Jean Valentine said that one should write as if there is a person one is writing to that will implicitly understand everything. This seems to be exactly the opposite of what is preached by many editors of journals and teachers in our current American culture. They demand context. They themselves write as if there is no point in writing if the writing is not explicit. We are warned as writers that not only the ‘reader’ as the unknown reader of your poems but the actual reader/editor of the journal you are submitting to will not give time to a poem in which they cannot understand ‘what is going on’. To counter this I would say that Emily Dickinson, who is considered, with Whitman, to have inaugurated an authentically American style, and whose reputation has only increased since the first publication of her poetry, wrote in the way Valentine recommends. Considering Dickinson’s influence on Valentine, it is probably from reading Dickinson that Valentine had the idea. Stein, Eliot, Stevens, Ashberry, all followed the same principle. I think it is this principle that liberated them to write the way they did. If a reader has to take the time to wonder what I meant in a poem, that is fine. I want them to wonder: for me at least, wonder is the best possible state to be in.
The entry for ‘death’ in the Emily Dickinson Lexicon shows just how often and in how many ways Dickinson thought of death:
death (-'s), n. [OE; see also dead, adj.] (webplay: action, another, arrow, away, ball, banished, being, blood, born, breast, called, caught, cause, ceased, child, Christ, circumstance, cold, color, common, danger, darkness, deadly blow, decrease, deep, depart, deprived, destitute, disappear, divine, drops, dull, end, endure, enemy, eternal, everlastingly, extinction, eye, faint, faith, fall, fame, father, feathered, feeling, fire, force, frost, functions, future, gates, given, God, grace, grief, hands, head, heart, heavy, horror, hour, hunger, imitating, immortal, impotent, indifference, invisible, kill, land, life, livest, lose, love, manner of dying, means, men, mortal, motion, murder, name, nature, night, nothing, obscure, pale, passed, peaceful, people, perfectly, perish, perpetual, poor, portion, power, prayer, property, quiet, realm, remain, renewed, request, resembling, restored, rights, rising, river, sake, seas, second death, secret, senses, separation, ship's, sickness, sight, signifies, slain, sleep, slumbers, society, sought, soul, space, spiritless, still, stone, suffer, surface, tasteless, timber, time, torments, tree, truth, use, vital, walls, want, water, weight, wind, wine, winter, world, wrath).
Complement to life; inert stage in the life cycle.
Dying; demise; closure of mortality.
Force that ends life; [personification] personage that takes someone from mortality to the next life.
Moment of passing away; time when life ends.
Expiration; seemingly permanent loss of breath.
Final crisis; fatal agony.
Losing life; process of dying.
Physical stasis; rigor mortis; biological termination of animation.
Cessation of life; transition into a better world.
Total loss of consciousness; complete shut-down of the physical body.
A corpse; a dead body; one who is no longer alive.
Final accounting; last chance.
Passing away of someone.
Loss of life; physical decomposition; corporeal corruption; dissolution of the body; (see Luke 9:27).
The inescapable conclusion of life; [personification] the destroying angel.
Duration of a lifeless state; period of time that a being is not alive.
Release; liberation from life's pains and griefs.
Time of darkness; suspension of light.
The undertaker; [personification] the gentleman chauffeur; the funeral director; the driver for a funeral cortege.
Being dead; no longer having a living identity.
A killer; a cause of demise; an agent that terminates life.
Separation of the spirit from the body.
The tomb; the grave; the underworld.
Obligation to follow natural law; temporal obligation to relinquish life.
A fatal wound; a sharp lethal weapon.
The unknown; the mysterious final chapter in life's book.
Capital punishment; worst possible penalty; legal sentence of being killed.
The end of mortality; the transition from this world to the world beyond.
Hell; state of separation from the Beloved.
Bridge from this truth to the next truth (like a hyphen).
Decomposition; corruption.
Phrase. “put to death”: execute; martyr; kill in capital punishment.
Phrase. “House of Death”: final resting place; [kenning] tomb; grave; sepulchre.
Something I have become certain of through reading history is that however harshly we judge the past, the future will think of us just as harshly.
There is a traditional Turkish saying, used for a situation that cannot get any better, that translates literally as “The only thing better than this is an apricot in Damascus.”
Apricots ripen and drop during a relatively short period of the year, as figs do, and yet apricots receive far less attention and devotion than figs. Perhaps because apricots are not so consistent in flavor as figs. Perhaps because they act as the introductory fruit to the later, and more obviously luxurious, peaches and plums.
Unless you have lived in a place where apricots grow well, and have eaten a perfectly ripe apricot that has been refrigerated only briefly or not at all, you cannot appreciate how delightfully flavorful an apricot can be.
I was researching information about rifles for a poem, and found this in an article about the lever-action .30-30 Winchester, or “the cowboy assault rifle”:
Many 2nd Amendment supporters are concerned that mandatory registration of semi-auto rifles is only the first step toward the federal government attempting to confiscate Americans’ weapons, violating our right to bear arms. Should we find our nation outlawing semi-auto rifles and attempting to disarm lawful citizens, a lever-action .30-30 could come in handy. The ability to thumb-in fresh rounds through the loading gate allows for speedy reloading, and being able to top off the rifle means you have plenty of rounds ready to fire. The .30-30’s stopping power ensures that you can bring down any predator you might face, whether of the four-legged or two-legged variety.
I don’t believe in Jesus, but I did say “Jesus” aloud after reading this. It is important though to have a sense of the thinking of people with whom you profoundly disagree. Hopefully the person who wrote the above feels the same, and doesn’t pick up their gun against someone who believes in gun control measures.
I am also not quite sure what this person imagines will happen if people do come “attempting to disarm lawful citizens”. Even if you owned a fully automatic rifle and resided in a bunker, there is no possibility of outlasting or overpowering our heavily militarized and technologically advanced police force. Perhaps they have an unlimited food supply in their bunker as well as enough batteries for the high-tech anti-drone gun they will need to last the rest of their lifetime. And anti-aircraft weapons. And no need to sleep. I don’t know. Do they need a gun so that they have a gun ready when people come to take away their guns?
The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure by Solmaz Sharif
In the poetry craft group of which I am a part we read this essay by Solmaz Sharif for our meeting today:
https://thevolta.org/ewc28-ssharif-p1.html
The essay examines the political ramifications of using erasure as a technique. These are some questions I developed with quotes from the essay to guide our discussion:
What do you think of the syllogism with which Sharif begins?:
Every poem is an action.
Every action is political.
Every poem is political.
What are the political ramifications of this technique? What are our responsibilities to the text when we use this technique? What does it mean if a poet is not taking these ramifications into consideration? It would be helpful to take in Sharif’s statement about the political in this context:
“The political is not topical or thematic, it is tactical and formal. It is not, as its strictest definition supposes, something relegated to legislative halls, but something enacted wherever power is at hand, power being at hand wherever there is a relation, including the relation between text and reader.”
Are we enacting on the text the same process by which states forcefully extradict peoples, conduct trials without due process, oppression, genocide, and other acts of historical erasure? Is it or does it have the potential to be an act of violence? Sharif:
“the proliferation of erasure as a poetic tactic in the United States is happening alongside a proliferation of our awareness of it as a state tactic. And, it seems, many erasure projects today hold these things as unrelated.”
“Erasure may well be the closest poetry in English has gotten to role of the state.”
Under what circumstances, if any, do you think a poet should not use this technique when approaching a technique? Should we limit ourselves in this way? According to Sharif:
“To not attempt this conversation wastes the opportunity to create a cultural acumen that can inform political change. It wastes the danger—because poetry is, if we will it, a dangerous business in this republic.”
Sharif’s points for consideration:
Possible political and aesthetic objectives of poetic erasure as set forth by a multiplicity of sources:
Highlight via illegibility and silence an original erasure (e.g. Jen Bervin’s Dickinson Fasciles or Phil Metres’ Abu Ghraib Arias)
Collapse time and instance between dead and living (e.g. “The dead do not cease in the grave.” Srikanth Reddy, Voyager, p 3)
Expose author’s authority and, therefore, role as culpable participant (e.g. “…the very fact of mutilating the text broke the spell the complete text has on us. I use the word ‘mutilate’ with great deliberation here since I was dlieply aware at the time I worked on Zong! that the intent of the transatlantic slave trade was to mutilate—languages, cultures, people, communities and histories—in the effort of a great capitalist eliterprise. And I would argue that erasure is intrinsic to colonial and imperial forces. It’s an erasure that continues up to the present.” M. NourbeSe Philip)
Care for what is left behind so that erasure has an additive or highlighting effect (e.g. “my first encounter with the text as a potential palimpsest for erasure was reading the words “If it had no pencil, / Would it try mine – li—the first words attributed to Dickinson in 1861. I took a pencil and circled those words. In the next three poems I circled phrases: “a Flag”— “Victory”—”Martyrs”—”Streaks of Meteor – / Upon a Planet’s Blind” and realized that I could work with these beginning poems as erasures.” Janet Holmes)
Render incomplete a text to invite collaboration between reader and text (e.g. while not an intended erasure, If Not Winter, Sappho’s fragments, Anne Carson trans.)
Point to the nearly infinite possibilities and infinite centers of a single text (e.g. any appropriation)
Here are links to some of the projects/artists Sharif mentions, or reviews/interviews about them:
https://www.jenbervin.com/about
And in my opinion the most beautiful presentation yet of some of Dickinson's letters, The Gorgeous Nothings, on which Bervin collaborated:
https://www.jenbervin.com/projects/the-gorgeous-nothings-edition
https://josephrossnet.wordpress.com/2012/01/07/phil-metres-abu-ghraib-arias/
https://www.harvardreview.org/book-review/voyager/
https://kenyonreview.org/2012/11/erasure-collaborative-interview/
https://www.google.com/books/edition/If_Not_Winter/0FiIB9vI2cMC?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover
Carson's translations of Sappho, which I believe I have mentioned before, is one of my favorite books of poems. If you click on the last link above and scroll down to page 2 and later you will get a sense of what Sharif is referring to.
‘Perhaps names are no more than frozen laughter. Laughter is marked by the guilt of subjectivity, but in the suspension of law which it indicates it also points beyond thralldom. It is a promise of the way home.’ Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectics of Enlightenment
I do not agree with Coleridge’s definition of poetry as the ‘balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities’—such a definition seems too restrictive—but I understand more and more that such an act of reconciliation is one of the most productive means for developing poetry. As discord develops plot in fiction, keeping thesis and antithesis in tension is a means to generating new poetic concepts and lines.
Nigerian Poetry
Above: Wole Soyinka, in his forest home.
Perhaps it was the third or fourth young Nigerian poet that made me wonder: why is it every that young Nigerian poet I read is so talented?
Most of Britain’s colonial holdings in Africa extended from the south of the continent to the east. One of the few exceptions to the French rule of Western Africa was Nigeria. Though English is the colonial language, the language of business and mass communication, over five hundred languages are spoken there. Five hundred native tongues to enrich the speaker’s English with loan words and slang. Instead of speaking of Nigerian poetry as a monolithic entity, we might as well speak of Nigerian poetries.
With its 213 million residents, Nigeria accounts for one-sixth of the total population in Africa. This also makes it the sixth most populous nation in the world. By the middle of this century it is expected to reach a population of 400 million. By this time it will most likely have surpassed the population of the US, though its landmass is not too much larger than the state of Texas. According to projections, by 2100 Nigeria will contain 700 million, making it the third most populous country in the world. If this is correct, it will contain significantly more English speakers than Britain, the US, Australia and New Zealand combined.
Perhaps, in the future, Nigerian poetry will influence the poetry of other English-speaking countries in a way the former British colonizers of Africa could never have conceived.
I find it better to research for whole books rather than for individual poems, though that happens sometimes as well. Researching in a general way and writing freely allows the individual poems to arrive freely. After the poems are drafted they can be reworked and expanded according to their particular needs. Writing this way allows it to be a constantly joyful practice. I am always eager to learn more and write more. My manuscripts are much more cohesive than they would be if I worked on every poem as an independent project. By approaching each poem individually I would have to hope that the poems I wrote over however long a period could find some sort of cohesion in book form. The poems instead are in conversation with each other from the beginning. This seems far more productive to me, just as dialogue is more stimulating, for me personally, than a series of monologues.
Cyanide was isolated as a by-product of the first synthetic pigment, Prussian blue. Certain bricks in Auschwitz still carry a faint bluish tinge from the cyanide used in the gas chambers there.
What poetry and philosophy offer—or, at least, some poets, some philosophers—is the ability to multiply associations of meaning. Reading these poets and philosophers, our thinking becomes productive, not reductive—the later being, perhaps, at least during the modern period, the defining characteristic of thinking in our culture.
It has been a challenging few weeks for me. But the way creativity operates, it seems, is in finding solutions to problems. Whether it’s an idea for a poem, or a novel, or a painting, or a sculpture, a writer or artist is presenting themselves with a problem which they then have to figure out how best to solve. Art doesn’t merely offer an escapist fantasy: it allows its practitioners training to function more imaginatively, and thus more effectively, in the way they conduct themselves in the world. This is something for legislators and school boards to remember as they continue to eliminate art programs in school in favor of focusing on STEM classes.
“The limitations that constitute the medium of painting flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment—were treated by the Old Masters as negative factors that could be acknowledged only implicitly or indirectly. Under Modernism the same limitations came to be regarded as positive factors, and were acknowledged openly.” —Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’
Lucy Tunstall, on Plath’s “Fever 103”: “How might purity be achieved in a poem, it asks, and what might it cost a woman speaker or a woman poet? If a mystic must fast, pray and denounce all worldly bonds to achieve enlightenment, or an alchemist burn away all dross in a fiery crucible, what terrible process might lyrical elevation demand?”
This is an inspiring essay by Jess Skyleson, a poet in one of my writers groups, on computational poetics:
https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/poetic-respiration