Depressive Relapse; Writing and Personality

I wrote this the other day but forgot to post it, so forgive any redundancy at the mention of depression or the anachronistic reference to a lack of comments. --CE


The rainy season has begun, and here in coastal northern California, once it begins it seems never to end. It is the price we pay for redwoods and berries and mushrooms and all the lush vegetation that surrounds us in this emerald paradise. But you don't want to move here; it's much to damp and drizzly. And the economy sucks. And we locals treat tourists like lepers. (Actually our economy depends on them.)


To come clean, I have been in a bit of a depressive relapse since Thanksgiving, when I took a medication for pain for the trip to SF, a medication I know presents risks as soon as I go off of it. My brain screams: "Don't take it!" My back urges, "How can you drive four hours without it?" Truly my brain must win this argument, since the pain in my back can't compare with emotional pain. Strangely, though, when I now become tearful at my usual times, 11 AM and 4 PM, I think of Rachel. The sadness comes first (I am convinced the affect precedes the thought) but now, at least, I have a focus that feels healthier. She was my heart; she broke my heart in life; she shattered my heart in death.


I apologize to any who feel I sometimes ask too much of the reader, for some feeling of connection, usually when I reveal something extremely personal. I must remind myself that the medium of writing renders things impersonal; the writing is the show and the audience is the reader, and if it's a good show you don't think about the writer, you just enjoy the show--that's good writing in a nutshell. Eliot was partially right about this, how the personality must get out of the way for poetry; in confessional prose, the act of writing does change the personality into a persona; it is unavoidable. How I come across in the meat world is far different. If my mood is euthymic I tend to be a gregarious clown, something you might not guess from my writings.


I suppose what I most prize in writing, besides clarity and substance, is the virtual disappearance of the writer. Often we run into heavy-handed exposure of the writer, even in fiction, if the writer is not careful (Mailer and Thompson come to mind). One example of great writing is that no one really knows squat about Shakespeare from his plays; his sonnets are the only real record he gave us, and even they are somewhat stylized to please a patron.


The meaning of "Patron" (of the arts) has changed over the years. It used to mean the one guy you worked for to amuse, the same guy who paid you. You had to amuse him, and if he liked your stuff and paid for its printing, it added to the patron's reputation. Now "patron of the arts" seems a generic term for people who attend opera and donate now and then. In place of the old patronage system we have the grant system, where committees weight the investment of a foundation's money. It's not easy to get patronage in either case, but it sure would be nice to know for whom you're writing. Shakespeare was lucky in this regard; his audience was made up of all society's classes.


All art is for someone; initially for the artist, then for an audience, then for the critics. In my best writing, of course, an audience is never a consideration; it is all about the writing. If publication follows I feel slightly vindicated in my own judgment, but that is more frosting on the cake than the labor of the cake.


In view of the above, when I complain about a lack of comments, I deserve the criticism I get. Writing that does not objectify the writer into a voice may rightly be attacked by those who are repelled by the writer's personality and actions in the "real world."

Thine at 2 Kilorats,

CE

Giving Up Poetry

I’ve been reading some very good online and print journals of late, and I am seriously entertaining giving up poetry as a genre for my talents (except for the occasional toss-off). In fact, whatever else I see when I read the best journals, I see that my verse would stick out like a sore thumb if ever published in the middle of so many elegant, painstakingly crafted pieces.

I’m not saying this in irony, nor do I say it to be contradicted by the reader’s encouragement. It is not a plea for someone to say, “Stay the course, CE,” no; it is a considered result of reason and observation, something I’ve been slouching toward for some time.

Truly, I am not good enough for current poetic standards. In retrospect, had I not married young and become a doctor, I ought to have studied under masters, perhaps gotten an MFA, attended all the seminars from all the name poets I could. Instead (given whatever opportunity I have had)—perhaps for fear of failure, perhaps for lacking the humility for instruction, perhaps out of protectiveness against having my art altered by any external, well-meaning hand, I bull-headedly pursued my own lights and muse into whatever my verse has become today. And as it is, it is inferior to the good poetry I find myself reading, with its original diction, premise, construction, scene-painting, tantalizing incompletions and often insuperable puzzles. Since it appears that this is what good editors now prize, I am, well, sunk—at least for this time and this age, the only period an artist can rationally count upon. Therefore I think I should embrace prose wholeheartedly and be done with my dream of being a poet, saver for the occasional piece, as I said above.

Now it’s true that contemporary poetry is a very large tent and has room for both the blunt and the refined, and for the most part I belong to the former category, still the best journals seem to prefer a certain refinement beyond my skill. The Journal, published by Ohio State University, has many examples of this in their new issue. Here’s the first and second stanzas of a poem by Molly Brodak, “Like Your Jesus, Only Mine”:

Wait up, bitch!” begs back the pale bus stop boy.
O molester moustache, O fake hobble—
they group up—legs of toddler proportion, whatever glamour wants,
and papery shirts, long as dresses

hung with tangles of gold—
the kind that rubs off, once finger-loved.

The poem concerns a brief dispute between wannabe white gang-bangers, or “wiggers” (= “white niggers”), as one can see from the description of the clothing (although some of the principals may actually be black; we can’t know). The only action in the poem I am sure occurs, besides the boy at the bus stop begging the other to wait, is when the other boy bangs him in the chest with a cell phone. Then the scene segues abruptly to a restaurant, and at the poem’s end the other boy (not the pale bus stop boy) gets a call from his dad on the same cell phone. All of this is very cryptically done in brief and powerful images that evoke a story line of their own—even if you have no idea where that story line leads.

Now not all the poems in this journal are quite as difficult as this, still it appears to be the prevailing style. As I said to Kathleen last night, “I want to connect the dots. They want to disconnect them.” Or better put, many of the more successful current poets want to disconnect and reconnect the dots again in a somewhat disconnected way, forcing the reader to put the pieces back together Humpty-Dumpty like, never sure the egg shell edges really fit. Or if these poets deconstruct to construct, what they construct is often more difficult to understand than their process of deconstruction.

Despite all this, with sufficient ambition and steadfastness, one can usually piece a narrative of some kind together from a poem of this type. Here’s another one from the issue in its entirety, “Cure” by Kristin Abraham. As I read it over and over, with sufficient time between my readings, I felt that I finally “got it.” Perhaps I was not versed enough in this kind of poetry to decode its substance sooner; perhaps I deceive myself into thinking there’s something to get; but my gloss makes sense to me at the least. Here’s the poem, double-spaced as in the issue:

Cure


They played

doctor.

(She was the foot of the bed / chart

marked with asterisks and daggers,

the story looking over its shoulder.)

Then the next she

was born, they

called her Ridiculous.

Ridiculous as

shh, I can hear them, as

little door in my mind

(the not-so-pleasant fairytale.)



Now the family can’t

sleep: birds

are living

in her walls, unraveling

the hem of her name.

Now she tosses crusts

to the birds, now the birds

won’t leave.


Bear with me here. I think this poem is about discovery of sexuality in childhood and its association with the primal scene, so that the child eventually discovers where she actually comes from (as in “unraveling / the hem of her name”), and how this ultimately unsettles the family dynamic as she comes to terms with her growing adult sexuality, a revelation that can’t be undone, hence the birds won’t leave. The “Cure” is in effect, the end of childhood, the cure for childish misconceptions. Once you understand you are the result of your parents having sex you can’t go back. Perhaps the birds symbolize the lost innocence of childhood, perhaps they symbolize the persistent reminder of adulthood. Regardless, things have changed, and not necessarily for the better.

Now I’m not saying that Ms. Abraham would admit that her poem is “about” anything, but I am fairly sure a determined, intelligent reader would likely unearth some of the same substance as I have.

Why poets and readers of poetry want to work this hard, I don’t know. Susan Sontag wrote that irony had been exhausted in the late 20th century. It seems as if poetry had been exhausted, too, so that the best poets dancing on the edge of the art have had to go to great lengths to put an original stamp on the art. It is not enough to tell the truth wryly as Frost did; one must provide an almost out-of-body experience for the reader. Again, not all the poems chosen by the editors in this volume are this abstruse, and I would say a word about David Moolten, an excellent poet/physician from Philadelphia, whose work I remember from long ago—I think, if I am not wrong, from some online workshop. He has matured into a fine poet whom I can still understand without banging my head against his poems. One of his three poems in the volume, “Tolerance,” is a masterpiece. In fact, to the editors’ credit, he is the only poet with three poems in the issue.

Anyone more interested in these sorts of debates can refer to my Logopoetry essays, written almost ten years ago, which now strike me as horribly outdated, since the examples I used for difficulty of substance—Dylan Thomas, for instance—now seem, in comparison to current fare, fairly easy to understand (if “understanding” in the usual sense can even be a goal of the poetry most admired today). Having said all this, here’s a piece I wrote this morning about my feelings of inferiority towards the poetry which garners more recognition in this age among the cognoscenti:


Second Fiddle

It’s not easy to be
almost good enough
understudy, journeyman
playing the chitlin circuit
on a minor label
in a middling journal
tuxedo an Armani rip-off
a few millimeters
from handsome,
two freckles from pretty,
an eyebrow from beautiful.

It’s not easy
to open the violin case
for the first fiddle,
to straighten the conductor’s
music sheets, to rehearse
lines with the lead.
For a while you think
there may be a chance
but when the lead gets sick
they import someone,
pass you over—
you are the ultimate insurance,
you are the just in case
never shooting, always
falling star.

Since I know most readers of this blog are not poetry aficionados, indeed some have told me that the only poetry they read is found here, no doubt many will prefer my simple complaint to the complex reverberations of “Cure.” If this is true, don’t pick up a literary journal. You may be disappointed.


Memorially Thine,

CE

New Poem; Also the Parnassian vs. the Conversational

An Apology for Bad Poems

I’ve been talking at you for years
like a deaf grandfather. I don’t mean
to lecture, that’s death for poetry.

But if poetry can’t compete
with “The Wall of Death,”
at least it can be a Ferris Wheel.

At the zenith of our revolution together,
your head jerking like a gopher sitting sentry,
I’d like to hear, “Grandpa, what’s that?”

“That’s where the A-Bomb hit in ’62.
Nothing grows there except man-eating radishes.”
“Really? And Grandpa, over there, over there!”

“That’s a whale sunning himself in a tree.
Those are sea otters flying about.
The gleaming carousel is made of abalone.”

“And there, Grandpa, what’s that?”
“That’s the Red Giant, gouty Antares
limping out to milk his Apatosaurus.”

“Really? What does the milk taste like?”
“Like vanilla ice cream smothered in caramel
and melted into a thick, sweet soup.”

We descend and dismount. Carnies bark
from booths overflowing with kitsch.
Sorry, son, the poem is over.


I penned (typed) this one first thing this morning. Notice how deafness recurs as a metaphor for me. ;-)

Incidentally I stole the title for today's poem from Robinson Jeffers.

I'm trying to loosen up my verse a little. But there’s always a catch.

The tradition of Parnassian verse, as in Homer, Virgil, Beowulf, Spenser, Shakespeare (ignoring comedies and comedic interludes), Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson—a type of poetry Matthew Arnold wrote of as containing "high seriousness"—seems clearly over.

Yet much of the magic of poetry depends upon such high seriousness, since we must take poetry seriously to set up heroic expectations, or even anti-heroic expectations. (See "The Hollow Men" by Eliot, "Out, Out" by Frost, or "Roan Stallion" by Jeffers. The moderns could still do high seriousness.)

What am I trying to say? There must be a point between the conversational voice of Billy Collins and the often elevated voices of Milosz, Larkin, Yeats and the like.... I think Eliot mixes the conversational with the Parnassian better than anyone:

From “Gerontion":

"The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at last
We have not reached conclusion, when I
Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last
I have not made this show purposelessly
And it is not by any concitation
Of the backward devils
I would meet you upon this honestly.
I that was near your heart was removed therefrom."

(italics mine)

I find the conversational more effective when set up by the serious, the empyrean, or the Parnassian, but so few poets can do this—change voices in mid-stream successfully. You have to be very good to do this. Most of us can only write well employing one voice. In reading Jane lately, as good as she is, she doesn't even attempt this. Most poets don’t.

Again, without form verse libre is impotent; without seriousness the conversational becomes banal. The necessary dualisms of great writing are in the very nature of writing, just as Shakespeare relieves the political machinations of Henry IV with Falstaff.

Here’s a different example of coming from the conversational to a conclusion of high seriousness (Yeats):


CRAZY JANE TALKS WITH THE BISHOP

I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
'Those breasts are flat and fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.'

'Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,' I cried.
'My friends are gone, but that's a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart's pride.

'A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.'

(italics mine)

Since first being enamored of poetry, I have been enamored of poetry of power. I find Plath powerful at times but not Collins. Dylan Thomas is powerful, as Larkin can be, but Walcott rarely. Milosz can do it, though he is a bit jagged. Coleridge's "Rime" must be the most powerful poem ever written in the sense I mean.

I wrote an essay called "Power Lyrics" several years ago in which I tried to develop this theme more clearly, but I doubt I'll ever explain it properly; it's like what Blackwell said about pornography; I know it when I see it.

What is even more powerful is when the poet has the skill to interrupt serious verse with a snatch of the intimately conversational, even ridiculous, or vice-versa, which takes us completely by surprise and works despite (and because of) the momentary jarring of switching inputs.

If you are confused by these points, it is the fault of the author, not your brain. Maybe I’ll nail the concept another time.


All for today,

CE

A New Mandala for Poetry....

In my Logopoetry essays I divided poetry into a Mandala of Form, Substance, Meaning, and Feeling--with the intersection of the four being the center of artistic excellence. Now I have been visited with a second Mandala, whose four corners are Inductive, Deductive, Open, and Closed.

I don't know how to reproduce it here in the blog, but just imagine that the following five elements are spread at 90 degrees from each other with 'X' in the middle for the intersection of the Mandala.


Deductive
Closed
X
Open
Inductive


Deductive poems use figures of speech to support their assertions, however surreal.

Inductive poems spring from an actual experience that generates elaboration.

Open poems invite the reader to join the author in his journey, avoiding easy conclusions.

Closed poems end with a summarizing statement, however disguised by technique, wrapping the work in a nice red bow. Keats' "Ode to a Grecian Urn" is proof that closed poems can be great and ought not to be despised, even in our present relativistic culture.

Yeats writes many closed poems, like "Byzantium."

There is likely no poet more open in English than Emily Dickinson, whose insights are so subtle and stuttering you feel like you're dancing with a shy wallflower--until you see her great heart and intelligence.

Eliot's early work, like "Prufrock," is more open, though certainly deductive. His later work is more closed, especially "Four Quartets."

Shakespeare's sonnets are almost entirely deductive, using figures of speech instead of surrendering to the experience of the moment, and mainly closed as well. And Spenser and Johnson are in the same club, while Donne can be more inductive, as in "The Flea." Closed and deductive were the expectation of those times.

Wordsworth could be inductive or deductive, though his early work strives to be inductive, as in "Tintern Abbey," and especially "The Prelude," while the Lucy poems, for instance, are deductive.

Coleridge was more deductive, even in natural settings as in "This Lime Tree Bower My Prison."

Elizabeth Bishop was best when inductive, as in "The Moose," or "Fish Houses," or "The Fish."

Strand is mainly deductive, though often disguised. But his settings are mainly created like stage scenery.

Wallace Stevens is mainly deductive as well. But is he open or closed? I think more open in his uncertainty.

Matthew Arnold is closed and deductive, a combination that puts his poetry out of favor in this age. Same for Pope, Dryden and Johnson. Same for Milton.

Shelley often transformed the inductive into the deductive, by exalting an experience, especially of nature, into an epiphany that exceeds the experience ("Ode to the West Wind.")

Blake is almost purely deductive. But is he closed? I think his childlikeness makes him open even when a poem, like "The Sick Rose," tells us the entire story. We want to leap into childhood with him and his diction. Despite his rhetoric, he is more open than closed; he wants us to believe in his world, and it shows.

Zymborska is mainly open, though she can be inductive and deductive, like most poets, though I think if we analyzed all poets, most would tilt towards one quality or the other.

Rilke was mainly deductive in his "Sonnets for Orpheus," but more inductive in his "Duino Elegies."

Neruda, without reviewing him in detail, strikes me as beyond these classifications in general, but later in his career, as a dogmatic Communist, he wrote more closed and deductive poems. His best work is open.

I will stop here. Perhaps I'll write an essay about these four corners, perhaps not. If an editor wants it, I'll likely do it. But that requires a query letter, which I find tedious and am loathe to write. Any editor who visits these pages need only drop me a note and I will flesh out my theories for her pleasure.

Anyway, I wanted to share this alternative approach in understanding poetry which is complimentary to my Logopoetry essays, still available in the Melic Archives


Food for thought. I'd like to hear your thoughts!

CE