Dreaming in Iambic Pentameter

• April 1: Blank Verse Sonnet I, ‘My Husband Bought Some Summer-flowering bulbs’: I’d decided that if I wasn’t inspired I would simply write a blank verse sonnet on whatever I was thinking about or doing that day. Some of them, like this one, were surprisingly successful, but I don’t know if I’ll be taking most of them any further.
• April 2: Offerings: I had some inspiration for this but it’s pretty slight.
• April 3: Negative Capability: This was a dream-based poem with some potential. I may go back to it.
• April 4: Blank Verse Sonnet II, ‘Fifteen Years Ago Today I Married.’
• April 5: The Cruellest Month: This is a promising first draft of a pantoum.
• April 6: Lullaby in Glose Form: I loved this. I’ve sent it to Liam in my April packet.
• April 7: Ultrasound: Again, I loved this, and it went to Liam.
• April 8: Blank Verse Sonnet III, ‘The Blind Man’s Fingers Flutter Across The Page’: I quite liked this. I split it off into the poem “The Art of Reading,” which I’ve entered in the Inglis House Poems about Disability Contest.
• April 9: Blank Verse Sonnet IV, ‘There is a Way of Giving, Pulled Like Punches’: This one’s a bit personal.
• April 10:On Researching Death Masks After Reading Linda Gregg’s Poem: A bit too derivative.
• April 11: Desperate Housewife: Has some potential
• April 12: Premonition of Death: It’s an idea I’ll go back to, but it needs more weight
• April 13: Blank Verse Sonnet V, ‘Renaissance Profiled Girl; Cream and Gold Globe’: Again, pretty personal.
• April 14: Ekphrastic: I was proud of the twist in this one, which also went to Liam.
• April 15: Auto-antynomy: A clever but somewhat stilted sonnet.
• April 16: Blank Verse Sonnet VI, ‘I Am Cooking A Family Meal For Seven’: This one definitely has something to say. It needs to be separated and re-titled.
• April 17: Swing: Some good lines, needs expanding.
• April 18: This was when I posted the revision.
• April 19: No Dead Poet’s Words: Waay too personal.
• April 20: This was when I posted the translation.
• April 21: Totems: This has potential.
• April 22: Emily Bronte Begins Wuthering Heights: I really liked this one and worked on it for several days afterward. It went to Liam.
• April 23: Alternative Creation Myth: I’ve worked on this some more since the first draft and it will probably go to Liam in May
• April 24: Blank Verse Sonnet VII: Just for my family really.
• April 25: Sore Throat: Yes, well I got a bit preoccupied at this point.
• April 26: Ark: This one is very tongue in cheek, but it may go to Liam in May.
• April 27: Sore Throat Sestina: Ahem, but I wrote it as an illustration to the essay I was writing for The Barefoot Muse on “How to Write a Sestina.”
• April 28: The Lost Voice: I know. Still, it’s the best of the three illness based poems and may go somewhere.
• April 29: Elegy for Lost Countryside and a Distant Brother: A sonnet that may be worth sending to Liam.
• April 30: All the Poems I Didn’t Write During NaPoMo: Just a bit of fun to round things off.

So, there we have it. 28 poems. 8 are definitely continuing on as living entities and 9 have potential to be revised, leaving 11 as NaPoWriMo exercises. I think that’s a fair result. The good news is, I do have here at least four poems that can go to Liam in May with a little work, so I don’t need to worry about writing new stuff for a bit.

I’m having a break for a few days regardless. That was intense, but very worthwhile.

Well, it’s done. I just posted my last poem to the NaPoWriMo Madness Blog over on Journalspace. I’m proud to say that I have kept up with the poem a day requirements with only two small bendings of the rules. On one day I felt the poem I had written wasn’t suitable for public display, so I posted a revision I’d also been working on that day instead. And on the day I took the kids to the Aquarium I didn’t write a poem, but I posted the translation I’d been working on the day before.

Anyway, I wanted to list the poems by title for posterity, and to give an indication of how many of them I feel have any kind of future. I’m going to come back and do that in a bit.

I was very much struck by D.W. Fenza’s essay in the latest Writer’s Chronicle “The Words and the Bees,” which was by sweet coincidence, adapted from a commencement speech given at Bennington. The Waggle Dance, he explains, is the type of dance performed by a bee to indicate a source of nectar more than 100 yards away. One of many fine points he makes, in his extended metaphor comparing writers to bees, is that it is our “obligation to do the Waggle Dance whenever possible, to tell people where the wonderful books are.”

I have just read such a book, and therefore I am going to post my MFA essay about it below, hoping that this will act as a Waggle Dance to encourage anyone who has not yet done so to seek out this inspiring and innovative poet.

Ways of Seeing: Glass, Irony and God by Anne Carson
 

This book contains quite simply two of the best mid-length, contemporary free verse narrative poems I have ever read: “The Glass Essay” and “The Fall of Rome: a Traveller’s Guide.”

The mid-length poem is a difficult length to carry off. Approaching a book length poem is like preparing for a considerable journey; the reader needs to arrange her mind to accept the necessity for patience and that some interruptions are bound to occur before the delayed satisfaction. A short poem has visible boundaries which give it a pleasing unity on the page. But mid-length poems often have a built-in checkpoint: the number of pages in at which the reader yawns and looks ahead to see just how many pages there are still to go until the end. The absence of such a point in the above poems confirms that both have an unstoppable momentum.

“The Glass Essay” is an extraordinary poem which transcends its ostensible subject core: the first person narrator who is attempting to get over the end of a five year relationship. The poem is an intricately plotted as a novella: the narrator has a lurid fascination with the life and works of Emily Bronte (which, incidentally, makes me want to revisit her work); there is an elderly mother with all the mother-daughter history that typically applies; there is a war-hero father with late Alzheimer’s. Add the narrator’s own teetering sanity, as represented by her macabre visions of the ‘thirteen nudes,’ and a good dollop of Wuthering Heightsian moor-as-metaphor scenery, and you have a poem which drives the reader onward even as it pierces all complacency and exposes the raw truth about a woman’s psyche. But I rhapsodize.

I listed, in a suitably spooky coincidence, thirteen lines which struck me as quite perfect. Clearly I don’t have space to cover them all here, so I’ll confine myself to two, the first being “Spring opens like a blade there.” I love metaphors that are strikingly original and yet easily unpacked. We never say ‘spring opens’ but we know exactly what Anne means, and then ‘like a blade.’ You can literally visualize the green shoots of spring unfurling like a switchblade, which hints at the violence of the moor landscape, and of course with ‘blade’ you get the double meaning from ‘blade of grass.’

Secondly: “My voice is very high. Mother vaults it,” which occurs in the context of an argument between the daughter and the mother. “Vaults” is an unbeatable word choice with its implications of escalation and competition familiar to anyone who has witnessed such an argument.

The final image of the poem is the thirteenth nude, “a human body trying to stand against winds so terrible that the flesh was blowing off the bones,” and yet the bones “stood forth silver and necessary.” Anne Carson’s ultimate vision seems to be the necessity of pain to the human condition, how we cannot love without pain, and must therefore accept pain. It is a humbling truth.

One of the joys to me of Carson’s work is the way she varies her voice. Had all the poems in this book been in the voice of “The Glass Essay” I would not have been disappointed, and indeed, not all of her voices work for me: “The Truth About God” and “TV Men” strike me as not entirely successful experiments. However, the voice of “The Fall of Rome: a Traveler’s Guide” is entirely separate from that of “The Glass Essay” and yet it is an equally page-turning poem.

In this poem, divided into seventy short sections appropriately marked out by Roman numerals, we follow a different first person narrator on a trip to Rome, and experience alongside him the alienation that can occur upon being submerged in a foreign culture. The word “stranger” is key to the poem and occurs in several of its most disturbing moments: “a stranger sleeps in a solution of dread”, “a stranger is master of nothing”, “a stranger is someone who comes on the wrong day”, “a stranger is someone desperate for conversation.”

In this marvelous poem we encounter Alaric, who sacked Rome in 410 AD, Proust, the tourist attractions of Orvieto, Dante, Marco Polo and even Herodotus. The blitz of impressions combines with the stark syntax and fragmented structure to give the reader the disoriented feeling of being bombarded by novelty in a barely understood language. It is an example of form superbly matched to content.

The book concludes with the biblically evocative “Book of Isaiah” and one of Carson’s classical essays “The Gender of Sound,” both of which confirm her status as an extremely well-educated scholar of the classics and ancient times, who is nonetheless able to render her arguments into a prose which Harold Bloom should envy.

I am not surprised that Anne Carson continues to scoop up important prizes in the literary world. She deserves them; I shall read more.

Today I translated de la Fontaine’s fifth fable of Book II, “The Bat and the Two Weasels.” It is a strange thing, but I find a peace in translation similar to the peace I have occasionally found doing cryptic crossword puzzles. I think it engages a similar set of skills. To explain that, I’ll give a brief description of the way I tackle translation. Please note: I have not been ‘taught’ to translate, so this may not be the received process.

Firstly I read the original once through to garner a rough meaning, mentally noting any words I need to look up. When I begin a crossword puzzle, I read every clue through. Some answers may jump out at me, but often at this stage I will fill in nothing.

Secondly I render the original into exact prose. This is a painstaking process, but I am not at this stage concerned with poetic effect or even with achieving a fluent English idiom. The purpose is to make sure that I have the literal meaning as intended. I look up plenty of words, including ones I think I know, if there is any concern that context may be subtly varying the meaning in an unfamiliar way. My next step on doing a crossword is to pick a couple of the clues with longer answers and concentrate hard on getting at least one of those. These are often quotations or phrases, which may need looking up. Once I have some letters in place, I can look at the shorter clues.

This rough work has been done so far in my notebook. Now I pull up my new word file alongside my online rhyming dictionary and get started. The point is to render the prose translation back into a poetry that approximates as closely as possible the structure (in terms of rhyme and meter), the tone, and where possible the wordplay of the original. Needless to say this is the hard part, especially translating from French, a rhyme rich language, to English, a rhyme poor one. Fortunately English is very rich in synonyms. Often I will be working with several lines at one time, looking up synonyms in my English thesaurus, checking for their rhymes (or slant rhymes–I permit myself these in translation) on my rhyming dictionary, and double checking back against my prose translation to make sure I am still acceptably close to the meaning. When I am not 100% certain of a crossword answer, I will look again at the clues to all answers that intersect with that one, looking for corroboration.

Finally I have the poem back in poem form. I read it through OUT LOUD (my dog likes this.) I have found that because I am using slant rhyme, I have to be quite tight on the metrical irregularities, particularly in the beginning. It is also easy to let oneself get away with phrasing that isn’t quite natural, and think that it will do. Well it shouldn’t do. A crossword puzzle will only work if every single answer is correct.

The satisfaction on completion is immense. Hmm. Maybe that’s just me.

Doing the MFA has given me the opportunity to see the poetry world from a different perspective. No longer am I the acolyte worshipping from a distance, astounded by the intellectual weight and creativity of these god-like poets. I’m up there with them, talking to them and learning from them, but also able to see the flaws, the posturing and the sleight of hand behind the magic. Let’s take two examples: Robert Bly and Linda Gregg.

Dana Gioia criticized Bly’s translation skills, as I mentioned before. Poets gain kudos in the poetry world by doing translations and it seems as if every well known contemporary poet has a book or two of translations in his or her bio. I always thought this confirmed poets as the intellectual elite of an American society where few people actually speak a second language, let alone fluently enough to read a poem in that language.

However, now I understand that this translation gig is often done by the seat of the pants, or to be more accurate, by means of a dictionary, a grammar and a great deal of arrogance. Robert Bly does not really speak French, and yet he translated Mallarme, badly, I might add, agreeing with Gioia.

With this in mind I decided that I should tackle some translation of my own. After all I DO speak French, fairly fluently. First I picked up a good French dictionary from Borders. Then I went looking for a text to practice on. I wanted something for which I did not have, and could not easily get, an existing translation, and preferably something in metrical verse which would ideally be rendered into metrical English. Eventually I found in Micawbers, a used and new bookshop in Princeton, a French text of de la Fontaine’s Fables.

I had never heard of de la Fontaine, but the poems seemed to fit the bill. I googled the gentleman, and found out a great deal about him. This site is a useful one. I also discovered that a new translation of the fables was brought out in 2001. (Craig Hill, the translator, again admits his knowledge of French is meager.) Anyway, I decided to begin with Book II, being the first book for which no translations were available online, and I have now rendered Fable I and Fable II into metrical (slant) rhyming English. It’s hard but satisfying work. I suspect I would never have attempted this had I not learned that poets honored for their translations were not actually well-schooled in those languages.

Secondly, Linda Gregg. Liam Rector recommended her books Too Bright To See & Alma to me because she is visiting Bennington this Summer as associate faculty, and I have just finished reading them. I prefer her work to that of many of my contemporaries as it is neither prosaic nor overly obscure, although I am tempted to classify her, in the words of one of my own poems, as a “fey woman poet with a floaty cotton skirt.” However, she risked losing me completely at one point because of these lines:

There are almost no flowers to be looked at anyhow.

No flowers to bear having an opinion about.

And the more it rains the less flowers there are.

Linda is a highly regarded poet and teacher, recipient of numerous awards and fellowships. Surely she should know that, because flowers implies countability, she should say “fewer flowers” NOT “less flowers.” Now, you can accuse me of pedantry for this and I’ll admit to it. I am one of those irritating people who uses “whom” after all. The point is twofold: firstly, I had been allowing Linda all sorts of leeway in her poetry up to that poem because I had assumed automatically that she was smarter than I am. It was all my fault if I wasn’t getting her meanings or missing a hidden depth. She blew it with that grammatical error, and I began to think that the poems I wasn’t getting were maybe just not good poems. (And to be fair to Linda, these books contain some excellent poems. I’ll cite “Goethe’s Death Mask”, “Pictures of Marriage” and “The Copperhead” as illustrations.) Secondly I began to think that maybe I am smart enough, after all, to make it as a poet.

Like I said, things look different from up close: smaller, less perfect, and somehow more possible.

I have just returned from this afternoon’s poetry reading at Espresso Joe’s in Keyport, hosted by the Travelling Poets. It was an excellent session of poetry, with fifteen minute sets by yours truly, Penny Harter, Bill Higginson, Adele Kenny and Deborah LaVeglia.

Adele directs the Carriage House Poetry Series in Fanwood, NJ, and she spoke to me about having an evening there dedicated to formal poetry. I would first give a basic lecture on meter and common forms, followed by a thirty minute reading of my own formal work. This sounds very exciting to me as I have never permitted myself to compose a set which consisted of more than fifty percent formal pieces. Plus, they would pay me a small honorarium.

I also sold two copies of Swimming. Today I am a happy (though somewhat tired) poet.

• Got up, woke the kids and got them on the school bus
• Went for an Echo Cardiogram
• Wrote a poem about the Echo Cardiogram (which you can read here.)
• Practised for this weekend’s two poetry readings
• Ate lunch
• Finished reading Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms for the MFA
• Wrote a two page paper on the above
• Got the kids off the school bus and Rachel’s 3 year old Jacob from her ex, Todd
• Changed Jacob’s dirty diaper
• Drove all 3 to drop Becky off at Gymnastics
• Made dinner for the other two
• Went to my first poetry reading for National Poetry Month featuring Ona Gritz, who was fantastic
• Read five of my own poems, including the Echo Cardiogram poem
• Went to Dunleavy’s, ate Buffalo Chicken Tenders (Hot) and drank several glasses of well-earned Pinot Grigio

Don’t you just love National Poetry Month?

Today is the first day of National Poetry Month 2006, which gives those of us who are obsessed with poetry all the time permission to admit it for thirty days. I was interviewed by the Courier Post earlier this week, and you can read the article in which I am quoted here, for a limited time at least. I’m rather excited that she included my mention of Gioia, and published my poem “Why There Are So Many Poems About Onions.”

I’m also somewhat insanely committed to writing a poem a day. This project is being run by my good friend Rachel over on Journalspace. If you care to read my poems, I post there as Sestina.

Talking of sestinas, having finished James Cummins’ The Whole Truth (hilarious, and well worth reading) I wrote a sestina yesterday based on the anxiety of influence. The end words are Roethke, Plath, Bloom, rose, moon and influence. Email me if you’d like to read it!

Now I have to go sell pins at a gymnastics meet.