem this naturally seems to reflect on Stevens' sense of approaching death as well as the power of nature (the aurora borealis) over the puny skill of individual humans. This isn't a summary of the poem, however - not only is it 10 sections long, but Stevens can skilfully compress ideas into powerful symbols that mean more than he states.

Nevertheless I have often come across this poem, and the short lines I have quoted above, discussed as key aspects of Stevens' work, and when thinking about the idea of "the reader of poetry" (in which I include myself, of course), as someone overwhelmed with a light that they also possess in part - someone who is afraid of, but recognises and loves, this light. For me the idea of a reader is not a distant, passive, objective function, but immediate, passionate, and active - the poem is not complete unless the text is read or listened to and responded to. The poem is not just words on a page or in the air, but the creator, creation and recipient interacting together.

This is not an original idea; I have found it in many guises, including in poets and poems. One of these is another Stevens poem, The House was Quiet and the World was Calm. The word scholar is used for the reader, who blurs into the book which blurs into the house and the world. The activity of reading becomes or makes a quiet, calm space in which everything, including the reader, is indistinguishable from everything else:

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

Reading this poem, I recognise that special space I have often felt when reading, especially poetry.

Representation and resistance

The September issue of Poetry is now out. There's an interesting article by Tony Hoagland comparing two types of poetry - designated by him as perspective and entanglement. Two kinds of poetic meaning, value systems, "tribes". Hoagland makes the important consideration that both of these functions are important, and then goes on to talk about the second, "entanglement", also called resistance, derangement, disorientation, as the most recent, and less well-known. An intimate struggle between the poem and the reader that resists the mind, and a way to talk about "collective dizziness" as a "fundamental symptom of modern life".

To me this construct of meaning is interesting in the opposite way I personally react to it. With communication overload, a hyperawareness of the subjectivities and imperfections of language and culture, the time-pressured and ephemeral conditions of our existence, is poetry to work with this by using fractured sentences, phrases, words, constructions? Undercut assumptions of narrative, meaning, hierachy, place? So many poems I've read have this uncertain play going on, either in the text itself as in many LANGUAGE-influenced poems, or in the concepts put together. I find it bewildering, exhausting, and not, in the end, useful to me - which puts me firmly in the first, more conservative tribe, of perspective, I assume. Especially with the concept of a poem as a made thing, an artifice, a work.

What I'm not sure of, and which haunts me as I read and reread this article, is the idea of a poem as an experience. When I write, I am trying to induce an experience of a certain kind in the reader (the reader being usually me but hopefully others too). The vertigo Hoagland talks about fits as an experience, but so does the blossoming of emotional recognition, surprise, elation, transcendance which many historical poems evoke in me (I'm thinking of a poem such as the lone and level sands of Ozymandias, for example, or more recently, Anthony Hecht's Peripeteia.)

So a poem must create an effect (or why read it), whether emotional, and/or intellectual. But must it represent the times? I.e. induce a state in the reader that is intended to replicate, maybe at an accelerated or focused way, conditions we already live in? Or could it, instead, create a slow place, a safe place, where those emotions, truths, and facts, that we often forget or miss in our hectic lives, can surface, and be considered? Where we can love at a depth not expressed in any other way, where we can remember death, or those quiet voices telling us we have forgotten to take a breath, change course, speak up, listen?

Hoagland's excerpts of Lyn Hejinian's The Fatalist as an example of incorporating both "tribes" are interesting, however, and as I've never read the book, warrant some investigation.

I re-read my post, and wonder if these comments attempt to make a complex thing too simple. Probably. This is the sort of issue that should never be resolved, but considered, argued about, and struggled with, by anyone interested in reading or writing poetry.

Good books on poetry

Looking at my bookshelf, I have a number of books I'd highly recommend to anyone on writing or reading poetry, as well as a few books I don't own but can also recommend.

So here is the beginnings of a list of good books on poetry. These are listed in order of preference and will be expanded over time:

Shaw, Robert. (2007). Blank Verse : a guide to its history and use. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press
A detailed, ambitious focus solely on iambic pentameter since its origins in the sixteenth century, and particularly valuable for covering 20th and 21st century poets that have written in blank verse, such as Howard Nemerov and Rachel Hadas. Essential if you want to understand the form.

Fussell, Paul. (1979). Poetic Meter & Poetic Form. Revised Ed. McGraw-Hill.
Informative book on meter, and yes, form, that's well-written and actually shows how meter and form create meaning as well as the rest of the poem. A useful reference book for readers and every poet or would-be poet should have read this or a similar book.

Keats, John. (2001). Selected Letters 1817-1820. In Complete Poems and Selected letters of John Keats. New York: The Modern Library.
This edition is only one of many published. These letters show the development of Keats' poetic career, knowledge, maturity, and understanding of poetry itself. It's in these letters he discusses the famous concept of "Negative Capability".

Rilke, Rainer Maria. (2004). Letters to a Young Poet. Translation by Herter Norton, M.D. Revised Ed. New York / London: W.W. Norton & Company.
Again one of many publications. Letters written by Rilke to a would-be poet from 1903-1908. Rilke has a sensitive way of describing sensibility, and poetic and life choices, and is unabashedly emotional about it. If you feel jaded and too intellectual about your poetry, this could be an inspiring read.

Hirsch, Edward. (1999). How to Read a Poem : and Fall in Love with Poetry. Houghton Miffler Harcourt.
In my mind I always add "..all over again." to the end of the title. Another wonderful book for fresh enthusiasm and reading poetry you might not otherwise read. Also informative. The first chapter can be read on the Poetry Foundation website.

Kowit, Steve. (2003). In the Palm of Your Hand : the Poet's Portable Workshop. Atlantic Books.
The cover calls this "lively", and it is. Kowit aims to reach both new and experienced poets, covering just about everything you could imagine in a small volume. Because it's a general guide I would suggest it to inexperienced poets first, readers second, and everyone else when they feel the need to do some general reading again.

Favourite poets

My biases will be obvious from this list of my favourite poets. I don't tend to read a lot of contemporary poetry.

My love of poetry began with a small brown book, with the cover text faded completely off and the spine starting to disintegrate. Inside this book I found selections from two Romantic poets who have formed my ideas of what poetry is and my tastes.

John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. I've long lost this little book, but I now own the complete works of both poets, along with the selected letters of Keats, a useful poetics text. Favourite poems include Keats' Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on Melancholy, La Belle Dame sans Merci; Shelley's The Cloud, The Sensitive Plant, Ozymandias...and others that don't immediately come to mind.

Next Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens (I seem to group my poets in pairs). These two modernist poets offer the same thing, to me, from slightly different angles. Crane and Stevens both use an oblique, difficult kind of language to convey the idea or emotion they are writing about. Stevens tends to be more about the concept than Crane, who tends to go for the feeling. Favourite poems? Include Crane's Voyages, To Brooklyn Bridge (from The Bridge); Stevens' Le Monocle de Mon Oncle, The Idea of Order at Key West, and the famous Sunday Morning...

Other (minor) poetic mentions include Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, e.e. cummings, Walt Whitman... and the only woman on my list, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Aurora Leigh)...

More on this topic to come, however.

N.B. The title of this blog comes from Edgar Bowers' moving and skillful poem Autumn Shade.

"For there he is,
In a steel helmet, raging, fearing his death,
Carrying bread and water to a quiet,
Placing ten sounds together in one sound:
Confirming his election, or merely still,
Sleeping, or in a colloquy with the sun."

Reading poetry

Every poem is personal; every poet feels like they belong to you and no-one else. I know very little about famous poets' lives; have read very few biographies or even searched Wikipedia for many of them. But it doesn't matter. The poem is more important than the poet (numerous quotes could be inserted here). Reading something like Hart Crane's Voyages, for example.. "permit me voyage, love, into your hands", his last, major poem The Broken Tower, I don't have to think about Crane's love of his life, a sailor for whom the sex was casual, or his one heterosexual love Peggy, on the boat with him when he died. This aspect of the poem (it's background, conception and personal context for the poet) is interesting, sometimes useful even, if you want to know how the poem was intended to be read. But if you are just reading from your personal situation, which I would argue any emotional reading would be, you take the words and interpret them in the light of your own experience, and if they're good, they might alter how you see aspects of your own life or people in it.

Another potential discovery - Katherine Liddy

Katherine Liddy was one of the poets in "AUP New Poets 3" put out in 2008. The book was reviewed by Tim Jones in his blog.

Liddy caught my eye when browsing this book in Unity High Street as iambic pentameter stands out as a certain shape of text chunks on the white page (a quick and dirty way to locate it, provided there aren't too many breaks). Again haven't read properly, just noted here to follow up later.

Tim Jones notes most poems in this book were end-rhymed, so not actually blank verse, though I'm sure she could write blank verse without much change of stride. I wonder if she has...

David Beach's prose sonnets

David Beach calls his works "prose sonnets"... an example published in Trout 15. Other poems can be viewed via his NZETC page.

They appear to be, from a brief scan, rough and dirty iambic pentameter (with plenty of elisions, additional syllables, and substitutions). Perhaps too many variations to qualify strictly, but definitely an interesting read.

He has a couple of collections out - "Abandoned Novel" (2006) and "The End of Atlantic City" (2008).

I haven't read either of these, just a couple of individual poems here and there, so not offering an opinion. This is a placemarker - one to come back to later with greater attention.

Purpose of this blog

The purpose of this blog is to discuss all things poetic - poets, poetry, meter, rhythm and form, with an emphasis on blank verse (iambic pentameter), and New Zealand poetry. To store useful links in context with my own notes and quotes. To think about, make coherent, and publish my own thoughts on poetry.