Addonizio Stuff

Let's start with... Story time!

While it's entirely up to you in terms of how you begin your own poems, the approach you take in the first stanza often (if not always) sets the tone for what's to follow and establishes the subconscious expectations of the reader.  Then, it's a matter of deciding whether you'll give the reader what they more or less expect or risk steering the poem in an entirely different direction.  Kim Addonizio is a great poet to study in this regard because her poems have a performance-like energy but instead of being too general (a common criticism of performance pieces), she still maintains a strong level of emotional resonance.  Let's take a closer look at a few poems from Lucifer at the Starlite.

In "The Burning," p. 27, Addonizio begins with Dante put the philosophers in Limbo.  How would it change the poem if she started with something like, My brother told my father to go to hell?

In "Where Childhood Went," p. 35, imagine The teeth sold to the fairies / are tombstones in the graveyard of the fireflies replaced with something more direct and personal: My parents are showing signs of rot.  

In "Crossing" and "Weaponry," pp. 61-62, how would it change the poems if the "I" were shifted to "He/She" or "You"?

Other questions:

1) Take a look at Section II (Jukebox).  The first few poems (especially "Snow White: the Huntsman's Story" and "Dream-Pig") seem to be persona poems; how does that go with the title of the section?

2) Addonizio uses quite a bit of anaphora in her poems: "You" on p.31, "Forms of Love" on p. 47, and to some degree, the before-mentioned Snow White poem that often starts sentences with "I."  Any other examples?  What are the benefits and risks of that approach?

3)  Especially in a poem like "November 11," p. 17, what's the risk?  What's the payoff?  What's her approach to political subject matter here?

4) Let's take a closer look at the organization of these poems, plus the titles of the sections.  Do you see a progression of theme here?

Activity: take a look at "The Matter" (p. 59), another example of anaphora.  This can be good because the repetition gives some extra grounding to the author and the audience, alike.  (Side note: this is also reminiscent of what Albert Goldbarth does in "Library," using a somewhat consistent structure as an inversely liberating imaginative device).  Taking the same (or a similar) structure, write a "Some...." poem of your own.

Reinvention Exercise

Hopefully, you've grasped by now the necessity of toiling over every word and line break; that writing good poetry takes passion and energy and it should be fun, yes, but it also takes some sweat and dedication.  Especially when we spend a great deal of time crafting our individual lines, though, it can be very easy to get tunnel vision.  That means we end up tinkering with a few syllables when the hard truth is that the poem might require something more radical.

One way to get around that and simultaneously develop a deeper sense for your own turns and rhythm is to basically rewrite your poem backwards, starting with your last line and ending with your first.  Then, tinker with the punctuation, grammar, and word choice to clear up any syntactical disasters that can result from something like this.  When you're done, put the two drafts side by side.  Which do you like better?

Incidentally, this doesn't just have to be a tool for radical revision; you can also use this as an invention exercise and produce a whole new piece, inspired by a certain line or imaginative leap you might not have otherwise made.

A still more difficult (but damn impressive) exercise is to write a poem that can be read (more or less) in either direction. The most famous example of this (which is probably familiar) is Read This Poem from the Bottom Up by Ruth Porritt.


Read This Poem from the Bottom Up
by Ruth Porritt

This simple cathedral of praise.
How you made, from the bottom up,
Is for you to remember
of Andromeda. What remains

Until you meet the ancient light
With your sight you can keep ascending
Its final transformation into space.
And uphold

The horizon's urge to sculpt the sky
Puts into relief
Your family's mountain land
Upon the rising air. In the distance

A windward falcon is open high and steady
Far above the tallest tree
Just beyond your height.
You see a young pine lifting its green spire

By raising your eyes
Out onto the roof deck.
You pass through sliding glass doors
And up to where the stairway ends.

To the top of the penultimate stanza
Past the second story,
But now you're going the other way,
Line by line, to the bottom of the page.

A force that usually pulls you down,
Of moving against the gravity of habit,
While trying not to notice the effort
And feel what it's like to climb stairs.

Poetry Explications and MIDTERM INSTRUCTIONS

We talked last week (and, well, every week before that) about sound in poetry.  Obviously, each poet decides for her or himself (often from poem to poem) if the bulk of a poem's energy will come from narrative, lyricism, imagery, etc.  But to better illustrate how sound and imagery can work together,  take a look at this famous poem by Marge Piercy that relies almost entirely on sound and imagery.

Touch Tones
by Marge Piercy

We learn each other in braille,
what the tongue and teeth taste,
what the fingers trace, translate
into arias of knowledge and delight
of silk and stubble, of bark
and velvet and wet roses,
warbling colors that splash through
bronze, violet, dragonfly jade,
the red of raspberries, lacquer, odor
of resin, the voice that later
comes unbidden as a Mozart horn
concerto circling in the ears.

You are translated from label,
politic mask, accomplished patter,
to the hands round hefting,
to a weight, a thrust, a scent
sharp as walking in early
morning a path through a meadow
where a fox has been last night
and something in the genes saying
FOX to that rich ruddy smell.
The texture of lambswool, of broadcloth
can speak a name in runes. Absent,
your presence carols in the blood.


A great way to refine your own aesthetic, not to mention develop a more technical appreciation for poetry (see also the Pinsky line, "Read the way the chef eats"), is to perform an explication of a published, well-regarded poem.  In other words, go line by line and theorize on what the poem is (or isn't) doing. Another big benefit of this is that once you've come up with a detailed, hopefully complimentary explication of a poem, you have something nice to send out to journals (National Poetry Review is interested in explications) or at the very least, post on your blog to show everybody how smart you are.

To see some examples of explications, check out my explication of the above poem, which also contains info on the midterm (due Feb. 25), as well as my explications "To Pull into Oneself as into a Locked Room" by Stephen Dobyns and "Waiting" by James Valvis.  You should also check out my lesson on scansion, since that's another time-consuming but very effective way to develop a deeper awareness of what's going on in your or someone else's poems.


And now for something completely different...

One way to refine your aesthetic… and, well, get better at stuff… is by seriously attempting something that is more or less impossible.  So with that in mind, let’s try an exercise based on some poems I selected off Verse Daily. 

 If you’re not familiar, Verse Daily is a site that, each day, republishes one poem selected from all the copies of journals and recently published books that are sent their way.  They tend to publish a wide range of styles so obviously, not everybody’s going to agree on the subjective quality of each piece.

Still, in the interest of sharpening your aesthetic and quite possibly starting an argument, I’d like you to read these pieces and try and nail down some kind of reason for why you think each piece is “good” or “bad.”

http://www.versedaily.org/2013/malamute.shtml

http://www.versedaily.org/2012/thebeachhouse.shtml

http://www.versedaily.org/2012/thewallising.shtml

http://www.versedaily.org/2013/missing.shtml

http://www.versedaily.org/2013/shoofly.shtml

http://www.versedaily.org/2013/mothering.shtml

http://www.versedaily.org/2013/rivertown.shtml

http://www.versedaily.org/2013/naked.shtml

Invention Exercise

We’ve talked before about how a good poem (much like a Zen koan) can seem to pull you in two different logical and psychological directions at the same time.  That’s part of the magic and, eventually, you want to be doing it while basically writing on auto-pilot.  Initially, though, it often takes some conscious, concerted effort to get a feel for the rhythms and music that exist in all artistic language but seem to be heightened in poetry.

   

1) So for practice, begin by listing some 1 or 2 syllable words you like, then come up with words that have the same beginning and ending sounds in the reverse order.  Examples: cedar and repose.  Rabbit and temper.  Fort and tariff.  Risk and killdeer.  Russet and tier.  Donkey and yield.  Feel and leaf.  Fumble and bluff.

2) Come up with a few words that have the same internal sounds but different connotations.  Examples: gloom and boon.  Glow and drone.  Bastard and happy.  Jewel and coup.  Rigor and cigarette.

3)  List a few nouns and join them with seemingly unrelated adjectives.  Examples: naked sunrise, screaming whisper, cellophane skyscraper, paper temple, lonesome anthill, purple stoplight, raspberry wrath, plexiglas salvation, disjointed symphony, prehistoric tuxedo, oscillating freeze.

4) Now, take something from #3 and turn it into a simile describing a seemingly unrelated noun.  Examples: the setting sun blinked like a purple stoplight, she was lonesome as an anthill, typewriters rang like a disjointed symphony, he wore the earth like a prehistoric tuxedo.

5) Come up with some two syllable words that have both syllables stressed.  These words add extra punch to your sentence.  Examples: Riptide, whirlwind, whitewash, spendthrift, whiplash, toothpaste, snowmelt, ragtag, cupcake, laptop, stonewall, slapdash.

6) Come up with an elevated, sophisticated image or phrase (or even a bit of scientific terminology).  Sandwich that next to something more guttural, pedestrian, etc.  Another way to think about this: follow a pretentious statement (distinguished not just by overly elevated images or concepts but lots of unstressed syllables) with something blunt and plain-spoken.

7) Now, try weaving these together.  With your words for #1, don’t just put them side by side.  Put them a few words or even a whole line apart.  This creates a subconscious feeling that your lines are connected by an internal rhythm.  Don’t worry about literal meaning yet; you’re just trying to clear up your creative lens and hammer out some lines that have a sense of rhythm, music, and raw imagination.

Poetic Parodies

I noticed in this batch that a few people seemed to be satirizing... well, the act of writing poetry.  This (along with, more generally, the difficulty inherent in writing) is always a totally legit subject matter.  It seems like the trick, though, is to make the satire obvious while still either avoiding or parodying individual elements of stylistic cliche.  In other words, the poem has to spin several plates at the same time (it has to be entertaining and criticizing pretension and cliche while utilizing pretension and cliche, indicating a narrator that isn't self-aware while still demonstrating that the author is self-aware, etc).  

With all that in mind, let's look at the following example and discuss where the energy of this poem is coming from, i.e. what it's offering to the audience:

The Introduction
by Billy Collins

I don't think this next poem

needs any introduction -

it's best to let the work speak for itself.

Maybe I should just mention

that whenever I use the word five,

I am referring to that group of Russian composers

who came to be known as "The Five,"

Balakirev, Moussorgsky, Borodin - that crowd.

Oh - and Hypsicles was a Greek astronomer.

He did something with the circle.

That's about it, but for the record,

"Grimké" is Angelina Emily Grimké, the abolitionist.

"Imroz" is that little island near the Dardanelles.

"Monad" - well, you all know what a monad is.

There could be a little problem

with mastaba, which is one of those Egyptian

above-ground sepulchers, sort of brick and limestone.

And you're all familiar with helminthology?

It's the science of worms.

Oh, and you will recall that Phoebe Mozee

is the real name of Annie Oakley.

Other than that, everything should be obvious.

Wagga Wagga is in New South Wales.

Rhyolite is that soft volcanic rock.

What else?

Yes, meranti is a type of timber, in tropical Asia I think,

and Rahway is just Rahway, New Jersey.

The rest of the poem should be clear,

I'll just read it and let it speak for itself.

It's about the time I went picking wild strawberries.

It's called, "Picking Wild Strawberries."

Tinkering with Line Breaks

We've talked a little about line breaks (for instance, how you can use them to build suspense and double-meanings) but there are probably as many subtly different philosophies on this as... well, as there are poems.  Ultimately, how you structure your poems is up to you.  Still, one way to get a better feel for line breaks (and help you establish your own aesthetic) is to take a published, “established” poem, change the line breaks, then compare the different versions and ask, in our own subjective opinion, what's gained or lost.  It's also a good way to see how even tiny changes can affect the overall feel of a poem.  By way of illustration, let’s take a look at a few poems from The Good Thief then compare them to some other versions that have all the same language and punctuation but different line breaks.

Part of Eve's Discussion (original)
by Marie Howe

It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand,
and flies, just before it flies, the moment the rivers seem to still
and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when
a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop,
very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you
your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin, like
the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say,
it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only
all the time.

Part of Eve's Discussion (non-Howe version 1)

It was like the moment when a bird

decides not to eat from your hand, and flies,

just before it flies, the moment the rivers

seem to still and stop because a storm is coming,

but there is no storm, as when a hundred starlings

lift and bank together before they wheel

and drop, very much like the moment,

driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you
your car could spin, just before it slowly begins

to spin, like the moment just before you forgot

what it was you were about to say, it was

like that, and after that, it was still

like that, only all the time.

Part of Eve's Discussion (non-Howe version 2)

It was like the moment

when a bird decides not to eat

from your hand,
and flies, just before it flies,

the moment the rivers

seem to still and stop

because a storm is coming,

but there is no storm,

as when a hundred starlings

lift and bank together

before they wheel and drop,
very much like the moment,

driving on bad ice,

when it occurs to you
your car could spin, just before

it slowly begins to spin,

like the moment just before

you forgot what it was

you were about to say,
it was like that, and after that,

it was still like that, only
all the time.

Providing for Each Other (original version)

by Marie Howe

You are the one who takes it all away.

For one moment, the leaning oaks are gone, and the tall grass

where the small birds practice their incoherence.

I know but for your fingers I would lie awake

and what the barter is for their articulate flight,

the agreement we make at night,

our guttural wail the only song for the end of the world,

before we begin blinking on again,

blinking, blinking, when the room comes back

and from the dark barn the lambs cry.

Providing for Each Other (non-Howe version)

by Marie Howe

You are the one

who takes it

all away. For one moment,

the leaning oaks

are gone, and the tall grass

where the small birds practice

their incoherence. I know

but for your fingers

I would lie

awake and what the barter is

for their articulate flight,

the agreement

we make at night,

our guttural wail the only

song for the end of the world,

before we begin blinking

on again, blinking,

blinking, when the room

comes back and from

the dark barn the lambs cry.

Recovery (original version)

by Marie Howe

You have decided to live. This is your fifth

day living. Hard to sleep. Harder to eat,

the food thick on your tongue, as I watch you,

my own mouth moving.

Is this how they felt after the flood? The floor

a mess, the garden ruined,

the animals insufferable, cooped up so long?

So much work to be done.

The sodden dresses. Houses to be built.

Wood to be dried and driven and stacked. Nails!

The muddy roses. So much muck about. Hard walking.

And still a steady drizzle,

the sun like a morning moon, and all of them grumpy

and looking at each other in that new way.

We walk together, slowly, on this your fifth day

and you, occasionally, glimmer with a light

I’ve never seen before. It frightens me,

this new muscle in you, flexing.

I had the crutches ready. The soup simmering.

But now it is as we thought.

Can we endure it, the rain finally stopped?

Recovery (non-Howe version #1)

by Marie Howe

You have decided to live. This is your fifth day living. Hard to sleep. Harder to eat, the food thick on your tongue, as I watch you, my own mouth moving. Is this how they felt after the flood? The floor a mess, the garden ruined, the animals insufferable, cooped up so long? So much work to be done. The sodden dresses. Houses to be built. Wood to be dried and driven and stacked. Nails! The muddy roses. So much muck about. Hard walking. And still a steady drizzle, the sun like a morning moon, and all of them grumpy and looking at each other in that new way. We walk together, slowly, on this your fifth day and you, occasionally, glimmer with a light I’ve never seen before. It frightens me, this new muscle in you, flexing. I had the crutches ready. The soup simmering. But now it is as we thought. Can we endure it, the rain finally stopped?

Recovery (non-Howe version #2)

by Marie Howe

You have decided

to live.

This is your fifth day living. Hard

to sleep. Harder to eat,

the food

thick on your tongue,

as I watch you, my own mouth

moving.

Is this how they felt after the flood?

The floor a mess, the garden ruined, the animals

insufferable, cooped up so long?

So much work to be done. The sodden dresses.

Houses to be built. Wood to be dried

and driven and stacked.

Nails!

The muddy roses. So much muck about.

Hard walking.

And still a steady drizzle,

the sun

like a morning moon,

and all of them grumpy

and looking at each other

in that new way.

We walk together, slowly, on this

your fifth day

and you, occasionally,

glimmer with a light I’ve never seen before.

It frightens me,

this new muscle in you, flexing. I had

the crutches ready. The soup

simmering.

But now it is

as we thought. Can we

endure it,

the rain finally stopped?

Assignment: try this out for yourself.  Choose one of the poems from The Good Thief and implement your own spacing and line breaks.  Don’t spend too much time thinking about it; just follow your first impulse and see what you come up with.

On the Context of Metaphors and Similes

Adv. Poetry

Meyerhofer

On the Context of Metaphors and Similes

When it comes to good writing, maybe a third of the battle is coming up with good lines—which largely seems to require a kind of Zen-like clearing of whatever curtain separates our conscious and subconscious mechanisms of creativity. 

However, that's just the beginning; after all, coming up with a snazzy, poignant or provocative line or image doesn't necessarily mean that you should use it right away.  Maybe it belongs somewhere else (which is why, by the way, that we should always save and be willing to cannibalize our past poems and stories that didn't quite measure up). 

Just as we need to consider the denotation and connotation of our word choice, we also need to consider the tone and context of our metaphors.  For instance, let's say (just to invoke the cliché) that a poet were writing a piece about a traumatic childhood event.  Midway through the poem, they described raindrops (or body-blows) falling "...like a child jumping in mud puddles."  Right away, there are some problems with this.  The image of a child jumping in mud puddles could invoke a carefree feeling, which normally might create an unsettling disharmony with the poem's otherwise sad imagery (in a good way) BUT if the poem is about a child describing something else as a child... well, that's a bit like a clown describing something as "red as a clown's nose," i.e. not very original.

Let's look at another context: a grown adult in a board meeting, noticing how rain is pelting the window "like a child jumping through mud puddles."  Well, it's a bit problematic to compare water to water, but in terms of CONTEXT, see how the second example sets up a better contrast?

Going along with that, the primary aim of similes and metaphors seems to be to create a visceral reaction in the reader by basically taking their brain in two different directions at the same time.  In so doing, our multidimensional, creativity-loving selves momentarily arc out of what might otherwise be a rather bland, mundane, straightforward narrative, and THAT motion seems to be what quickens the senses.

So a good rule of thumb is to begin by pairing fairly dissimilar things, making sure that your similes and metaphors have an unexpected element to them, something that also seems to relate back to the core object or feeling that you're describing.  Don't just do this for shock value, though, or else you risk writing the poetic equivalent of junk food.

To get a better feel for this, let's look at some more basic images and similes/metaphors and discuss contexts in which they WOULD or WOULD NOT be effective (in our obviously subjective postmodern opinion).

1.  ...bright as a birthday cake
    A) To describe a child's smile at a literal birthday party*
    B) To describe a burning building
    C) To describe an electric blanket that caught on fire
    D) To describe an embarrassing rash

2.  ...like ash from a crematory
    A)  To describe the soot in a fireplace
    B)  To describe the color of someone's hair
    C)  To describe the sky on a cloudy day
    D)  To describe the taste of a crappy dinner you're pretending to like

3.  ...like an apostle
    A)  An attentive nurse in a hospice
    B)  A tollbooth operator with a hairy mole, who lets you by despite you forgetting your change
    C)  Mitochondria
    D)  The posts in a neighbor's fence
    E)   A priest offering comfort at a funeral

4.  ...necking like seahorses
    A)  Strands of DNA
    B)  Teenagers at a movie
    C)   Mating giraffes
    D)  Wires in a computer terminal
    E)   Mating dolphins

*There's an odd, possible exception to this kind of thing: using an unsurprising metaphor purely to advance a specific scene or action, i.e. "...her face bright as the cake her mother, hungover, had simply bought from the store on the way home from Vito's, where all the liquor bottles glowed with thumbprints."  Note, though, that you still seem to need some kind of contrast to avoid Hallmark-like cheesiness (which is really just another way of describing lack of dimension).