This Business of Poetry, Part 5: Practice and Meditation, continued—10 Poems That Have Changed Your Life

I spotted this book at a garage sale: 10 Poems That Will Change Your Life. The title was both intriguing and audacious. I disagreed with the premise implied by the title, but I had to read it—the price was right, and I needed to see what the choices were and how the anthologist asserted each poem’s significance as a “life changer”.

Let me start by saying that I completely agree with the idea that interacting with poetry can be a life altering, perspective changing enterprise. I firmly believe this. Czeslew Milosz’s poem “Dedication” positively aches with these lines:

What poetry does not

save  a nation

 or a people?

I believe in the uplifting and healing power of poetry. Poetry is, for one thing, a compendium of human history, of humanity’s struggle, resilience and survival, if not also of transcendence.

I am suspicious, however, of a programmatic approach—to me this smacks of didacticism, rather than a sincere attempt at guiding others toward portals and new ways of thinking. This, incidentally, is why I tend to read books of literary criticism with a skeptical eye.

T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets are among the most beautiful poetic testaments ever crafted, but if you know that Eliot was an elite member of the intelligentsia of his time, and that he was writing with an eye toward programming others of his rank to work in support of the prevailing Tory, oligarchic “power elite”, this rather colors one’s reading of the work, doesn’t it?

I will not write an apologia for Eliot; he was a class-conscious bigot who used his position in the publishing world to promote philosophies for the uncommon man, and that these philosophies were conveniently conformative and acceptable to what the ruling class wanted the public to think. There is no doubt that he placed himself in a position of authority among the intelligentsia, and allowed his work to be used as a political tool. While I find it repugnant that he used his undeniable talent and vision to promulgate a sociopolitical cultural agenda, I cannot deny that the Four Quartets are a brilliantly crafted collection of works. These poems are utterly beautiful, and the messages they convey (if you don’t follow up on all the references; these would require several volumes of annotation and particular readings of American and British history) are ultimately transformative.

What I suggest is that if you encounter this body of work by Eliot without benefit (or detriment) of the foreknowledge of Eliot’s cultural agenda, you are likely to have a much different, more uplifting and transcendent reading of the pieces than after you have read a biography of Eliot, literary criticism of his work by other authors and one or two of his plays, which positively ooze with disdain for the common man. It is too bad that Eliot set himself apart to be an arbiter and that his intended audience was so small and narrow. It is also too bad that one must have read so much beforehand to really understand what Eliot meant by all of what he wrote in those four final poetic writings of his career.

The work stands on its own and transcends the purpose its author made for it. I treasure these works because of their unintended message to me.

Returning to my thoughts on 10 Poems That Will Change Your Life, the well-intentioned author of this small anthology spends much of the space in the book telling us how the ten selections were life altering for him. If you remove that commentary, the biographies of the authors of the poems and the suggested further reading, then this book really offers very little for its retail price of $14.00 plus applicable sales tax. You and I could spend that much money on a much larger anthology or on the collected works of a single author, then to mull over the work on our own, without being told what to think about it.

I considered the selection of poems offered, and wondered at it. Yes, there are some interesting selections. Whitman’s Song of Myself makes total sense. Mary Oliver’s The Journey is also a powerful statement. But out of all the 27,000 lines of poetry by Rumi, why select Zero Circle?  And, if you are presenting one poem by a Persian poet, why then take a selection from another Persian poet? Why not represent a Chinese or Japanese zen poet?

The small sampling in this thin volume is a highly subjective one, and while the dust jacket claims they are “astonishing poems” that “can inspire you to live what you always knew in your bones, but never had the words for”, I wonder. In fact, I think the book failed to do that for the original owner, which is why I found it at the garage sale. Ultimately, the book failed to do that for me, as well. Why should I care about how the anthologist experienced these poems?

I long ago came to the conclusion that individuals cannot (although they try to do so) buy or sell personal experience. The people who try to sell their own experience to others are false prophets; the people who try to buy someone else’s experience are abdicating their own. The publishing industry should heed this, if it wants to survive.

To his credit, the anthologist does acknowledge his small sampling to be a starting point, but I think he missed something by not proposing a next step, which I will do now: to create a practice around the poetry that inspires you.

How would such a practice work? You could start with a short list of poems that have inspired you. Copy them into a notebook and think about them. Recognizing that such exercises are naturally subjective, write what you think about the poems, cite reasons why you love them and why they inspire you. Use this as springboard to your own thinking, thought process, analysis and writing.

A friend of mine told me that she had shown her work to a mentor who offered the criticism that too much of her life was reflected in the writing!!! Well, for heaven’s sake, your writing is a subjective experience, and it should be—it is your experience!

When asked by someone “What should I write?” the author advised, “Write what you know.”

Amen.

___________

Next time: Trial and Error, Blank Pages and Failures

This Business of Poetry, Part 4: Peak Experiences, the Abyss and Everything Between; Writing as Meditation Practice

Last time, we talked about experience and awareness, as well as how the poetic mind engages with experience in reflection.

This time I want to make it crystal clear that every kind of experience is fair game for the poet. When everything is not “coming up roses”, that may be as good a time as any to think and write about what is happening in your life. Peak experiences are fabulous, if short lived in the scheme of things and infrequent; one peak experience may have to do for a lifetime. We may experience many more moments of pain, sorrow, horror or otherwise abysmal moments; writing about these can help us through crisis and toward healing.

Rumi is the best selling dead poet ever! The ecstasy of his revelatory conversational relationship with Shams, and the agony of Shams’ departure were the food that fueled, during the next twenty or more years of Rumi’s life, no less that 27,000 lines of poetic text and additional prose, recorded by amanuenses.

Carlo Gesualdo, an Italian nobleman of the late Renaissance period, is known today for two things: he was a murderer, and he wrote some of the most tortured chromatic music for choirs to sing. Those pieces that were secular undoubtedly settings of texts he wrote. Here is an example of one from Volume IV of Gesualdo’s collected madrigals for five voices:

Io tacerò

Io tacerò, ma nel silenzio mio,


La lagrime i sospiri, 


Diranno i miei martiri. 


Ma s’avverrà ch’io mora, 


Griderà poi per me la morte ancora.



(I will keep quiet, yet in my silence, 


My tears and sighs, 


Shall tell of my pain. 


And if I should die,


Death shall cry out for me once again.)



In van dunque, o crudele, 


Vuoi che’l mio duol e’l tuo rigor si cele. 


Poi che mia cruda sorte 


Da la voce al silenzio ed a la morate.



(Thus in vain, oh cruel one, 


Yearn you for my pain and your harshness to be hidden. 


Since my cruel fate 


Gives voice to silence and to death.)¹

I get the feeling Gesualdo wasn’t a fun guy to be around.

Emily Dickinson could write of pain:

Pain has an element of blank;

It cannot recollect

When it began, or if there was

A time when it was not.

It has no future but itself,

Its infinite realms contain


Its past, enlightened to perceive


New periods of pain.

But she also of  an envisioned joy:

Me! Come! My dazzled face

In such a shining place!

Me! Hear! My foreign ear

The sounds of welcome near!

The saints shall meet

Our bashful feet.

My holiday shall be

That they remember me;

My paradise, the fame

That they pronounce my name.

The point I make is that life’s joys and pains can most assuredly be commemorated in your writing, from among an infinite combination of words. All that is needed is the courage to explore the landscape of your dreams and feelings and experiences. And it does take courage.

After tragedy, some people find they cannot express themselves. I know I have difficulty; the writing that results can seem stilted or desultory, unfocused. This may be due to depression or a feeling of numbness. The Canadian writer, Mordecai Richler said, bluntly,

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing: it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustrations that it creates.

Maxwell Perkins, who was editor for Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, put it this way:

You have to throw yourself away when you write.

There is truth to this; while you write, you are committing bits of yourself to paper or to a digital screen. There is an element of self-emptying to writing that may ultimately be medicinal, but it could be difficult to arrive at that point. I cannot cite any document or study that will prove what I say; all I can tell you is that I have experienced this for myself.

How do we process our joys, tragedies and terrors through writing? Well, it cannot be too obvious that we need to write. You need to write something everyday in order to see results and completions over time. Author Ann Lamott puts it this way, in her wonderful book Bird By Bird:

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.

Elsewhere, she also said:

If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.

The hardest part of writing is letting go (or committing) so that you can “throw yourself away,” as Perkins suggested, even if what you are letting go of is what you love the most or has given you the greatest pain.

Writing must be practiced just as any other skill is practiced. How do I do it? Well, to start with, the size of my purse is dictated by whether it will hold a simple composition notebook; I tend to haul one around with me all the time. It has a pencil stuck inside it. I write everything in the notebook: dreams, meeting minutes, ideas, shopping lists, ideas for poems and actual poem drafts. This is my practice, anytime, anywhere. You never know what will happen; every place can offer inspiration, and anything you write down could be further developed later.

Simply put, writing and refining what you write is the practice—and the meditation. Whether you end up with anything you would want to publish is not the point.

________

¹ English translation by Matthew Smyth

______

Next time:  Practice and Meditation, continued—10 Poems That Have Changed Your Life

This Business of Poetry, Part 3: Thought, Word and Deed; Metaphor and Imagination

“What you seek is like music. It sweeps you aloft so that you are moving in glory among the stars. Take time to find the unseen.”

--from A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L’Engle

Last time, we explored the question of what sort of person might be a poet. Now, let’s turn our attention to the poetic existence. Such existence is all about mental attention and where you turn yours.

There are certain mental activities that take place within both hemispheres of the brain; music and poetry are among these activities. Engagement with what is through the lens of possibility might also be a way to describe this. (Flights of your fancy pass through landscapes of dream and imagination; where do they lead you?)

I am sure these are bold statements to make, without recourse to scientific data, neurological comparisons or a degree in biochemistry, but my intuition tells me this is so.

We go about our daily activities, some reflexively or by rote, some by thought and plan. Throughout our days, we may follow a daily routine that seems tedious, and yet each day is different—there is always something irregular punctuating the regular activities. We think, we speak, we act and we witness; later our minds review these actions and happenings, categorizing, analyzing and judging. This is the activity of the left hemisphere of the brain, the center of language, logic and order.

Meanwhile, the right hemisphere of the brain may engage with the remembrance of these activities in a completely different manner than the left hemisphere. This other hemisphere processes experience as imagery, symbolism, impression; reflections tend to be of the big picture variety, leaping from idea to idea in a more random manner. Shades, shadows, colors, sounds, shapes and silence that may have been among the daily experiences run through this entirely different filtering process.

Left hemisphere and right hemisphere register experience differently, and to that I say “vive la difference”! The right hemisphere has a natural tendency to lavish attention on much smaller details (moments of surprise, apprehension of beauty, tiny joys, slights, hurtful words from someone, seeing someone act in a mean or careless way and other seemingly useless bits of awareness that flow through our days). When the mind is engaged in this way, the person, embedded or immersed in experience, is likely to be completely sincere and guileless—and free.

Gaston Bachelard, a French mathematician and chemist who turned his attention to poetics (joining science, aesthetics and psychoanalysis) had this to say about the way our experience, embedded in the memory as imagery, transcends the original experience:

From the standpoint of its will to shape experience, the literary image is a physical reality that has its own relief. More precisely, it is the psychic relief, the multi-leveled psyche. It furrows or it raises; it finds a depth or suggests an elevation; it rises or falls between heaven and earth. It is polyphonic because it is poly-semantic. If meanings become too profuse, it can fall to word-play. If it restricts itself to a single meaning, it can fall into didacticism. The true poet avoids both dangers. He plays and he teaches. In him, the word reflects and reflows; in him time begins to wait. ¹

A very fancy and beautiful way to talk about a poet’s main exercise with regard to the images derived from experience: metaphor.

It may be unnecessary for me to offer this explanation, but etymologically, metaphor comes from meta, which means “transcendent”, and pherein, which means “carry”. The word metaphor means to “carry beyond”.  Aristotle assigned the sense of meaning for metaphor that we have today:

—

“The converted use of a word (metaphor) as the application of one word to signify another, where the former is usually used to mean something else.” ²

Why? Why is metaphor the poet’s main exercise?

We experience mostly in part, and even that part we cannot claim to truly understand or own. Our experience of something is not the thing itself. Metaphor points the way to a kind of definition—even revelation—that might make an impression on someone else, or perhaps offer an apprehension of the experience.

Even so, as beautiful as an apprehension may be, it continues to elude being the thing itself. One cannot buy or trade experience (although you wouldn’t know that by looking at self-help and spirituality sections of any bookstore or library). Your experience is your own, period. The prophet Isaiah sums this up rather well (Isaiah 55: 8-9 NIV):

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

This is so for everyone. If you want to try to make someone understand your experience, you have to communicated by using metaphors or analogies the other person might understand.

We’ve talked about the role of experience and the role of metaphor; what we haven’t touched on is why we would waste our time engaging in poetic streams of thought. Many people have addressed this in books about writing, literary criticism and psychology.

Ultimately, I think that we can boil all this down to a few essential reasons. Firstly, it is mental stimulus that is a byproduct of awareness; everyone needs to exercise the brain cells. Secondly, writing is therapeutic in the sense that the kernel you start with is a happening that captivates your attention and the exercise of writing helps you to work through that captivation (whether it is a positive or negative one). 

Thirdly, I think of writing as a meditation practice. I set aside time to do this (granted, sometimes I actually have to shove aside other obligations in order to make time for writing), and I allow my right brain hemisphere to explore, as uninhibited by the left hemisphere as possible. How I do this is an experience I can describe, but not impart in a way that would be useful for anyone trying to “learn” how to do it. Personal discovery of how to “get in the zone” is likely an integral part of the practice.

It may be a matter of, as the epigraph above suggests, taking the time to pay attention to “the unseen”.

___

¹ Bachelard, Gaston. L’Air et les songes (Librarie José Corti, 1962). pp 286-288

² Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. S.H. Butcher (London: Macmillan and Co., 1902), 77-79.

___

Next time: Peak Experiences, the Abyss and Everything in Between,
Writing as Meditation Practice

… Meanwhile, when something catches your attention, write it down and keep thinking about it!

A Mild And Breezy Afternoon

Between two shores,
sun shimmering on water,
birds, in flight, in rest, at play
in the musical waves.

Soft voices murmur
from one shore to another;
softer steps in the quiet sands,
also musical waves.

One shore opposes the other,
joined by living water;
a counterpoint of
muted musical waves.

Opposites need not be extreme,
opposites need not find attraction,
but may freely join in conversation,
making musical waves

Of a mild and breezy afternoon.

© 2012 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

This Business of Poetry, Part 2: Who and What is a Poet?

Here are some words that have been used to describe the poetry of poets:

            Political

            Subversive

            Discerning

            Beautiful

            Evocative

            Serene

            Incomprehensible

            Wild

            Erotic

            Evocative

            Impressionistic

            Metaphysical

            Obscene

            Surreal

There are a lot more adjectives that could be used to describe the work, but do these adjectives tell us anything about the poets, themselves? What kind of person is a poet?

In my last article, we looked at the areas in philosophy that strive to define, categorize and legitimize poetry and poetic form. All such speculation might be interesting, but philosophy has no business being involved in the business (such as there is) of poetry. This may well be an audacious statement to make, but I believe it to be true. The philosophical branches can only strive to create rigid structures and teachings, ideological cults, if you will, that attempt to hold the thing, but are not the thing itself. Poetry does not fit within neat, labeled boxes, for even if it follows form, its function is ruled and owned by the unique mind that imagines and creates it, and by every unique mind that reads and interacts with the work.

Let us take on a thought experiment. We begin with the following question:

What came first, the word or the vocalization?

This is an interesting question because history does not hold the answer for us. Our earliest iteration of written history occurred thousands, perhaps millions, of years after the time that would hold such an answer for us.

I would venture to say, within the bell jar of this thought experiment, that vocalization and word are twins of a sort, born of thought and instinct. Thought is a product of awareness. Words are vocalizations of thoughts that seek, firstly, to identify and to name, secondly, tools of memory. Remembered objects and words become the primary tools of coping and teaching.

When you can name things, you have mastery, of a sort. When you can relate one thing to another by the use of words, and can bridge such relationships to another person, you have communication. When you turn from those things you understand fairly well toward speculation of things you don’t understand at all, you begin a conversation that leads to philosophy, cosmology and/or metaphysics. When you stir together combinations of organic matter over an open fire, you have science—if you can remember the best combinations and repeat them, you have a recipe. When you can repeat the story of something that happened to you, a bad thing that might better be avoided, you have a teaching, and possibly a moral.

Back to the question we started with: What kinds of people are poets? To some extent, this is a silly question with a simple answer. Anyone who has ability with language can be a poet. Poets are musicians, philosophers, instigators, rebels, loners, peasants, rabble, home makers, theologians, soldiers, workers, kings and queens, provocateurs, “gypsies, tramps and thieves”, not to mention crazies and addicts.

Poets are prophets—they see and report on the state of reality, asking us to turn and return away from hubris towards conscious trends of action.

Poets are seers—they experience life to the fullest extent of its triumphs and failures; they are people who arise from oceans of reality to mingle in the clouds of possibility and imagination. They illustrate what might be, what could become, in the world, if certain conditions were extant.

Poets are illusionists and magicians—they show us one perspective, while drawing us to apprehend another. They conjure and transform perspective, stopping or elongating time, recovering, reflecting, reverencing and rejuvenating moments of splendor or simplicity.

Poets are alchemists—from the symbolism of all that has come before, they develop new forms, ideas and words by means of their thought experiments that result in poetry.

Do you resemble any of these remarks?

________________________________________________

Next time: Thought, word, deed through the filter of imagination.

And don't forget, I'm saving you $200.00 in fees for a class and materials! HA!

This Business of Poetry

I was taken aback when I saw an advertisement (on the local parent network listserv) offering poetry classes. I read the ad with interest. $200.00 for six weeks, offered in the home of the teacher… Plus, you must purchase a book of poetry by someone I have never heard of … explore the specific poet’s work, first half the class, then “take cues” from the “unique voice” of the poet under examination as a jumping off point for your own writing, second half the class. Offered by a published poet and former editor of a magazine I’ve never heard of … MFA from a local college… blah, blah, blah.

Interesting.

Got me to thinking… poetry as a cottage industry?

NIX! NADDA! NOT!

If I had $200.00 to spend, it would be on an evening of music, a book or two, a cup of coffee, a tea cake, and thou…

Why is she offering this out of her home? Why doesn’t she have a classroom and office hours?

Here’s the thing: poetry is not a business. Not a cottage industry. Not some little shoppe on the square (although it could possibly be described as a house of cards) with cute little note cards, a book or two, pens, leather bound notebooks and calligraphed verses and such. More to the point, in this case, you can’t teach anyone how to write anything by using your approximation of someone else’s voice. I think it takes a lot of gall to ask people to pay you for teaching them how to express themselves in writing by using someone else’s voice or technique.

I figure that I might be doing a great service to the community by offering free discussions about poetry and writing right here, on this blog. Not daily, but occasionally, in this month and a half ramping up to National Poetry Month (April).

What Is This Thing Called Poetry?

We get the word from the ancient Greek ποιεω (poieo) and the word means “I create.”  When you look up the word “poetry” in Wikipedia (or, who knows, perhaps you have an antique lying around your house labeled “Dictionary” or another bearing the legend “Encyclopaedia”), you will find a lot of interesting information about what poetry is and of what it can consist. I won’t bother to repeat any of that here—if you can see this blog, you can look that up for yourself.

I would like to define poetry in a less academic sense, couched in a more personal reality. Poetry is an activity of the mind, using the tools of everyday vernacular language, in response to personal experience of life. In essence, poetry is a word game that you play with yourself. This game is, however, grounded in your unique experience of the world, which could be thought of as philosophical, particularly existential or hermeneutical, rather than confined to being literary, in the most basic sense of the word. This may be why Poetics, the study of and theorizing on the nature, principles and elements of artistic composition, is considered a philosophical activity. You will find books on poetics in the Philosophy section of your library and bookstore, but seldom, if never, in the Reference or “How To Do It” sections or even the Poetry section! Moreover, you are more likely to find the earliest Western book on the subject, Aristotle’s Poetics, in the Classics section than any of those other areas I mentioned.

Aesthetics is another branch of philosophy that has a bearing on a broad range of artistic endeavor; it is the study the nature of beauty and sensory values, usually within the context of culture.

Literary Criticism can straddle the divide between philosophy and literature—this is sometimes described, perhaps unkindly, as a method academics use to put their mark on someone else’s work. Literary Criticism tries to establish a philosophical and cultural framework around a work or a body of work, sometimes with the intent of guiding people toward meaning or understanding or validation of the work. Personally, I don’t take much stock in literary criticism, as it has a history of foisting ideologies on readers, rather than allowing the work to stand on its own within the context of the readers’ experience. Some authors have little sense of humor when it comes to a Literary Critic telling the reading public what to think about their work.

So, we have talked a little bit about poetry, poetics and aesthetics and literary criticism, but knowing about these disciplines doesn’t get you anywhere close to writing poetry. The good news is that there are some “How To Do It” guidebooks, called poetry handbooks. These you might well find in the Reference section of your library or bookstore. Such books will talk about diction, tone, voice, rhythm, meter, rhyme schemes, and such. Sometimes they will do this by examining actual poems by well-known poets, poems that may be already familiar to you. I like reading poetry handbooks that are written by well-known poets, as opposed to those written by well-meaning “publish or perish” academics you likely haven’t heard of or read anything about.

The interesting thing about poetry handbooks is that they don’t all say the same thing. Yes, there are set forms and formulations, but poetry is not a science. You can take the forms and formulas and jam a bunch of words into such, but will the end result be a poem? Chances are that if you hand a set of Scrabble tiles each to two people, each person will construct a different piece of writing from among them.

But now we are back to the notion of word game. And that is what poetry is: it is your creative act using words that talk about your experience of life. Poetry differs from prose in that it is laid out line by line in stanzas, whereas prose is organized in paragraphs following grammatical structure and perhaps more regular speech patterns. Poetry differs from prose also by virtue of its music—that is to say, your music.

Poetry is your music, your experience, your truth:

            Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

~ PLATO, Ion

--NEXT TIME: What and Who is a Poet?--

Softly

Softly, they fall;

some into the snow,
some into the soft earth—
they fall, these blossoms fall,
to falter, to fade and to fail,
the evidence
of that transience,
of that impermanence
that divides us,
yet that sings to us,
most especially when we
do not want to hear
the music of passing,
the words of parting,
to feel the emptiness
of longing
for the departed
One.

We long
for the song
of your presence,
in our sight,
in our hearing,
in our arms,
where so soon ago,
you were, every moment,
a thread in the fabric
of our days and our being.

Our tears are shed
in private silence
for being left behind;
indeed, we might gladly
have gone abroad with you,
oh, Beloved One.

We whisper a prayer to you,
oh, Vibrant Lovely,
hidden from us.

We sing a silent song for you,
because we know
that it is but illusion
that separates us
from one another.

Our tears,
they wash away
the sorrow of our loss;
for it is a sad truth:
though we can no longer
hold you in our arms,
we can still feel your kisses,
and know your presence,
and hear the sound
of your voice,
on our hearts.

You will not rest,
where you are,
and neither will we rest,
until the wheel of time
places us, once again,
in intimate proximity.

Oh, Beloved One,
Love to You;
Dearest One,
Good Night.

© 2012 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

--This was written about the loss of a dear friend in 2009, brought to mind
by the passing of a colleague this week. Sing on, Todd, in the heavenly choir!
And may the winds carry your tune straight to our hearts. --