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SunWinks! October 5, 2014: Music Without Melody
Dear SunWinkers!
In the history of art in general and poetry in particular, one of the creative giants and originals among originals is Dame Edith Sitwell. Born in 1887 into an upper-crust family and distant parents, Sitwell was encouraged by her grandmother and governess to write and express herself. From the very infancy of her poetic career, she broke the mold of stuffy, rigorous Victorian English poetry, determined to find a new language and a new approach.
Edith Sitwell. Painting by Roget Eliot Fry (1918).
Not only a pioneer, Sitwell was a celebrity on the order of Gertrude Stein, Picasso, and Dali. So I was gobsmacked to find a vintage 1949 copy of her volume The Canticle of the Rose: Poems 1919-1949 for sale at Powell’s for $3.50. It begins with an invaluable preface: Some Notes on My Own Poetry. I feel like a kid who found an antique wind-up tin soldier in his Cracker Jacks box:
At the time I began to write, a change in the direction, imagery, and rhythms in poetry had become necessary, owing to the rhythmical flaccidity, the verbal deadness, the dead and expected patterns, of some of the poetry immediately preceding us.
SunWinks! September 28, 2014: Nothing Is Sacred
I think that I shall never see
A poem as trivial as “Trees.”…
Dear SunWinkers!
Joyce Kilmer’s 1913 poem “Trees” is an easy and favorite target for parody. I was shocked to learn that “Trees” was originally published in the prestigious Poetry magazine. (I was also shocked to learn that Joyce Kilmer is a guy.) And you know, looking at it again, it’s not the worst poem ever, especially for 1913.
Joyce Kilmer
Writing parody can be lots of fun, and it can improve your technique and even give you a new appreciation for the poem you are lampooning.
This week, I wrote a parody of James Whitcomb Riley’s “When the Frost Is On the Punkin,” a poem I grew up with. It (the original) is a celebration of crisp autumn mornings on the farm. I heard some baseball commentator say, “The pitcher’s on the rubber, and the batter’s in the box…” and said to myself, “OMG I have to write that!”
SunWinks! September 21, 2014: Playing the Field
Dear SunWinkers!
“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax–
Of cabbages–and kings–
And why the sea is boiling hot–
And whether pigs have wings.”
Lewis Carroll
Well, I got Len to write a poem, so pigs must have wings…..
Anyway, poetry is many things, and consists of many things, and we are going to talk about one of them. Today I want you to think about the placement of the words on the page.
Now, poetry is an oral medium. A good poem must be read out loud, both by the poet in the process of composition, and by the discerning reader.
It follows that the organization of a poem affects how it sounds when read out loud. When it is written in a fixed form, such as a ballad, the form is imposed on the content, and the content must be manipulated to fit the structure. Therefore, much of the music of the poem comes from the superimposed formal structure.
The emergence of open form (or free verse) spearheaded by Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams in the 1940s is based on the idea that the form of a poem ought to grow organically from the thoughts, words, and breathing of the poet. Pound said that poets should “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome.”
SunWinks! September 14, 2014: Gently Down the Stream
Dear SunWinkers:
Years ago, I was struggling with deep depression, divorce, custody battle, blah blah blah. I started writing poetry as a form of therapy. I would usually begin by doing some automatic writing in my journal, just writing the next word that came into my head without thinking about it, and before you know it, there I would be, writing a poem.
Not too long ago, I wrote an experimental poem, just a goof, really, called “Listening In.” The idea was to “record” (not literally, the poem was a deliberate composition) what I heard and saw and what was going through my mind as I watched a Chicago White Sox broadcast with Ken “Hawk” Harrelson and Steve Stone. The poem leaps from inner thought to external action to thought to action to thought to action.
So, in a way, this is what is called stream of consciousness writing. Stream-of-consciousness writing differs from automatic writing in that the author composes the stream of thought that is putatively going through the character’s head. S-o-c writing eschews punctuation and sentence structure, hurtling along from thought to fragmentary thought. James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and Jack Kerouac are notable practitioners. Continue reading
SunWinks! September 7, 2014: Give ‘Em The Fast Shuffle
Dear SunWinkers:
How’s the wife, you ask? Get it from the horse’s mouth at http://carollineswords.wordpress.com ! We went to Carol’s hairdresser today and—well, I’ll let her tell you.
Interesting story: My good friend and colleague Susan Budig, who writes a column called Mindful Poetry, did a prompt asking for readers’ original forms. Respondents were instructed to submit at least two examples of poems in that form. I submitted the two you see below. Susan’s response was that she didn’t see how the two poems were the same form.
SunWinks! August 10, 2014: Check It Twice
Dear SunWinkers:
Reflexive Pronoun Error of the Week:
Illinois man ‘showing off’ shotgun to friends fatally shoots self in head to prove it is empty.
Now on to this week’s column:
You make them to take to the grocery store…
You make them to do your Christmas shopping…
You make them to keep tabs on your money…
What are we talking about?
Duct Tape Wallets, of course!
I’m kidding. We’re talking about…
Lists
There’s a form of poetry called list poetry, also known as the catalogue poem, that goes back many centuries. The ancient list poems served as mnemonic devices: Polynesian list poems, for example, helped the islanders remember the names of all the different Polynesian islands. What amounts to list poetry can be found in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Homer’s Iliad, and it would not be stretching the point too much to include the genealogy in Matthew 1. Continue reading
New Story: Shear Coincidence
Shear Coincidence
A Zen monk was bicycling through a residential neighborhood in East Vancouver, Washington. He was pedaling along a random side street, miles from home, as a consequence of meandering around checking out garage sales, when by chance he came upon a man pinned underneath his lawn tractor beside the curb in front of his home. The monk took in the scene and asked himself, “Is this really happening?” He raced up to the man and set his bicycle down.
“Are you all right?” he asked the man, a typically but not grossly overweight Caucasian man in his fifties or sixties, evidently the homeowner. The tractor was on its side, half off the curb; the man was lying on his side with his legs underneath the steering wheel. He was struggling with the tractor, but in his position, could not budge the tractor or slide out from under the steering column.
“I just need to lift this off me,” he replied. The monk lifted the tractor by the steering wheel and with some effort wrested it off the man’s legs.
“Are you okay?” the monk asked again, concerned the man’s legs might have gotten crushed or something.
“Yes, I’m fine,” the man said, “can you help me up?” The man extended his hand and the monk helped him to his feet. It took somewhat more effort than lifting the tractor, actually, but between the two of them, they managed it. “Thank you very much,” said the man. Continue reading
Poem: The Antique Store
This is probably my favorite personal ars poetica–in fact, I used it as the prologue to my first chapbook, The Caterpillar.
Poem: Because It’s There
Here’s one of my ars poeticas, written a couple years ago for a prompt.
This is written in the “garland cinquain” form. Forms of this complexity Continue reading
SunWinks! 