II. Old Dogs, New Tricks

Listening to Seamus Heaney read and speak at Meredith College a few days ago, I was again reminded of the way words can become almost as tactile as the things they name and the way a poet's experience rendered precisely can spark an experience in the reader, but today I overheard one undergraduate tell another, "Poetry sucks." She went on to say that it's full of tricks and that nobody really knows what it means. That bit of eavesdropping almost cost me the sense of excited attention I'd been paying to everything for the last hundred hours, but I thought back to the first time I read Heaney's North (Faber & Faber, reprint edition 1995), which Kay Byer had recommended to me. I hadn't known such stony rhythms or images like edged weapons. I had already been astonished, uplifted and scolded by the poems of Dickey, Merwin and Dickinson, and with Heaney, I began to feel I had found the teachers I needed to get a good start.

Although I have long relied upon Borges's analysis of poetry as a thing made of "algebra and fire" to locate my longitude, I needed Heaney's distinctions in his essay on Auden in The Government of the Tongue (Noonday Press, 1990) to provide latitude: "On the one hand, poetry could be regarded as magical incantation... on the other hand, poetry is a matter of making wise and true meanings..." So, it is made partly from mystery and has mysterious purposes and effects, while it is also made of worldly perception and skill, which give it a kind of far-seeing practical value. Two more relevancies: in Government, Heaney asserts that poems are made from within, like crystals, and in his Nobel speech he maintains "the sufficiency of that which is absolutely imagined." In the light of these lanterns — and probably very much because Heaney is on my mind this week — I am looking at books that would teach us about the name and nature of poetry, and I want to cheer for the writers who, like me, seem to disagree with Keats that poetry had better come "as easily as the leaves to the trees" or not at all.

I can't think of a book I would more strongly recommend to musophobists, somnambulists and skeptics than Kenneth Koch's Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry (Scribner, 1998). What the author has learned from decades of teaching poetry to children has led him to understand how to sponsor the value of poetry without alarming the reluctant beginner. Koch displays great sympathy for adolescents who think poetry "sucks" or adults who will say, perhaps, "I don't read it... I don't really understand it." The first half of this new book is a manual for reading and writing, an inspired and meticulous account of how it feels to encounter a poem or the urge to make one, and the other half contains an anthology of poems meant to reveal the range of poetry and exemplify the claims of the first half. That half, built of two sections entitled "The Language of Poetry" and "Writing and Reading Poetry," is quite fine, but the second wasn't very satisfying for me.

As Koch himself affirms, "The main innovation in the book is probably the discussion of poetry as a separate language" or "a language within a language." Working as both statement and song, words in poems follow a different logic from prose, a logic the author says involves more aesthetic consequence than practical. His chapter on music is especially simple and straightforward. It can, he says, arouse feelings very quickly, and it relies on rests, symmetry, repetition and variation. Words conforming to these requirements take on a charge beyond denotation and connotation, and that charge can dominate. I might as well say here that I don't find the examples from O'Hara convincing, and I believe the book to be limited by Koch's heavy reliance on "beat" and "New York" poets. Koch adds that convention, comparison and lies (both plain and fancy) can all be important in a poem, yet subordinate to musical and tonal effects.

It is part II, "Writing and Reading," in which the author's careful attention to how poems ignite and how they are rekindled by readers, that strikes me as especially admirable in this book. He suggests that inspiration is a common occurrence, but it has to be recognized, seized and extended before it can be used to make something. Why does it come? And how? These are serious questions, but not answerable with theory. Elizabeth Bishop read "mammoth" as "man moth," and she was driven to pursue the implications of that image; the strange and the common are equal sources for inspiration, which most of us spend in conversation, instead of building on.

In discussing the role of judgment, Koch says something really useful for those who would understand or write poems: we must take "an active role in organizing the event." His analogy between moments of inspiration that are badly managed and "disconnected wires that lose their energy" is compelling, and he follows it with a brief discussion of the kinship between technical forms and rhetorical ones. Emphasizing the gradual process of a poem's construction, he says, "When one has revised a poem, one knows who made it." I think this speaks importantly to the role of inspiration and perspiration in composition and demotes the question of inspiration's origin in favor of the question, "What do you do with it?"

For all his stress on looking at a poem's insides, Koch's notes in the anthology section seem to be looking into the poems through small or clouded windows. He tends to summarize the poems and to repeat what he has said earlier in the book. The poems are arranged chronologically and run from Homer to, well, Joseph Ceravolo, who was born in 1934. Here, despite the strong contentions of part I, I lost interest, probably because I am less intrigued by Gertrude Stein, Ashbery, O'Hara and Césaire than Koch is. For exemplary performance, I might dwell instead in the H's — Hecht, Hollander, Howard (to cheat a little, Justice). But fair enough: he has every right to present his own favorites. My disappointment arises from wishing to see him apply his theories more meticulously, and apply them to some of the poets who interest me more. I wish he had provided poems by Wilbur, Frost, Oliver, Merwin, Kumin, Muldoon, Hacker, the Wrights, Plath. His examples are often zany, as one might expect from Koch, and I expect that anyone whose aesthetic is closer to his than mine will find the selections refreshing and useful. I do have two other complaints to make quickly: the contemporary poetry in the anthology tends toward the urban, and in all of the poems by Blacks, alcohol plays an important role. I don't think Koch has done this intentionally, but I certainly think it could have easily been avoided. Still, this is a valuable book, especially for people who feel that poetry is something academic and too armored for its own good.

Mary Oliver's A Poetry Handbook (Harcourt Brace) was published in 1994 and remains the best brief introduction (130 pages) to the basics of poetry for undergraduates. What it lacks in thoroughness, it makes up for in confidence and an intuitive sense of what students need to know first, before the questions become too complicated. She has followed it up with Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998) which, like Making Your Own Days, contains an anthology (in this case, all metrical poems), constituting about half of the near-200 pages. One great advantage to Oliver's books is that she herself is known for candor, a seizing of the immediate, the illusion of spontaneity and quickness in a poem, but here she is recommending exercises, revision, a critical vocabulary and cohesion. "The similarity of sound at the end of two or more lines creates cohesion, order, and gives pleasure." What could be simpler? Yet such points are often obscured by writers' need to demonstrate the subtleties of their own reasoning.

In A Poetry Handbook, Oliver states pretty directly one of the debates that thrive in poetry workshops: "Is poetry language that is spontaneous, impulsive? Yes, it is. Is it also language that is composed, considered, appropriate, and effective, though you read the poem a hundred times? Yes it is." While presenting the basics of metered verse, she also stands up for "a felt integrity," in which the poem echoes its own beginnings even more than any genre or form. With this integrity, a poem can be both incantatory and soberly wise.

She uses some of the same examples as Koch (poems entitled "The Fish" by both Moore and Bishop, as well as "The Red Wheelbarrow"), but she also depends upon some pertinent Robert Penn Warren poems for audial effects, a strategy I sympathize with. My interest in her examples isn't surprising, as I am a more enthusiastic reader of her poems than of Koch's.

Oliver, like Koch, insists that a poet must be able to survive in Keatsian "uncertainties," and one of the most valuable pieces of advice she records is Flaubert's, "Talent is long patience, and originality an effort of will and of intense observation."

Although I'm always captivated by the enthusiasm that Oliver brings to the page, I like Rules for the Dance less. She sometimes analyzes her examples too little to help me see her point, and she moves from strictly metrical matters to rhyme, form and imagery before the metrics are quite clear. She also discusses rhythm in a way that confuses me, using "tone" in a musical sense that seems very close to what I understand as "pitch," a shading very difficult to hear in written English. I am more accustomed to hearing matters of diction discussed as tonal — morose, reflective, jubilant, perplexed.

This book would probably work better as a handy reference if the instructor were giving more details in class, but it has a strong, albeit uncontemporary, anthology, and Oliver can often make the precise observation that others omit. When she says, "the foundation of every poem is not only its words but its formality of motion," I think she's really onto something, finding a memorable and apt phrase for something we keep almost knowing. She is also very helpful in explaining what kinds of expectations arise in the presence of iambic pentameter or the sonnet form. Like Koch, she is able to make the reader believe that many facets of poetry can be learned with patience.

Sometimes I think the best book anyone can read on writing is Lu Chi's WEN FU: The Art of Writing. The translation I know is Sam Hamill's ( The Art of Writing : Lu Chi's Wen Fu, Milkweed Editions, revised edition, 1991), which was published a decade ago by Breitenbush books and runs, including introductory material and Hamill's afterword, 38 pages. Lu Chi's brief advice includes the following:

This third century Chinese poet/critic trusts his reader to fill in the details, but unfortunately, anyone who can do that probably doesn't need a guide or a course. Two young poets, Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux, have attempted a more daunting task, to compose a text, called The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), which will fill in the daily schedule for the itinerant poet, explaining not only how to write poems, but what to write about, how to get published and build a career and how to use the internet to one's poetic advantage. As I said, daunting, detailed... and often over the top.

To give these two poets the benefit of the doubt, they probably understand a lot better than I do what people entering poetry workshops want and what their expectations are. However, Laux and Addonizio are often too diligent or too literal, and I'm not certain they have defined their audience very effectively. The poet capable of discerning exactly how their advice applies to an extensive, free-form poem like Patricia Smith's "Skinhead" will probably be irritated by casual sentences like, "CD-ROMs have been coming down in price, so they're worth checking into..." or their facetious gambit about what to expect once one gets published : "Strangers will stop you on the street for your autograph... Your sex life will improve dramatically."

In fact, sex and sexuality more than permeate this text; they radiate from it. I can see how this feature might get the attention of young readers, but the poems about masturbation, incest and homosexuality are too frequent and too artlessly explicit for me. The second poem in the book is Rita Dove's "After Reading Mickey in the Night Kitchen for the Third Time Before Bed," in which the mother describes in detail showing her daughter their genitals in a mirror. I understand how this is transgressive for a purpose, how it claims some territory that has been denied to women poets, and when Dove reads this poem to audiences, it always creates a stir. However, I never hear it discussed as a poem, and The Poet's Companion, displaying it prominently, doesn't really discuss its art either. Dove has written many fine and moving poems, and I wish these teachers had chosen a poem whose skill engages them as much as its subject and attitude empower them.

Many of my disappointments in this book involve fine distinctions, but I don't think they are insignificant ones. Here's an example. In a chapter entitled, aptly, "The Energy of Revision," they quote Richard Tillinghast: " 'The willingness, the ardent desire even, to revise, separates the poet from the person who sees poetry as therapy or self expression.'" I'm in complete agreement with that, but Addonizio and Laux are not, for they qualify it: "Ardent desire may be a bit more than we can hope for, but certainly willingness is important." That's the difference between their perspective and mine. I believe the poetry that endures beyond trend, personality and any ambition to be a "professional poet" will be the work whose authors had an ardent desire to revise, to re-encounter the poem, to change it from the inside out. That seems to me to be the source of the exciting difference between coming up with witty or catchy or arresting thoughts and employing them to build something lasting.

The Poet's Companion is constituted of four parts. The first, "Subjects for Writing," seems questionable, though I can imagine its usefulness for a classroom of students who really have no serious need to write poems. Part of the authors' purpose here is to suggest, rightfully, that the range of subjects for poetry is far larger than most beginners imagine. However, plunging into sections on grief and the erotic leads the authors into the territory of psychological generalizing about "owning" one's feelings or, "If you're dealing with a loss, we suggest you keep a grief journal...." In their exercises following the chapter "Writing the Erotic," they ask the student to "Write a pornographic poem — that is, one you think is pornographic." It's easy to anticipate the risks involved in such an assignment, and I'm not convinced there's much to gain.

The next section is "The Poet's Craft," which I see as the necessary heart of the enterprise. I was delighted to find Jack Gilbert and Martha Collins poems here as examples, and the Gilbert poems on the death of his wife are discussed with tact and insight. Dana Gioia's "My Confessional Sestina" and Steve Kowit's villanelle "The Grammar Lesson" add a valuable touch of humor, but I'm not certain the first-aid grammar chapter is useful. Generally, this section is competently imagined and written, but the authors still have a flippant inclination that I assume will be appreciated by a few students. Section III, "The Writing Life," accentuates my uncertainties concerning the audience for this book. How ready is the reader who needed grammar lessons to learn about virtual and material publication? What is the value of distracting the beginner with questions of submission and building a career? If a young writer is likely to "try writing with a friend" to overcome writer's block, is he or she well advised to start thinking about publication?

I don't want to belabor my skepticism or perplexity over this book, but the 20-minute writing exercises that comprise the final section don't offer much guidance, and the index is dramatically incomplete. On pages 202-203 I find an encouraging anecdote from Carolyn Kizer, but she doesn't appear in the index, nor do Dante, Styron or Julia Kasdorf, all of whom the book mentions. In one of his oft-quoted moments, Flaubert wrote, "Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes to make a bear dance, when we would move the stars to pity." For this challenging endeavor, there aren't many shortcuts, and I'm afraid the tone and many of the ideas in The Poet's Companion suggest otherwise.

Perhaps, before we worry about moving the stars, we should just concern ourselves with getting the bears to dance. One way to begin this is to learn to organize images and rhythms in proven sequences, steps that encourage the body to sway. Lewis Turco's The New Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics (University Press of New England, 1986) is a valuable resource book for such a project. It opens with chapters on the typographical, sonic, sensory and ideational levels of language, and this Turco follows up with an encyclopedia of forms, complete with examples so masterful as to encourage any reader to believe that great things can be accomplished by working in forms that have a history and a sense of ceremony about them. Of course, it's easy to see this as sculpting the language from the outside, but once one has practiced sestinas, sonnets, ballades or even obscure and demanding forms like the deibhidhe stanza, they can become part of the poet's natural way of thinking, part of the crystallization process. Although this is more a reference book than a reader-friendly jaunt through the history of poetic form, the examples by Wesli Court and Turco's own arrangements of the texts of Emily Dickinson's letters supply the book with enough wit to tempt the reader back again and again.

I will admit that all this talk of algebra can become pretty dry, and it's easy to forget that something that renders heat and light may come from it all. To leave off this evening on a fiery note, here is one of Heaney's "Glanmore Sonnets" from his Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998), in which his urgent imagination is shaped and almost contained, but not quite:

Thunderlight on the split logs: big raindrops
At body heat and lush with omen
Spattering dark on the hatchet iron.
This morning when a magpie with jerky steps
Inspected a horse asleep beside the wood
I thought of dew on armour and carrion.
What would I meet, blood-boltered on the road?
How deep into the woodpile sat the toad?
What welters through this dark hush on the crops?
Do you remember that pension in Les Landes
Where the old one rocked and rocked and rocked
A mongol in her lap, to little songs?
Come to me quick, I am upstairs shaking.
My all of you birchwood in lightning.

Absolutely imagined ..., "and how / that came to be the bears and Yeats would know."

R. T. Smith
Rockbridge County, VA

Copyright © 1998 by R. T. Smith.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.