The Poetry Habit

How To Give A Poetry Reading

2010-10-15T07:00:00.010-05:00

Next week my company is going to host a reading. Several people, mostly from writing and editorial, read a little bit of their personal writing, and lots of other employees usually show up to listen and drink free coffee. (And yes, my workplace is awesome.) So I thought I’d post about on reading your poetry for an audience. This is a huge topic, but these are just some thoughts.

First you have to pick your poems. You can just pick your best ones, or you might want to do some that kind of have a similar theme. If you’re worried that a poem reveals too much about you or casts you in a negative light, but you know it’s really good, I say don’t be chickenshit. Read it. It’ll probably be everyone’s favorite.

Now you probably want to practice reading them out loud, to yourself and/or in front of a friend or two, if possible.

The main thing is that you want to read loudly and clearly enough so that everybody can understand the words.

Make sure you know how to actually pronounce everything in your poem. (Don’t laugh, this has been an issue for me!)

If your voice shakes, you’re not obligated to worry about that. It’s no big deal. It can even make the audience root for you more. I almost always have a little bit of adrenaline going before I read my stuff. The one time that I didn’t, I gave a terrible reading. Everything went fine, but it was flatter than a crepe. A little bit of energy is good.

If you lose your place, you don’t actually need to say anything about it. You can let the pause hang there and find your place again. It’ll keep your audience’s attention.

I usually don’t do long introductions to poems. If the poem doesn’t work at all without the backstory, you need to revise the poem. Sometimes there might be a little reference or something in there that you want to tell your audience about, since they aren’t in a position to Google it or whatever.

Whatever you do, DO NOT apologize for your work. At all. Ever.

But if you forget and wind up apologizing after all, that’s okay, too.

Now a lot of academic poets in the U.S. use this kind of slow singsong voice when they read their poetry. You can hear it in this poem by Billy Collins, to which someone made this great little animation.

That reading style is not my favorite thing. I think it’s like using corporate jargon: conformist, elitist, and unnatural.

Some poetry is written for performance. Places like the Nuyorican Poets Café, where the poetry is often (but not always) influenced by hiphop, and The Green Mill in Chicago, where Marc Smith started poetry slams in the 80s, incubate this kind of work. I met Marc Smith at the Green Mill once, and he already knew of me because I had dated a good friend of his for a couple of years. He seemed really cool and he invited me to be a judge of that night’s poetry slam. I agreed, but then I left the bar before the slam started, because I can only take crowds for so long. Sorry about that, Marc.

Formal Friday: The Alexandrine!

2010-10-15T06:33:00.002-05:00

The alexandrine is the kind of line the French used in their poetry for hundreds of years. Twelve syllables. No worrying about which syllables are stressed and unstressed, because the French language doesn’t work so much that way. A little break, or caesura, after the sixth syllable. No enjambment: the end of the line is the end of a phrase or sentence.

Here are a couple of alexandrines from Paul Verlaine:

"Je fais souvent ce rêve étrange et pénétrant

d'une femme inconnue et que j'aime et qui m'aime..."

According to Google Translate, that says,

"I often have this strange and penetrating dream

an unknown woman and I love and who loves me ... "

I don’t know if Verlaine wrote that before or after he got married, or after he left his wife and started carrying on with Arthur Rimbaud, whom he later shot, but only in the wrist. I haven’t read Verlaine or much at all of those decadent Symbolists, and I really need to.

If you want to read a scandalous poem by Charles Baudelaire written in alexandrines, you can go here (scroll down for English). It’s not that scandalous actually, but it freaked people out back in 1857. If I could find a completely non-scandalous poem in alexandrines to link to, I would, but it’s slim pickings on Google.

The twentieth-century poet Robert Desnos, who I told you about before, could improvise poems out loud in cafes in perfect alexandrines. When he started writing down poetry in alexandrines, the Surrealists, who hated convention, became furious with him. Andre Breton wrote bad things about Desnos in his second Manifesto of Surrealism. Of course, no one is more dogmatic than a dedicated nonconformist.

A few English poets have changed up their iambic pentameter poems by throwing a few alexandrines in there. They still keep the iambs (unstressed/stressed); otherwise it would really interrupt the flow. Spenser did this in The Faerie Queene, which was an epic suck-up to Queen Elizabeth that I found skull-crushingly boring. I read it a long time ago, so who knows.

I do think alexandrines would be great for a contemporary long narrative poem, though not as long as The Faerie Queene. If I try this line out, I’m not going to use iambs. I think they’d be less authentic, and they’d make the lines sound a little weird because one is more used to iambic pentameter. Besides, iambs are hard.

An alexandrine is also a good-looking variety of parakeet. I put that picture of one up there just because they're pretty.

Metapoetry and Etymology: Time and Materials, Robert Hass.

2010-10-11T21:26:00.012-05:00

Hass wrote these poems between 1997 and 2005, from the time he was 56 years old to the time he was 64. He still writes plenty about sex, just like he did in earlier books. He also really likes delving into the meaning of words. That's how he winds up with this great ending of the poem "Etymology":

And what to say of her wetness? The Anglo-Saxons

Had a name for it. They called it silm.

They were navigators. It was also

Their word for the look of moonlight on the sea.

His personal narrative poems are really strong. "The World As Will and Representation" is an annoying title for a terrific piece about, I assume, his own childhood, as well as an indelible meditation of past gender roles. Loved it. I loved the one right before that, too, "Breach and Orison," which has lines like

...what

what what, the sprinkler

said

and

plums and apple-pears

the color of halogen

streetlamps in a puddle.

He has two elegies in here for Czeslaw Milosz, who was a terrific poet and Hass's good friend. One, titled "For Czeslaw Milosz in Krakow," is really lovely. The other, which has a bunch of little fragments inspired by famous paintings, is kind of eh. Hass is a really cultured and literate guy, and I'm not as interested in his imitations of classical poets and that kind of thing, probably because I'm less cultured. But when he writes things like

In Crete once, in the summer...

We sat in a taverna by the water

Watching the squid boats rocking in the moonlight,

Drinking retsina...

I think to myself, Damn, it must be good to be Robert Hass.

I like this guy pretty well, but he is always putting asides and commentary into his poems. Like this:

Maybe

The syntax is a little haywire there.

It drives me crazy. It's like you're watching some really good TV, but the director is in the living room with you and he keeps telling you stuff you don't need to know about each scene and standing up and blocking your view. And you're like, Sit down and be quiet, I'm trying to watch here! I think that kind of self-consciousness has something to do with postmodernism, but I don't really understand postmodernism, except that I know it's not what I want to do myself.

Hass has some big poems on big subjects in here too. The one called "State of the Planet" is really good, and it's nice to have some science in your poetry. His anti-war poems aren't quite as strong. The best poems I've read about war are by people who have been in the thick of it, like Anna Akhmotova and Paul Celan. Maybe a poem like "Bush's War" is hard to pull off because it's written at a comfortable distance.

But you've got to give him credit for doing some pretty ambitious things, and I think it's a really good collection overall. Dude did not win the Pulitzer for nothing.

"Last Letter": Ted Hughes Poem on Sylvia Plath's Death

2010-10-08T11:21:00.010-05:00

My pal Juan (djmeow_mix on Twitter) tipped me off on this one a couple of days ago. The U.K.'s weekly mag The New Statesman published a Ted Hughes poem for the first time today. You might know that Hughes was the unfaithful English husband of Sylvia Plath, a great American poet. I'm not saying she was great because that's what we tend to say about creative people who kill themselves. I think if she had stayed alive and kept writing into her old age, she would have been even greater, certainly on par with Dickinson and Whitman and Hughes. That's Langston Hughes, of course.

And you might also know that Ted Hughes published a collection of poetry called The Birthday Letters in 1998, which dealt a lot with his relationship with Plath and her suicide. It was a best-seller and won a bunch of prizes, which he probably didn't get to enjoy much because he also died in 1998, though he certainly reaped huge benefits from Plath's work and her death over the years. I haven't read The Birthday Letters, but I will soon and tell you what I think, so, you know, be looking forward to that. This poem, "Last Letter," is apparently an outtake from that collection.

I don't know how to get my hands on The New Statesman, but you can hear parts of the poem in this news story, in which you will also learn that the Brits kind of love Ted Hughes. Maybe that's because from the twentieth century onward, the Brits haven't had as many good poets as the U.S. has. This isn't the U.K's fault; we just have more people.

Hughes's poem doesn't come off as particularly brilliant in the lines of poetry we hear in this story. "My escape had become such a hunted thing"? Blech. It seems like the news story implies Hughes left the poem out because it was too direct and painful, but maybe he left it out because he just didn't like it as much as the others. I hate the thought of someone publishing your unpublished outtakes after you die and acting as if they're more authentic and revealing somehow than your more successful work.

Poetry and Fear

2010-09-23T16:50:00.009-05:00

I can remember taking my first poetry workshop in college. We were going to have to read our poems aloud in class, so I practiced in my dorm room.

Tried to practice. Just reading my own poem out loud in an empty room freaked me out. It took about an hour for my voice to even work.

I've been in a lot of workshops and done a lot of readings since, so I don't get too worked up about it any more. But why was it so frightening in the first place?

Part of it was just the discomfort of trying something new. For some reason, a lot of us feel embarrassed when we're not good at something, even if we're just learning.

We don't expect children to be perfect as they figure things out. If we look at a five-year-old's artwork, we don't criticize her lack of perspective, then point at her signature and say, "And God, you have terrible handwriting." But many of us don't have any patience with ourselves. We think we should be able to stand up on the surfboard after one lesson, or master a perfect French accent after a week with Rosetta Stone. And if we can't, well...maybe, we think, we suck. Or maybe we don't really want to surf or speak French or whatever after all.

Poetry also leads us to say things we wouldn't normally say, because it would be too painful, too personal, controversial, ridiculous, or even arrogant. In so many direct and indirect ways, our poems expose the weirdness we try to hide. That can be really uncomfortable, especially for shy or awkward people who, ironically, seem to be just a little more likely to be drawn to poetry writing in the first place.

But it's great when you share your poem, exposing your weirdness for everyone to see...and nothing terrible happens.

Probably, everyone still likes you okay. Occasionally, someone even knows exactly what you're talking about. Maybe she even has that experience of reading something for the first time that she thought was only true for her, and now you both know you're not alone.

Or, you know, maybe nobody likes your poem. Maybe even you don't like it that much (or maybe you still do). It's still all right. It took some guts to put it out there, and you did it anyway, and nobody can take that away from you.

Lives of the Poet Saints, Part 1: Robert Desnos

2010-09-11T09:45:00.013-05:00

Robert Desnos's Selected Poems, translated by Carolyn Forche and William Kulik, is one of my very favorite books of poetry--so lyrical, romantic, and imaginative.

Desnos started out as one of the Surrealists, and these guys liked to do "automatic writing" while in a state of hypnosis...though how much this differed from the usual poetry-writing trance, I don't know. Desnos could sit in a crowded cafe, drop off into a dream state, and declaim amazing impromptu poetry. That really would have been worth the price of an espresso. Paris was an exciting place in the 20s and 30s, and Desnos knew a bunch of famous people there, like Cesar Vallejo, Picasso, Hemingway, and Diego Rivera.

Later the Surrealist ringleader Andre Breton got mad at Desnos for, among other reasons, writing formal poetry, which I'll talk about in the next Formal Friday installment. Desnos actually wrote all kinds of things: music, movie, and book reviews, plays, novels, and a film script directed by Man Ray. He got a job writing radio shows, advertisements and jingles.

When the Nazis took over in France, Desnos was part of the press, and was able to get information and disseminate it to the French Resistance. He published poems and essays under pseudonyms making fun of the occupiers. In 1944, the Gestapo arrested him and sent him to Auschwitz. Later they sent him to Buchenwald, Flossenburg, Floha, and then the Theresienstadt, in kind of a grand tour of Hell.

Desnos was amazing. One of the prisoners later remembered him sharing his bowl of watery soup with another prisoner who was worse off. When a guard abused one of the captives, Desnos yelled an insult at him. The guards used to tell all the prisoners they were going to die, and Desnos would respond by going around and reading everyone's palms, making up fantastic futures for everyone.

Desnos died of typhoid fever a few weeks after Theresienstadt was liberated. He was 44.

Here's a poem by Desnos, in case you've never read him. A section from this poem was apparently on his person when he died.

I've Dreamed Of You So Much

I've dreamed of you so much you're losing your reality.
Is there still time to reach that living body and kiss
onto that mouth the birth of the voice so dear to me?
I've dreamed of you so much that my arms, accustomed
to being crossed on my breast while hugging your shadow,
would perhaps not bend to the shape of your body.
And, faced with the real appearance of what has haunted
and ruled me for days and years, I would probably
become a shadow.
O sentimental balances.
I've dreamed of you so much it's no longer right
for me to awaken. I sleep standing up, my body exposed
to all signs of life and love, and you
the only one who matters to me now, I'd be less able
to touch your face and your lips than the face and the lips
of the first woman who came along.
I've dreamed of you so much, walked so much, spoken
and lain with your phantom that perhaps nothing is left me
than to be a phantom among phantoms and a hundred times more shadow
than the shadow that walks and will joyfully walk
on the sundial of your life.

Lives Of The Poet Saints: An Introduction

2010-09-11T08:34:00.003-05:00

I've mentioned how several poets weren't especially nice people, but I don't want to suggest that's the norm. A lot of people who write poetry are wonderful human beings.

Case in point: Misha Collins, the actor who plays an angel on my favorite show of all time, Supernatural. Collins and his friends and fans have started a all-volunteer nonprofit group called Random Acts, and they fund orphanages in Haiti, provide relief from flood victims in Pakistan, and generally try to make the world a better place. Last weekend, Collins did an 83K run (that's 50+ miles) and raised an additional $95,000 for the charity. Collins is a poet who's published in Pearl, Columbia Poetry Review, and The California Quarterly.

I'm going to do a series of posts to talk about poets who were impressive people. "Saints" shouldn't be taken too literally: hardly anyone is a saint, even saints. But we can still do some pretty great things.

Poetry and Misogyny

2010-09-06T09:01:00.022-05:00

You think guys who write poetry are probably kind and sensitive. Not always! And once in a while, you'll come across some guy who's written something that's really awful toward women, and the poem seems to be fairly well-received anyway.

I already wrote about that one Stephen Dobyns poem, so we won't revisit that.

Philip Larkin is best-known for his iconic poem "This Be the Verse." This next poem has also made it into a lot of anthologies. It's weird and awful and terrific...

Animals Are Passing From Our Lives

It's wonderful how I jog
on four honed-down ivory toes
my massive buttocks slipping
like oiled parts with each light step.

I'm to market. I can smell
the sour, grooved block, I can smell
the blade that opens the hole
and the pudgy white fingers

that shake out the intestines
like a hankie. In my dreams
the snouts drool on the marble,
suffering children, suffering flies,

suffering the consumers
who won't meet their steady eyes
for fear they could see. The boy
who drives me along believes

that any moment I'll fall
on my side and drum my toes
like a typewriter or squeal
and shit like a new housewife

discovering television,
or that I'll turn like a beast
cleverly to hook his teeth
with my teeth. No. Not this pig.

EXCEPT. What exactly the HELL is going on in the fourth, fifth and sixth lines from the end? It's distracting and weak: hurr hurr, housewives are so stupid.

Roger McGough is even more irritating. He wrote a lot of the dialogue for the animated feature Yellow Submarine, which maybe doesn't seem as insufferable if you've dropped acid. He also gave us this:

The Newly Pressed Suit

Here is a poem for the two of us to play.

Choose any part from the following:

The hero

The heroine

The bed

The bedroom

The newly pressed suit

(I will play the VILLAIN)

The poem begins late this evening

at a poetryreading

Where the hero and the heroine

Are sitting and drinking and thinking

of making love.

At 10.30 they leave the pub and hurryhome.

Once inside the flat they waste no time.

The hero quickly undresses the heroine,

carries her naked into the bedroom

and places her gently upon the bed

like a newly pressed suit.

Just then I step into the poem.

With a sharp left hook

I render unconscious the hero

And with a cruel laugh

Rape the heroine

(The raping continues for several stanzas)

Thank you for playing.

When you go out tonight

I hope you have better luck in your poem

Than you had in mine.

McGough, by the way, is at least as well known for his children's books as for his poetry.

The poem has an entertaining conceit that doesn't go anywhere, and the poet tries to disguise the fact that he's really got nothing by saying something outrageous. I think it's possible to say something funny about rape, but "HAHAHA THEN I COME IN AND RAPE YOU A LOT, THE END" isn't it.

McGough was included in the 1973 version of the Oxford book Of Twentieth Century Verse. It wasn't the jolly raping poem, though, it was this random piece of crap. Larkin was the editor. Actually McGough had two poems in there, but I have better things to do than Google him all day.

Misogynistic poems are luckily pretty rare these days, but when they show up they get defended with a couple of arguments:

1. It's ironic!

If it's not completely clear that the poet's being ironic, he doesn't get a pass. Besides, I'm sick of irony. So often, it's just gutless. You have something to say, say it. Otherwise why are you even writing poetry?

2. But it's art!

The idea here is that art and poetry exist on this rarified plane where the artist has perfect freedom and the very idea of ethics is bourgeois and doesn't apply. Ethics always apply.

Formal Friday: Why Be Formal?

2010-09-03T06:47:00.005-05:00

In Tobias Wolff's Old School, which is a terrific short novel about a prep school and writing, Robert Frost appears as a character. So does Ayn Rand, and she's a tiresome bitch, as you'd expect. Frost seems fairly likable in Old School, but my husband tells me he was kind of mean.

Anyway, in the book, a kid questions Frost's use of traditional form, asking "whether such a rigidly formal arrangement of language is adequate to express the modern consciousness." Frost asks the boy what he means by modern consciousness, dismisses his half-baked answer, and talks about a poem he wrote for his friend who died in WWI. "Would you honor your own friend by putting words down anyhow, just as they come to you--with no thought for the sound they make, the meaning of the sound, the sound of their meaning? Would that give a true account of the loss?" He goes on to talk about Homer's The Iliad:

"I am thinking of Achilles' grief. That famous, terrible grief. Such grief can only be told in form. Maybe it only exists in form. Form is everything. Without it you've got nothing but a stubbed-toe cry...No echo. You may have a grievance but you do not have grief, and grievances are for petitions, not poetry."

I assume the fictional Frost would feel that form also gives other emotions more heft.

I thought I'd list a few pros and cons of formal poetry, or more specifically, poetry that uses a regular scheme of rhyme, and/or meter, and/or repetition. See what you think!

PROS

It makes the poem more memorable. Something that rhymes, especially, is more likely to stick in people's heads. That's why "red sky at night, sailor's delight" is easy for me to remember, while I can never recall whether you're supposed to feed a cold or a fever (I feed both), even though I get colds almost every winter and I've never sailed a boat. I don't even want to get on a boat. I'd get seasick.

It can make the poem sound more convincing. For some reason, something that rhymes and meters feels inevitable. This is really helpful for a poem when you're making some kind of argument. I said "can" though, because if the poem is written badly and has forced word choices, the form actually gets in the way of being persuasive.

NEITHER PRO NOR CON

It gets you out of yourself. The form can work against your obsessions, usual thought patterns, and habitual word choices. Not everyone thinks this is a benefit, but I do.

It's not exactly the same as inviting the element of chance into your creative process. I get the sense that there is a hidden logic behind which words rhyme that lead me to new insights that I wouldn't have discovered otherwise.

And now you're probably making fun of me in your head. Whatever. You're the one sitting around reading a poetry blog.

CONS

It's harder to write than free verse (for me, anyway.) It's especially harder to write well and make the language sound effortless. If you're trying to approximate natural speech, that's even more difficult. The places where you've made compromises in order to accommodate the form can be very obvious.

Actually, that's the only con I can think of, except that some people think traditional form is passe. There are also people who think traditional form is more impressive. I don't know what the prevailing opinion is there.

Reading Lists for the Other Courses, Fall Semester 2010

2010-08-28T10:21:00.044-05:00

Another follow-up to my humiliating confession post. The titles are linked to Amazon in case you want to read more about any of these!

POPULAR SCIENCE

The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter. Colin Tudge.

I’m already convinced that trees matter, but it’ll be good to learn why.

The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. Norman Doidge.

Neuroplasticity!

The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality. Brian Greene.

Seems like something I should know about.

The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist's Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombis, and Magic. Wade Davis.

Wade Davis spoke at my company several years ago. He mentioned that he went to Haiti to learn about zombies, and that zombies did exist, but that wasn’t the interesting part. It sounded like the interesting part to me. I didn’t see the horror movie Wes Craven made about this book, but I guess Davis wasn’t too happy about it.

Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival. Bernd Heinrich.

I love winter and I think I’ll enjoy reading this while drinking hot chocolate.

TRENDS IN GENRE ROMANCE

After reading about things like the fabric of the cosmos, I may need a palate cleanser. Besides, I'll probably finish at least one of the two romance projects I've started. And when I was walking the dogs this morning, I thought about writing some literary poems about genre romance to add to my poetry collection in progress called Bedtime Stories. Like the poems could be homage, and feminist critique, and wrong and fun. Hmm.

Anyway, the idea here is really just to read some recent releases, because I don’t like all the romance trends. For instance, ménages gross me out, and I hate vampires. Vampire ménages are the worst.

Seduced by the Wolf. Terry Spear.

I'll give werewolves a chance though.

Warrior (The Blades of the Rose). Zoe Archer.

I’ve chatted with Zoe a little online and she’s smart and funny and I really like her. But that’s not why I’m SERIOUSLY EXCITED about this one, the first of a trilogy. Victorian setting, though I can't remember exactly where--I think it's something unexpected...Greece? Mongolia? Anyway, strong heroine, magical artifacts, secret societies, what’s not to like?

Wicked Intentions. Elizabeth Hoyt.

18-century London slums should be a fun change of pace from 19-century London drawing rooms.

Assassin’s Heart. Monica Burns.

He’s a half-angel, half-demon, telepathic assassin with some very snazzy pants.

One Unashamed Night. Sophia James.

The hero is going blind! That’s kind of daring. The only other romantic hero who goes blind that I can think of is Mr. Rochester, who was an asshat. And that brings us to...

CLASSIC ENGLISH LITERATURE

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Anne Bronte.

I’ve already listened to some of the audiobook. It’s shockingly feminist.

Beowulf. Verse translation by Seamus Heaney.

Heaney is a pretty good poet, and I’ve been meaning to read this. Apparently the Kindle version doesn't include the original Middle English, but the printed one does.

North and South. Elizabeth Gaskell. And afterwards I’ll watch the miniseries!

Astrophel and Stella. Phillip Sidney.

"Fool" said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write." This guy was around at the same time as Shakespeare. It’s usually Sir Phillip Sidney, but please, this is America. I’ve only read a couple of sonnets from this 108-sonnet sequence before.

The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes. Arthur Conan Doyle.

I’ve never read any of this!

I'm pretty excited about all this reading! I'm a dork. I start classes the day after Labor Day, because then it's officially fall (according to me) and by then my I should be done wallpapering my studio. (See? Dork.)

Reading List: Contemporary American Poetry, Fall 2010

2010-08-26T10:24:00.005-05:00

Here is the reading list for my Fall Semester 2010 self-taught class, Contemporary American Poetry. The class consists of my reading these 5 books and blogging about them! (If you're confused about this fall semester stuff, please see yesterday's post below.) Click on the titles if you want to look at them on Amazon.

Sonata Mulattica: Poems. Rita Dove.

Rita Dove is a big deal. She’s won the Pulitzer. She’s been the Poet Laureate before. And, like Katha Pollitt, she picked my poems as the winner in a poetry contest once. I like Dove’s other stuff, and I’m pretty much guaranteed to like this.

Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005. Robert Hass.

He is also a big deal—same credentials as I listed for Dove, minus the making me a winner of a poetry contest, but I’ve never entered a contest judged by him. Yet! Once in a while, Hass seems kind of snobby and makes me roll my eyes, but mostly I like him. Maybe this book won’t have anything snobby in it.

Selected Poems. Fanny Howe.

No Pulitzer, no Poet Laureate stint, but still quite a big deal! (In poetry, though, “big deal” is very, very relative.) I’ve never read anything by Fanny Howe at all. Wikipedia tells me her sister Susan is also a poet. Now I remember that I read one of Susan’s poems once, and it was good.

OK, I had another book picked here and I started to type up a poem by the poet for you, and then I realized I wasn’t going to like him that much. So let’s go with…

heredities. J. Michael Martinez.

I, too, am suspicious of the lower case “h.” But this book won the 2009 Walt Whitman prize, so I’ll give it a go.

It Is Daylight. Arda Collins.

And this one won the Yale Series of Younger Poets thing in 2008. Beautiful book cover, huh? Hopefully she won’t write all in simple declarative sentences, i.e. “It is daylight. / My dog farts. / I am wearing a blue shirt.”

That’s it for this course. I am also going to be taking Trends in Genre Romance, Classic English Literature, and Popular Science. Do you guys want the reading lists for those? Let me know!

Humiliating Confession

2010-08-25T13:12:00.007-05:00

Nicholas Carr wrote a book this year called The Shallows, about how the Internet is supposedly ruining our brains. I've been pretty skeptical. And I always read these articles about how people don’t read as much anymore because of the Internet, and I dismiss them as an overblown reaction to technology, because I tend to think technology is good.

However: I spend too much time online, and I don’t read that much. Like, less than a book a month.

There’s hardly anything that I mind admitting publicly; a lot of us get into writing just so that we can admit things publicly. But this one’s pretty embarrassing. I like to think of myself as someone who loves books.

I was raised to be a reader and as a kid, I read at every possible opportunity. I would read anything. Young adult books and fantasy paperbacks, by the hundreds, but also: the magazine published by my dad’s union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. A self-help book by Dr. Wayne Dyer. The Oxford Book of English Verse. The Encyclopedia Brittanica.

As summer winds up, I remember how every year I would be a part of the summer reading program at the library (later, as a teen at my first job, I helped run it.) Kids would see how many books they could read in the summer. I would get frustrated because you could only check out 15 at a time, and we only got taken to the library once or twice a week. Still, it would make me so happy to come home with a big armload of books--all smelling like the Scotch tape that held the clear plastic wrap over their covers--and to try to decide which to dive into first.

For the last, I don't know, 5 or 6 years?, I've been an infrequent reader. Of course, when I'm online, I'm reading words, but it's usually chatter. Sometimes it's just garbage.

And I'm feeling it. I can't keep creating or even daydreaming forever when I'm not reading much. It's like trying to work out without water. And I can't figure out why I would neglect something that I like so much.

My husband has been reading a ton in the past few months. He sits on the couch overlooking the backyard and reads contemporary novels, history books, young adult novels, poetry. And I'm thinking about how nice it would be to read and read and read some more.

So since it's almost September, I have this idea (because I'm a nerd) of designing a few "courses" for myself for the "fall semester": a few reading lists. Contemporary American Poetry. Classic English Literature. Chinese and Japanese Poetry. World History. Trends in Romance Subgenres. Popular Science. Not all of those--I'll pick a few of them.

And all of this is making me think of a poem I like by James Schuyler. This is the kind of fall I want to have. (Although, I might do some of my reading on my iPhone with the Kindle app.)

October

Books litter the bed,
leaves the lawn. It
lightly rains. Fall has
come: unpatterned, in
the shedding leaves.

The maples ripen. Apples
come home crisp in bags.
This pear tastes good.
It rains lightly on the
random leaf patterns.

The nimbus is spread
above our island. Rain
lightly patters on un-
shed leaves. The books
of fall litter the bed.

Twitter Haiku

2010-08-23T07:07:00.003-05:00

It's not too surprising that lots of people tweet haiku--the 140-character limit lends itself to the form.

Every other day or so, this guy suggests a word...

and other people write a haiku using it.

More often, people just throw random haiku out there.

Here's a haiku from someone who always tweets as a stapler.

This phenomenon really embodies the idea of writing poetry just for the sake of writing poetry. Tweets just float downstream and disappear. Poetry isn't practical, and a lot of times, nothing tangible comes of it, but it's fun and it keeps your brain and maybe your soul alive.

MFA Programs: Do They All Suck?

2010-08-19T10:05:00.005-05:00

I met my sweet, smart, amazing husband at my MFA program, but that's not a recommendation for grad school, since no one else is going to meet anyone like him there. And other than that, I thought grad school was pretty much useless.

I was spoiled by a terrific undergraduate writing program at Knox College. Robin Metz and Robin Behn (who's coming to The Writers Place in Kansas City this fall! Yay!) were inspiring, dedicated teachers.

I went to grad school because I didn't know what else to do. I didn't really understand that a corporate job, like I have now, was an option. I planned to go to grad school, work random service jobs for several years while publishing a book or two of poetry, and then become a creative writing professor. I still think being a creative writing professor would be cool, but looking back, I don't think this was the smartest life plan. That's one thing places like Knox could do better: advise people for non-academic career paths.

My graduate program had a good reputation at the time, but I don't know why. Professors sexually harassed students. More offensive to me, they didn't always seem interested in writing. My main poetry teacher dismissed my inherent romantic lyricism as passe. It took years for me to get my groove back again (still, my own fault for losing it in the first place). After I wrote a couple of sexual, brutal poems, she encouraged me to write more, because she thought they would be popular. She was right--people do like that stuff because it's "edgy"--but that was terrible advice for me. More on that in another post, maybe.

There were a few nice people in the program. (One of them, who is brilliant, is going to give me some feedback on a chapbook!) Most of them were not nice. Also, a bunch of people had horrible addiction problems (alcohol and/or heroin), and I felt for them, but it was depressing.

I've heard a lot of people say that their MFA programs were really competitive, but I don't know if that was true of mine or not. It's possible that it was and that I was completely oblivious to it.

After I got my MFA and needed a job, I sometimes left the advanced degree off my resume, because it made me look like someone who was too much of a special snowflake to do normal work. There have been a few times when it's been nice to have an MFA, but not enough times to make it worth three years of my life. Not even close.

I learned way more about good writing after grad school: from people I worked with, from conferences, and from people on the internet.

When people are pondering whether they should go into an MFA program, I tell them they shouldn't. But maybe most MFA graduates are more positive about their experience than I am.

4spFilm Makes Poems Into Great Little Movies!

2010-08-16T10:19:00.004-05:00

Here's what they did with "The Weary Blues," which Langston Hughes wrote in 1923 when he was 21. Love it.

You can read more about 4spFilm here. I'll probably post some more of their things, now & again!

Formal Friday: Repetition!

2010-08-13T09:48:00.003-05:00

Repeating words and lines can be a great idea. It makes the poem more like a song, which also means it's more likely to get stuck in people's heads.

It usually works best with a poem that's evoking a mood, and/or expressing a strong emotion. I think when we feel something strongly, our thought patterns are kind of repetitive anyway ("oh crap oh crap oh crap," "OMG OMG OMG squee!"), so maybe that's why it works so well.

Most of the time, it's a good idea to use repetition more or less consistently throughout the poem. Most people like consistent patterns, the same way they like organized closets (whether they have the energy to organize them or not). But I've read some good poems that just have a little bit of repetition right at the end.

Here's a good example of a poem by Donald Justice that uses this device in not all, but most, of the couplets. (I met Donald Justice once. As an undergraduate I booked speakers for this lecture series at our college, and I also introduced them all. I was always a little drunk when I introduced them and probably did a terrible job. But anyway, he was really nice.)

Psalm and Lament

In memory of my mother (1879-1974)
Hialeah, Florida

The clocks are sorry, the clocks are very sad.
One stops, one goes on striking the wrong hours.

And the grass burns terribly in the sun,
The grass turns yellow secretly at the roots.

Now suddenly the yard chairs look empty, the sky looks empty,
The sky looks vast and empty.

Out on Red Road the traffic continues; everything continues.
Nor does memory sleep; it goes on.

Out spring the butterflies of recollection,
And I think that for the first time I understand

The beautiful ordinary light of this patio
And even perhaps the dark rich earth of a heart.

(The bedclothes, they say, had been pulled down.
I will not describe it. I do not want to describe it.

No, but the sheets were drenched and twisted.
They were the very handkerchiefs of grief.)

Let summer come now with its schoolboy trumpets and fountains.
But the years are gone, the years are finally over.

And there is only
This long desolation of flower-bordered sidewalks

That runs to the corner, turns, and goes on,
That disappears and goes on

Into the black oblivion of a neighborhood and a world
Without billboards of yesterdays.

Sometimes a sad moon comes and waters the roof tiles.
But the years are gone. There are no more years.

A couple of other fantastic examples: Federico Garcia Lorca's "Romance Sonambulo" and Paul Celan's "Death Fugue." Fair warning: the second one is pretty rough going (not that the Justice poem was such rollicking fun), but brilliant.

Poets on Prozac: Poetry and Mental Illness, Part 3

2010-08-10T11:54:00.011-05:00

I’ve posted before about how poets are more likely than most to struggle with mental illness. Richard Berlin, a psychiatry professor and poet, edited Poets on Prozac, a book of essays by sixteen poets about creativity, illness, and treatment.

They all agreed on one thing: when you’re really messed up, you can’t get anything done. Their experience bears out the quote from Sylvia Plath that Berlin supplies in his introduction: “When you are insane, you are busy being insane—all the time…when I was crazy, that was all I was.”

As far as Prozac, specifically, goes: I think only Chase Twichell (who, I was startled to learn, is not a guy—I always thought that was a dude’s name) felt like it inhibited her ability to create.

Bizarrely, two poets said that Prozac made them write more formal poetry (sonnets, villanelles, etc.) This is also the case with me! What the hell?! Why would that be? They both had theories, which I found unconvincing. I really have no idea.

I know that some meds can be a problem for some writers, though. As an adolescent, I would involuntarily shudder now and then—I still do it once in a while. Our family doctor diagnosed me (incorrectly, I think) as having some kind of epilepsy. He put me on Dilantin and phenobarbital. When this made me perpetually sleepy, he added Ritalin, which kept me awake. The meds were actually a disaster for my writing. I felt like the creative part of my brain had been packed away in cotton.

They also made me fixate on suicide, in a sort of dogged, dispassionate way. (A quick Google search suggests this was probably the Dilantin.) Anne Sexton wrote about this mindset in “Wanting to Die”: “But suicides have a special language./Like carpenters they want to know which tools./They never ask why build.” I kept trying to figure out how to do it without making too much of a mess (overdosing on the Phenobarbital, probably) and without upsetting people too much. Eventually I did make the connection between the meds and my fixation, and I stopped taking them. Obviously I should have discussed all this with someone, but I was a weird kid.

I started taking Prozac a couple of years after getting married, mostly in hopes it would make me a more pleasant, easy-going person for my husband to live with. It totally worked. A few years ago, I went off of it, and that’s when I really got back into poetry again.

Last year, though, I started having these episodes—once or twice a week, usually at night—in which I would cry nonstop for several hours and want to slash my wrists. At those times, I would feel positive that no one would mind me killing myself—that people would be relieved to be rid of me. I mention that because people always wonder how suicides could be so selfish, but the thing is, they’re not thinking clearly. After these episodes, I’d be just fine, even cheerful, if a little sleepy, and I’d think, “Huh. That was weird.” I went back on the meds, and talked to a therapist, and it went away quickly. I feel uncomfortable blogging about it, because mental illness carries a stigma, but of course that’s also one reason I’m blogging about it. And hey, hardly anyone reads this anyway.

My doctor recently increased the dosage, because my new job was making me unreasonably anxious. I can feel the open space in my head where the worry used to be. And I’m just about to start writing a poem a day again, like I sometimes do, because that kind of works for me and I want to finish a full-length manuscript with supernatural and mythological themes. It’ll be interesting to see if the higher dosage effects my writing at all, but except for making me want to write sonnets, I don’t think it will.

Good Poems To Read At Weddings

2010-08-09T13:05:00.002-05:00

It's my19th anniversary of being married to the love of my life today, so it seemed like a good time to post about this!

It's easy to find old poems that are great to read at weddings. We did Shakespeare's Sonnet 116, which has got to be one of the most popular choices. Barrett Browning's Sonnet 43 must be right up there, too. This untitled poem by Christina Rossetti is great, and her brother wrote this one that would be perfect for couples who think they've been together in previous lives. Anne Bradstreet's "To My Dear and Loving Husband" is really popular, and Emerson's "Give All To Love" seems ideal for the big day, too.

It's harder to find contemporary poems that are both happy enough and family-friendly enough for a wedding. I love this one by Pablo Neruda. "Lovers" might make a guest or two squirm, but honestly, it's less sexy than a lot of Neruda's stuff.

Two happy lovers make one bread,

a single moon-drop in the grass.

Walking, they cast two shadows that flow together;

waking, they leave one sun empty in their bed.

Of all possible truths, they chose the day;

they held it, not with ropes but with an aroma.

They did not shred the peace; they did not shatter words;

their happiness is a transparent tower.

The air and wine accompany the lovers.

The night delights them with its joyous petals.

They have a right to all the carnations.

Two happy lovers, without an ending, with no death,

they are born, they die, many times while they live:

they have the eternal life of the Natural.

Friends of ours chose this one from W.S. Merwin, which obviously would be especially good for a spring wedding, and would be appropriate for a second wedding too. Merwin, in fact, wrote it for his third wife, Paula.

Late Spring

Coming into the high room again after years

after oceans and shadows of hills and the sounds

after losses and feet on stairs

after looking and mistakes and forgetting

turning there thinking to find

no one except those I knew

finally I saw you

sitting in white

already waiting

you of whom I had heard

with my own ears since the beginning

for whom more than once

I have opened the door

believing you were not far

Maybe you've got other suggestions. And Robert Hass and Stephen Mitchell put together a ton of possibilities in this anthology Into the Garden, if you're interested!

Formal Friday: The Sonnet!

2010-08-06T07:32:00.029-05:00

Oh man, this is going to take a while.

You write a sonnet in lines of iambic pentameter. Remember, an iamb is an unstressed syllable plus a stressed syllable, and pentameter means there's five iambs / ten syllables. Like this Anne Bradstreet line (stressed syllables highlighted.)

"If ever two were one, than surely we."

A sonnet has fourteen lines, and there are a few different ways the rhyme scheme can go. If you do the oldest kind of sonnet, the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet (named after Petrarca, who wrote lots of these), the first eight lines go like this: abba abba. There's a lot of different ways the last six lines can go: cddcdd, cdecde, cdcdcd, or even cddcee or cddccd.

Just in case you have no idea what those letters mean, I'll give you an example of a Petrachan sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, so you can see how the letters represent the rhyme scheme. The last six lines here are cdcdcd.

My letters! all dead paper, mute and white!

And yet they seem alive and quivering

Against my tremulous hands which loose the string

And let them drop down on my knee tonight.

This said—he wished to have me in his sight

Once, as a friend: this fixed a day in spring

To come and touch my hand. . . a simple thing,

Yes I wept for it—this . . . the paper's light. . .

Said, Dear, I love thee; and I sank and quailed

As if God's future thundered on my past.

This said, I am thine—and so its ink has paled

With lying at my heart that beat too fast.

And this . . . 0 Love, thy words have ill availed

If, what this said, I dared repeat at last!

Petrarchan sonnets are hard because you have to come up with so many words with the same rhyme in the first eight lines. The English or Shakespearean sonnet is easier. It goes abab cdcd efef gg.

I like these better, because the final two lines sounds so definitive. Here's my favorite sonnet of all time, Shakespeare's 73rd, and it wouldn't pack such a punch if it didn't end on a rhyming couplet.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.

This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

But wait, there's more! You can do a terza rima sonnet, that goes aba bcb cdc ded ee. This is going to give you a feeling of continuity all the way through. I posted an example by Robert Frost a couple of weeks ago (scroll down).

And there's the blues sonnet! So American! Write one of these when you've got something good to complain about. The capital letters mean the whole line actually repeats (maybe with a little variation), just like you'd expect in blues: AAa BBb CCc DDd EE.

(If you aren't familiar with a lot of blues songs, I bet you still know "Roadhouse Blues" by the Doors.

"Well, I woke up this morning, I got myself a beer

Well, I woke up this morning, and I got myself a beer
The future's uncertain, and the end is always near.")

Oh, and Spenserian sonnets go like this: abab bcbc cdc dee. I didn't really like Edmund Spenser when I read him in college, but it was a long time ago. Maybe I should give it another go.

OK, so that's all about form. But here's what I didn't know when I first started trying to write sonnets. They're usually rhetorical, or making an argument for something. At some point, you get a big shift in thinking (called the volta.) Usually this is around line nine, but it varies.

This is a first draft of a sonnet I wrote yesterday. It's very rough--the meter's not even right yet! I'll take it down after a few days, because who knows, when it's shaped up I might want to publish it somewhere. Or I might want to throw it away, in which case, I'll also want it down. The volta or shift is really obvious at line nine.

(poem removed)

This next poem I wrote isn't really a sonnet like I first thought. In fact, it's only thirteen lines long, which I didn't even notice until after it was published in Antioch Review a few years ago (in their curiously named "All Fiction Issue.")

Just So You Know

The thing about the town was everyone

would walk around with these big name tags on.

Instead of names, they'd written info down...

like, I still can't believe my mom is gone,

or, Feel like crap since my mastectomy,

or, Picked last for the team in boys' P.E.

You didn't take rude comments personally

from Laid off after twelve years at G.E.

You saw somebody trip, you didn't smirk.

You didn't bitch about the bitch at work

or honk a guy for driving like a jerk.

You knew there was some kind of story there.

You always know some kind of story's there.

Form-wise, that's kind of a monstrosity: aaaa bbbb ccc dd. But I still like it OK. The form narrows down a little into a point. It would be crazy and cool (though hard) to write one that did that more deliberately and was 14 lines: aaaaa bbbb ccc dd. The "Donovan sonnet" or "funnel sonnet"! Feel free to use that.

Honestly, with form, you can do whatever you want as long as you're sort of consistent. And by the way, and if you write a poem that sort of argues something, and it's 14 lines long, you can probably get away with calling it a modern sonnet even if it doesn't meter or rhyme, if that's the kind of thing you're into.

Writers At Work

2010-08-04T09:37:00.018-05:00

“Poet” isn’t a paying job. It’s not even a non-paying job, like being a parent, since everybody (except maybe you) will be just fine whether you do it or not. It’s more of an obsession, like World of Warcraft.

So mostly you have to do it alongside a normal job, unless you’re very rich, or very poor, or financially dependent on somebody else. For poetry writing, some jobs work better than others.

Until recently, I wrote as a day job—a different kind of writing from poetry, obviously. I’ve heard people say they can’t write all day and then go home and do their own creative work because they feel too depleted. I was able to do work writing and my own writing just fine, but different people operate differently.

Lots of published poets teach in writing programs. Teaching a poetry workshop as a grad student was maybe the funnest paid job I ever had, though not the most lucrative one. I think if I did it full-time and hung out with other professors all the time, I would be wary of starting to write for a narrow academic audience. I always want to write stuff that anyone could understand, even if very few people read it. But to me, writing teacher seems like a great career.

I work at a corporate-type job, and it’s interesting and pays well and my co-workers are really nice, so it’s also a great career. I know how lucky I am to have it, especially in this horrible economy. There’s this idea that all corporations kill your creative soul, and I think it’s such garbage. It depends on the job and the corporation.

I don't work on my own writing at work, because I want to do a good job and I'm too daydreamy as it is. Occasionally I've written a poem on my lunch break. Like I mentioned before, Frank O'Hara did this while he worked at the front desk at the MOMA, resulting in his fantastic book Lunch Poems. A lot of times, it's easy to think that being a writer is this huge, all-or-nothing commitment, which keeps people from writing. But it's really not.

As I'm writing this, it occurs to me that there aren't a ton of poems about work, and certainly not about corporate life, and I wonder why. Denis Johnson wrote this one, which is sort of typically corporate-angsty, but it's a good poem. My husband laughed the other day that in his poems, Johnson just described the light over and over, and it's really true.

White, White Collars

We work in this building where we are hideous
in the fluorescent light, you know our clothes
woke up this morning and swallowed us like jewels
and ride up and down the elevators, filled with us,
turning and returning like the spray of light that goes
around dance-halls among the dancing fools.
My office smells like a theory, but here one weeps
to see the goodness of the world laid bare
and rising with the government on its lips,
the alphabet congealing in the air
around our heads. But in my belly's flames
someone is dancing, calling me by many names
that are secret and filled with light and rise
and break, and I see my previous lives.

Maybe there aren't many poems about offices because so many poets are teachers, like I said. Nobody wants to read poems about teaching poetry. Well, I don't, anyway. (I'm looking at you, Stephen Dobyns. I hate this stupid ass poem of yours, so willfully ignorant of context, and I'm glad you were never my teacher.) (Note: mature content warning on that link. Also, sort of gross.)

In my experience, jobs that suck for writing either wear you out physically, so at the end of the day you basically want to nap, or involve nonstop social interaction all day, so you never have a chance to hear yourself think.

The nice thing about being a poet is that it lets you define yourself instead of your job defining you. (And by the way, “poet” is anyone who’s writing poetry on a regular basis. Good poetry, bad poetry, that’s a whole different issue, and there’s not exactly consensus there, anyway.) No matter what your job is—receptionist, lawyer, cashier, electrician—you’re not just that. You’re that, plus you’re someone who’s working on your poetry, and that’s kind of awesome.

Congratulations, Alarie!

2010-07-28T09:10:00.001-05:00

So you guys, yesterday I went to a happy hour to pick up my friend Alarie's poetry collection, Spiraling Into Control. Isn't that a great title? Isn't it a gorgeous cover? Aren't you jealous that I have a copy and you don't? Of course you are. Don't worry, you can order it here.

I don't want to post any poems without permission, so I'll just link to this poem of Alarie's that I found already out there in the blogosphere. I couldn't be prouder of her!

Some Things Considered: The Mind-Body Problem, Katha Pollitt.

2010-07-25T13:06:00.011-05:00

I thought I'd like this book for two reasons:

1. as an undergraduate I liked Pollitt's Antarctic Traveller (and so did a lot of people, I guess, because it had won the National Book Critics Circle Award)

2. also as an undergrad, I won a poetry contest that Pollitt judged, though I can't remember the specifics. I may have read her book after she chose me as the winner of whatever that was.

Antarctic Traveller was published in 1982, and The Mind-Body Problem came out in 2009. In between those two books, Pollitt's been a columnist for The Nation, and she's published two books on feminism and one book of personal essays. So she's pretty impressive.

That being said, I didn't love this book. Rather than being lyrical or language-driven, it seems firmly planted in column/personal essay territory and in her own particular existence. I often think Billy Collins's poems sound like what NPR would write if it were a person, but that might be even more true of Pollitt.

The poems about Bible stories come to unsurprising conclusions (i.e. at the end of "Martha," "somebody's got to care about the tablecloth/and the bread, and the wine.") She writes about writing and about other writers, and that tends to not be my kind of thing (my appreciation of W.S. Merwin's "Berryman" notwithstanding.) There's a lot of nostalgia for childhood and for college years, and a couple of meditations on being nostalgic for things which were really not that great in the first place.

I appreciated the fact that she writes some more formal poems, and I found some phrases I really liked, such as "Windex-blue ices" (ices as in snow cones). I also liked "Lilacs in September," and I had read and enjoyed "Small Comfort" here before buying the book.

Don Draper, Frank O'Hara, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. And Denis Johnson.

2010-07-24T09:01:00.077-05:00

A new season of Mad Men starts tomorrow--terrific show, though I agree with Jezebel (in general, the most annoying blog I read on a consistent basis, besides Michelle Malkin's, I guess) that it would be great to have the point of view of Carla, the black maid in the Draper home. In honor of the season premiere, I thought I'd post the scene in Season Two where Draper reads from Frank O'Hara's Meditations in an Emergency.

This is the last section of a Frank O'Hara poem. I like imagining Draper reading the first three sections, with their overtly gay content and self-conscious hysteria. Here's the whole poem.

Mayakovsky

1

My heart's aflutter!

I am standing in the bath tub

crying. Mother, mother

who am I? If he

will just come back once

and kiss me on the face

his coarse hair brush

my temple, it's throbbing!

then I can put on my clothes

I guess, and walk the streets.

I love you. I love you,

but I'm turning to my verses

and my heart is closing

like a fist.

Words! be

sick as I am sick, swoon,

roll back your eyes, a pool,

and I'll stare down

at my wounded beauty

which at best is only a talent

for poetry.

Cannot please, charm, or win

what a poet!

and the clear water is thick

with bloody blows on its head.

I embraced a cloud,

but when I soared

it rained.

That's funny! there's blood on my chest
oh yes, I've been carrying bricks
what a funny place to rupture!
and now it is raining on the ailanthus
as I step out onto the window ledge
the tracks below me are smoky and
glistening with a passion for running
I leap into the leaves, green like the sea

4

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to see beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I do? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

So O'Hara named this poem after Vladimir Mayakovsky, who wasn't, in my half-assed opinion, as good as O'Hara. Mayakovsky's early stuff strikes me as really impressive original, but after that he just kind of wrote Marxist propaganda, which is less interesting, at least artistically. Like I said a few posts back, I don't think overt politics make very good poetry. Who knows, though, maybe in Russian it all sounds awesome.

Mayakovsky also inspired Denis Johnson to write a really good poem, a sonnet in fact, back before he gave it up for fiction. This is from his book The Veil, and think Draper would dig it, too.

After Mayakovsky

It's after one. You're probably alone.
All night the moon rings like a telephone
in an empty booth above our separateness.
Now is the hour one answers. I am home.
Hello, my heart, my God, my President,
my darling: I'm alarmed by the alarm
clock's iridescent face, hung like a charm
from darkness's fat ear. This accident
that was my life will have its witnesses:
now, while the world lies wholly motionless
and sorry in a crapulence of stars,
now is the hour one rises to address
the ages and history and the universe:
I swear you'll never see my face again.

Formal Friday: The Pantoum!

2010-07-23T14:41:00.006-05:00

The first thing you need to know about this form is that Neil Peart of Rush wrote one. I just learned this! The song "The Larger Bowl" in on their 2007 album Snakes and Arrows. You can read the lyrics here.

The English ripped this form off from the French, who stole it from Malaysia. It's written in four-line stanzas, and the second and fourth lines of one stanza become the first and third lines of the next. The repeated lines can change somewhat, though, and their meaning shifts because of the context.

It can be as long as you want. Here's how you usually wrap it up--the last 2 stanzas:

Line A

Line B

Line C

Line D

Line B, repeated from the stanza above

Third Line of the First Stanza of the Poem, repeated

Line D, repeated from the stanza above

First Line of the Poem, repeated

But of course, people do different variations. Donald Justice's poem below follows the form, but then throws in an extra line at the end. Hey! Where'd that come from?

Pantoum of the Great Depression

Our lives avoided tragedy
Simply by going on and on,
Without end and with little apparent meaning.
Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.

Simply by going on and on
We managed. No need for the heroic.
Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.
I don't remember all the particulars.

We managed. No need for the heroic.
There were the usual celebrations, the usual sorrows.
I don't remember all the particulars.
Across the fence, the neighbors were our chorus.

There were the usual celebrations, the usual sorrows
Thank god no one said anything in verse.
The neighbors were our only chorus,
And if we suffered we kept quiet about it.

At no time did anyone say anything in verse.
It was the ordinary pities and fears consumed us,
And if we suffered we kept quiet about it.
No audience would ever know our story.

It was the ordinary pities and fears consumed us.
We gathered on porches; the moon rose; we were poor.
What audience would ever know our story?
Beyond our windows shone the actual world.

We gathered on porches; the moon rose; we were poor.
And time went by, drawn by slow horses.
Somewhere beyond our windows shone the world.
The Great Depression had entered our souls like fog.

And time went by, drawn by slow horses.
We did not ourselves know what the end was.
The Great Depression had entered our souls like fog.
We had our flaws, perhaps a few private virtues.

But we did not ourselves know what the end was.
People like us simply go on.
We have our flaws, perhaps a few private virtues,
But it is by blind chance only that we escape tragedy.

And there is no plot in that; it is devoid of poetry.

I think forms that repeat lines, like pantoums and villanelles, are sort of relaxing to read. You don't have to really concentrate for the words to sink in.

Some people have been known to make them meter and rhyme! I don't know, you might just make yourself crazy, though. (The Rush lyrics rhyme, but don't meter.)

A lot of poets will put "pantoum" in the title of their pantoum, as if to say, "Check this out, I totally wrote a pantoum, you guys." I can understand that. I usually don't bother doing that with formal poems, though. If the reader knows about traditional form, she'll notice it anyway and feel all smart. And if she doesn't know about traditional form, she might not care.

Do You Get Visits from the Muse?

2010-07-20T00:11:00.009-05:00

I just started reading a book of essays called Poets on Prozac, and in the introduction, the editor Richard Berlin discusses Albert Rothenberg's work. Apparently after Rothenberg's huge study on the creative process--which included extensive interviews with Pulitzer Prize winners, former Poet Laureates, and the like--he concluded that all creative people possessed one thing: motivation. Rothenberg said the creative process results from "direct, intense, and intentional effort on the creator's part," and that it takes a ton of work and preparation to create.

Absolutely. I agree.

He also wrote about the "myth of inspiration"--the idea that, as Richard Berlin puts it, "the poet writes a poem directly from his or her head as though taking dictation directly from God." Berlin goes on to say that this idea dates back to the ancient Greeks, who thought poets wrote once they were possessed by the Muse.

Berlin adds something to the effect that that maybe poets came up with this to make themselves feel special, because poets don't make much money or get much recognition.

OK, now that pisses me off.

I do think it takes a lot of work to write a bunch of good poems. You think about what you want to do, you read other people's poetry, and you work out issues of form and content. Once you have a draft, it takes a lot of time (at least for me) to get it revised into the final form. As a writer, I want people to know it's a lot of work.

At the same time, when I write a first draft, it usually comes really fast, and when it's a really good poem, it's very much like taking dictation. It's like I go into a trance. I'm not saying that to be romantic; that's my experience. Over time, I've learned how to create the right set of circumstances for getting inspired like that.

I'm obviously not the only one. W.S. Merwin writes in his awesome poem about John Berryman:

he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally

(And by the way, even though I said in a previous post that it sounded like Berryman could be kind of an asshole as a teacher, Merwin's poem makes it clear that the guy did have a lot of very good advice.)

Anyway. I always sort of assumed that all poets worked more or less in the same way I do, getting rushes of inspiration. But maybe some poets are making rational decisions all the way through the writing of a poem, hesitating and considering each line, taking hours or days to finish the first draft. I want to ask more people about this.

Why Are So Many Creative People Liberals?

2010-07-18T19:36:00.016-05:00

I think Michelle Malkin may be on vacation, because there's a guest blogger on her website this week. A couple of days ago, he suggested that people should boycott the movie Inception (incredible movie, by the way). Two of the stars, Ellen Page and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, said insulting things about Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin, while leading man Leonardo DiCaprio said bad things about BP. Some of the readers correctly pointed out that if they boycotted all the movies made by liberals, they would hardly get to see any movies.

Actors, directors, and screenwriters are almost always liberal. The same holds true for artists and poets. "Liberal" is a pretty broad spectrum, but generally I mean in favor of government-provided social services such as health care, pro-gay rights, and environmentalist.

You can find creative conservatives, but they're few and far between. A few years ago, William Baer edited this anthology of contemporary poetry by conservatives. There isn't an anthology like that for liberal poets, because they're basically in all the other contemporary poetry anthologies. I found this study that supposedly proves a link between liberal politics and creativity, and while I think coming up with the right methodology for a study like this is probably tricky, it sure seems like something everybody knows already.

This isn't a new thing, either: poets have been attracted to left-wing politics for decades. Percy Bysshe Shelley is often considered a socialist. Pablo Neruda was an active anti-fascist and a Communist. Langston Hughes was interested in Communism, although his Communist poetry, like most overtly political poetry, was pretty bad compared to most of his amazing work.

So what's up with this?

A few people have suggested it's because creative people have greater empathy or a better understanding of people who are different from they are. In other words, the same understanding that helps them create great characters leads them to take up the causes of marginalized groups, such as gay people or poor people.

I don't know if that holds up. I don't know for sure, but I suspect liberals dominate in creative fields that have nothing to do with creating characters. And before liberals strain their shoulders patting themselves on the back, they should check their assumption that they are more compassionate. Conservatives donate more money to charity than liberals do, and this is true even when you only count non-religious charities and causes. They also volunteer more and donate blood more often. If liberals really have more empathy, it isn't spurring them to action. Maybe they're too busy, like, writing poems.

I heard one person say that the very act of creating is liberal, because it's envisioning what could be rather than what already exists. I don't think this makes sense, either. Plenty of conservatives imagine a future that is very different than present-day reality.

So basically...I have no idea why creativity and liberalism tend to go hand in hand, but as a liberal, I do think it's really interesting. I suspect it has something to do with brain chemistry.

Poetry With A Soundtrack!

2010-07-17T10:39:00.000-05:00

In one of my workshops, I tried out writing to snippets of music. They were two or three minutes long apiece: a snippet to a Bach cello suite, a short piece by Thelonious Monk, and a song by the Icelandic rock band Sigur Ros. We all filled the page with whatever came to mind, and I think it worked out pretty well. Music can set a mood and your imagination starts to come up with statements or images that go along with it.

A lot of people can't write while listening to songs with lyrics. (This wasn't a problem with Sigur Ros, because they sing in a made-up language.) I actually have no problem doing this. I wrote a poem about a gryphon, the mythological creature, while listening to Jethro Tull, which probably sounds kind of cheesy.

So what, though? I love Jethro Tull. I'm not really sophisticated, but no matter how sophisticated you are, the part of your brain that makes up poems doesn't care about what's considered intellectual and what isn't. It may get more inspired by comic books than Tolstoy.

Fellow writers turned me on to soundtracks for movies and games. Because that music is designed specifically to create a mood and/or convey urgency and conflict, it makes great background music for writing. Of course, if you've actually seen the movie or played the videogame, then it could be too specific for you.

Here are a few pieces you might try out for a poetry-writing playlist, all linked to iTunes. All of them are five minutes or less, but of course if you get grooving on something, you just hit "repeat" and keep on writing. If you just start writing words, any words, while you listen, sooner or later they're going to take shape into something, promise.

Charlie Parker, "Now's The Time." Optimistic and bustle-y.

Air, "Talisman." Outer spacey.

Arthur Rubinstein, Chopin's Nocturne in E Flat. Romantic and thoughtful.

Enya, "Tempus Vernum." Apocalyptic. There are lyrics, but they're in Latin.

Assassin's Creed II soundtrack, "Earth." Dramatic and Italian.

Yo-Yo Ma, Et. al., "Matsushima-Ondo." Lively and Japanese.

Thomas Newman, "Drive Away." Mysterious and urgent.

Cocteau Twins, "Lorelei" Shimmery.

Formal Friday: The Terza Rima!

2010-07-16T11:33:00.018-05:00

The first thing you need to know here is that an iamb is an unstressed syllable plus a stressed syllable. Ba-BUM. Like a heartbeat.

Then you need to know that iambic pentameter means you're writing in 5 iambs per line. This is how Shakespeare wrote all the time. The highlighted syllables are stressed.

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks." (Hamlet)

OK. Terza rima is an old Italian form. You write in iambic pentameter, in three-line stanzas. The rhyme scheme is like this:

aba
bcb
cdc

et cetera, for as long as you want, really. Then usually you wind up the rhyme scheme like this, with a two-line stanza (a couplet) at the end:

yzy
zz

But you don't have to end it that way. In this sample terza rima from Plath--a sort of gross poem about a dead snake, not really her best, but pretty good--she just ends it with a triplet that picks up the "a" rhyme from the beginning, which is pretty cool too.

Medallion

By the gate with star and moon
Worked into the peeled orange wood
The bronze snake lay in the sun

Inert as a shoelace; dead
But pliable still, his jaw
Unhinged and his grin crooked,

Tongue a rose-colored arrow.
Over my hand I hung him.
His little vermilion eye

Ignited with a glassed flame
As I turned him in the light;
When I split a rock one time

The garnet bits burned like that.
Bust dulled his back to ocher
The way sun ruins a trout.

Yet his belly kept its fire
Going under the chainmail,
The old jewels smoldering there

In each opaque belly-scale:
Sunset looked at through milk glass.
And I saw white maggots coil

Thin as pins in the dark bruise
Where innards bulged as if
He were digesting a mouse.

Knifelike, he was chaste enough,
Pure death's-metal. The yard-man's
Flung brick perfected his laugh.

Plath capitalized the first letter of every line, but you don't have to do that, in this or any form, unless you want to. Doing that has kind of gone out of vogue, but if you like it, go for it.

You probably noticed that a lot of Plath's rhymes aren't perfect. They're just sort-of rhymes. That is totally OK. Half-rhymes still sound great, You can always adapt forms however you like...but more on that later, maybe.

Robert Frost's famous and fantastic "Aquainted With the Night" uses the zz ending (two lines that rhyme.) It's terza rima, and also a sonnet! Hope I'm not blowing your mind here.

Acquainted with the Night

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain--and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-by;
and further still at an unearthly height
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

James Franco and Jon Hamm in Howl.

2010-07-15T11:39:00.007-05:00

Well, well, well. A movie about Ginsberg's iconic poem and the obscenity trial it spawned. Doesn't that sound good? Ohhh, I hope it's good.

Confession Is Bad for the Soul: Poetry and Mental Illness, p. 2

2010-07-14T07:06:00.008-05:00

Confessional poetry is extremely personal poetry people write about themselves. Sex, despair, it's all out there for everyone to see.

In the late 1950s and 1960s, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and W.D. Snodgrass personified this style. (Sexton and Snodgrass were both students of Lowell's, and Snodgrass was Sexton's mentor, though Sexton is the better poet.) People generally include John Berryman in this camp too. (Berryman was one of Snodgrass's teachers, though it sounds like he was kind of an asshole to his students.) Lots of contemporary poets work in this vein.

One of the pleasures of confessional poetry is the same as that of most reality TV: voyeurism. It’s fascinating to experience the intimate, embarrassing, maybe disastrous details of the life of someone we don’t know and have no business knowing about. If we are as messed up as the subject of the poem or the TV show, at least we know we’re not alone. But if the subject is more messed up than we are, that’s even better: we feel good about ourselves in comparison.

So that's fine for the reader. But the poet who gets praised for her expressions of her own illness and messed-up-ness doesn’t have a lot of incentive to get better. Her disorders are her raw material, like clay to a sculptor. If anything, she has good reason to get worse—all the better to write startlingly honest, dramatic, memorable stuff.

Of course, the confessional poets' mental illnesses may have led them to their kind of poetry in the first place. They may have had difficulty imagining much beyond themselves and their own depression. And isn't it therapeutic to get all that stuff out on paper?

Maybe not. In his great book Mind Wide Open: The Neuroscience of Everyday Life, Steven Johnson discusses evidence that talking about and re-living traumatic events actually etches them more deeply into the brain. The bad memories become the bookmarked pages on your mind's computer, the pages to which the book naturally falls open. This research seems to throw a lot of traditional therapy and "the talking cure" into question, but I would be surprised if the field of psychiatry made radical changes anytime soon as a result.

John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton all killed themselves. I think their particular kind of poetry helped keep them stuck in their despair, when it might have been healthy and helpful to focus on something, anything, external to themselves.

10 Essential Books of Non-American Poetry, According to Me

2010-07-12T06:43:00.004-05:00

This is a follow-up to my list of essential American poetry.

1. Carlos Drummond de Andrade. Traveling in the Family: Selected Poems. (Translated from the Portuguese by various people, including Elizabeth Bishop.)

This Brazilian guy is my favorite. And hardly anyone knows about him! He is not my favorite because hardly anyone knows about him. I’m not like that. If he somehow becomes really popular, I won’t say he sold out. Though it would be kind of hilarious if I did, since he’s dead. I first came across Drummond de Andrade in Another Republic, an amazing anthology of poetry in translation edited by Mark Strand and Charles Simic.

2. Anna Akhmatova. The Complete Poems. (Translated from the Russian by Judith Hemschemeyer.)

This is a gigantic volume filled with poems about pain of love, the cities she loved, war and loss, and flowers and leaves and hope. Highly recommended winter reading. Make some hot tea. Or you could just drink vodka.

3. Pablo Neruda. 100 Love Sonnets. (Translated from the Spanish by Stephen Tapscott.)

Who wouldn’t like this? Actually, some feminists don’t, but this feminist has no complaints. I agree with the San Francisco Examiner quote on the cover; “Sensual as a tropical night swirling with honeysuckle and jazz…”

4. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Sonnets from the Portuguese.

More Latino love sonnets? Well, no. Browning was shy about publishing these personal love poems, so at first she pretended they were translations. She intended to call them Sonnets from the Bosnian, but her sweetie Robert, also a poet, talked her into changing it. “Portuguese” was, weirdly, his pet name for her.

Barrett Browning’s “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” is probably as famous as any Shakespeare sonnet.

5. William Shakespeare. The Sonnets.

Obviously.

6. W.B. Yeats. The Collected Poems.

What can I say? I dig romantic Irish dudes. Pick this up when you’re in the mood for some misty Celtic mystery.

7. John Keats. Poems.

“Yeats” rhymes with “dates,” but “Keats” rhymes with “meets.” You should meet him, if you haven’t already. And Bright Star, Jane Campion’s movie about him and Fanny Brawne, is fantastic.

I read Keats as a college student on the back porch of a duplex while eating mixed nuts and drinking cheap sherry, both left over from the lecture and reading series I helped facilitate. Cheap sherry makes no sense in the middle of July, but hey, I was only twenty. I was also reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge then, and he’s sort of the runner-up here. Coleridge supposedly wrote “Kubla Khan” while high on opium, but I read recently that they may have just been a bit of clever marketing.

8. Robert Desnos. The Selected Poems. (Translated from the French by Carolyn Forche and William Kulik.)

Surreal, emotional, easy to read, easy to love.

9. Federico Garcia Lorca. Selected Poems. (Translated from the Spanish by various people.)

Pure lyricism. This does have the original Spanish versions of everything, in case you want to read them in Spanish too.

10. Charles Baudelaire. Twenty Prose Poems. (Translated from the French by Michael Hamburger.)

The first edition is for sale on Amazon for $89, and I’m a little tempted. But you can buy it in paperback for nine bucks plus shipping. I linked all the titles to Amazon. “Get Drunk!” is unforgettable. I think I have it memorized.

Who do you think should be on here? Rilke, Rumi? Who else?

Thinking Way Outside the Box: Poetry and Mental Illness, p. 1

2010-07-11T12:08:00.015-05:00

Poets are more likely to kill themselves than other people are. My favorite poet, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, wrote a poem called "Don't Kill Yourself," addressed to himself, for a reason. Luckily, he took his own advice, and lived to an old age.

Poets are also way more likely to be alcoholics, and they’re more likely to suffer from bipolar disorder. It makes poetry look bad.

Just a couple of months ago, brain researchers in Sweden sent out an press release saying they’d found a link between mental illness and creativity. Associate professor Fredrik Ullen explained, “"We have studied the brain and the dopamine D2 receptors, and have shown that the dopamine system of healthy, highly creative people is similar to that found in people with schizophrenia.” Basically, poets and schizophrenics may both be wired to make the unexpected leaps and strange associations that make poems so much fun.

Ullen summed it up by saying, "Thinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box.” The poet Anne Sexton, who first started writing at the suggestion of her therapist, wrote in her poem “For the Year of the Insane” that she wasn’t in the right box at all: “I am in my own mind./I am locked in the wrong house.”

Some people have tried to insist there’s no link whatsoever between being an artist and being more likely to be mentally ill…it’s just a myth! It seems ridiculous to deny something so obvious, especially because mental illness, like any other illness, isn't shameful. Of course, it also isn't romantic or glamorous. It just sucks.

I haven't come across anything yet that suggests that periods of greater illness produce greater art. Sylvia Plath wrote her best stuff right before she killed herself, but Anne Sexton wrote her worst stuff then.

And none of the research suggests that poets have to be crazy. They may just be more susceptible to mental illness, the way the elderly are more susceptible to pneumonia. Hopefully, research like this will help a lot of creative people understand themselves and take care of themselves, so they can keep making the art they were meant to make.

Robert Pinksy is a BAMF.

2010-07-10T20:39:00.007-05:00

The one time I got to see him read, he was just as intense.

Great poem.

Formal Friday: The Haiku!

2010-07-09T12:26:00.015-05:00

A lot of us Americans learned to write these in grade school with a 5-syllable line, a 7-syllable line, and another 5-syllable line. It makes sense that teachers and young kids would like those clear, simple directions. That Americanized version of haiku is a tradition in its own right, like Chicago-style stuffed pizza.

Japanese haiku are a little different. Those are usually written in one line, with three phrases of 5, 7, and 5 mora, which aren’t quite the same as syllables and which are really pretty confusing to me. Each phrase ends in a kireji, or cutting word, which we don’t really have in English.

If you write a literary haiku that captures the spirit of the Japanese traditional form, then it’ll probably follow most (but likely not all) of these guidelines.

•somewhere between 10 and 17 syllables

•one or two line breaks(to stand in for the kireji), sometimes with an ellipses, dash, or colon

•no title

•no rhymes or alliteration

•containing a reference to the season—either direct, like “summer,” or indirect, like “fireflies”

•about nature

•containing one or two concrete images

•capturing a fleeting moment or impression

•containing a comparison or a contrast

Here’s a Japanese haiku translated by Kenneth Rexroth.

Frozen in the ice

A maple leaf.

-Shiki

That image might make you think of time moving quickly, or of how the memories of your past are part of your present-day reality, or of something else entirely, but the poet isn’t going to spell it out for you.

Here are a couple written in English.

Just enough rain

To bring the smell of silk

From umbrellas.

-Richard Wright

lily:

out of the water…

out of itself

Nick Virgilio

My friend Chris told me about how R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe and some of his friends wrote a haiku a day for a whole year. They published this book of the poems, The Haiku Year. I think it's a pretty cool thing to try, even for a week, even on your own. I bet it makes life more entertaining.

10 Essential Books of American Poetry, According to Me

2010-07-08T22:29:00.030-05:00

This list is for people who don’t read a lot of poetry and aren’t even positive they like it, but would like to at least have an idea of what it’s all about. I’ll do a list of non-American poetry soon, too, for those who want to be really cosmopolitan.

1. Langston Hughes. The Collected Poems.

Hughes used conversational language, borrowed from jazz and blues, and made lyricism look easy. I think he’s one of the three greats of American poetry. The other two are coming right up.

2. Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass.

O Captain, my Captain! Whitman writes in big long generous grandiose lines about: America! And: himself!

3. Emily Dickinson. The Complete Poems.

Dickinson is sort of Whitman’s opposite: short, spare lines, a lot implied rather than said. Her anthologized stuff is not (as is so often the case) her best stuff.

4. Sylvia Plath. Ariel.

Brutal, brittle, brilliant. This newer version is Plath's original ordering of the poems; the earlier version was arranged after Plath's suicide by Ted Hughes, her cheating husband.

5. James Wright. Above the River: The Complete Poems.

I like the one about digging the swimming pool best.

6. Rita Dove. Thomas and Beulah.

This tells a story about a couple’s married life, from around the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1960s.

7. Frank O’Hara. Lunch Poems.

He wrote them on his lunch hour! You can read them on your lunch hour!

8. Kevin Young. Black Maria.

He puts out a good book of poetry, like, every four months or something. This noir-ish collection about a private eye may be my favorite, but it's a tough call.

9. Elizabeth Bishop. The Complete Poems, 1927 – 1979.

Her famous villanelle, "One Art," was featured in the movie In Her Shoes, which I haven't seen. Bishop was brilliant, and so was her mentor, Marianne Moore.

10. Charles Simic. The World Doesn't End.

These surreal, super-entertaining prose poems won the Pulitzer in 1990. Simic was born in Yugoslavia, but he came to the U.S. when he was 16.

No, I didn’t put Ginsberg’s Howl on here. I loved it when I was in high school, but now I think he should have done a lot more editing.