To Obey. Or Not To Obey.

Mary Biddinger recently posted some of her personal rules for writing poetry and challenged others to post their rules. Greg Rappleye accepted the challenge. Now here’s my list of do’s and don’ts.

1. No poem may be called a “poem” in the title. Likewise, no references in the poem to the act of writing a poem.

2. No using the f-word in a poem. Not because it’s obscene, but because it’s too easy, too overused, and too boring.

3. Try new forms. Learn from them, but don’t be a slave to them.

4. Scatter rhymes throughout the lines rather than positioning them at line ends.

5. Draft quickly; revise slowly; submit more slowly. Let several weeks pass before sending out. No poem before its time.

6. Find the format / shape of the poem only after multiple drafts, when thinking is just about over, when I’ve unearthed my material. Latching onto the format too early inhibits creative thinking.

7. Research my subject for useful facts and cool words. Import some of that into the poem.

8. Don’t be a cornball. Get rid of the bluebird and substitute a hunk of granite.

9. End with an image rather than a piece of information. Violations permitted.

10. Go over each line, interrogating each word. Improve the diction.

11. Let no one dictate what I may write about. Defy their impositions.

12. Decline to tell the story behind the poem. Withholding the truth shall set me free.

I prefer to think of the above as guidelines rather than rules. But I think it's good to have some; then you can work with them or against them.

So what are your personal rules? Or do you not have any?

Poets du Jour: Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar

Since meeting Dorianne and Joe, I've been spending some time with their new books. I had already read Dorianne's Facts About the Moon; I enjoyed the collection even more the second time through.

Here's one of my favorite poems from the collection.

Hummingbird

We buried the hummingbird
in his mantle of light, buried
him deep in the loam, one eye
staring into the earth's fiery
core, the other up through
the door in the sky. His needle
beak pointed east, his curled
feet west, and we each touched
our fingertips to his breast
before lifting them up from
the darkness to kiss. And
from our blessed fists we
rained the powdery dirt
down, erasing the folded
wings, the dream-colored
head, tamping the torn grass
with the heels of our hands,
our bare feet, summer almost
over, swaying together on the great
ship of death as clouds sailed by,
blowing our hair and the wind
walked us back to our room.


I like the simple beauty of this small scene about a small creature. There's a quiet elegance to the diction. Not fancy words but well-chosen ones, words that subtly appeal to the ear. Notice, for example, the rhymes / near rhymes with east, west, darkness, kiss, breast, blessed, and fists. And core, door, torn. Lots of consonance and assonance throughout. I admire this poet's music. She pierces the heart through the ear.

Another poem I really admire is the title poem. This one is available online as an audio. Check it out and listen to Laux read Facts About the Moon.

I also found a terrific collection of audios by Dorianne at the Kelly Writers House site. Eleven more poems including one of my absolute favorites, "Pearl," about Janis Joplin. To hear Dorianne read some of her poems.

Then I moved onto Joe's new book, Fortune. This was my first acquaintance with Joe's work. It's terrific. No wonder he's just won a Pushcart Prize!

Here's one of my favorites:

Throne

The toilet was ancient and wouldn’t stop
running even after the stained tank filled,
its metal valves and rusty ball float

oxidized to an undersea green. The new
bowl was elongated, svelte, eighty-five
pounds of gleaming porcelain muscled

up the narrow back stairs, three separate gouges
in the bathroom wall where I’d suggested,
scattering unguents and salves,

soaps made from oatmeal and apricot,
stoppered rose water, bits of beach glass,
hairpins, aloe vera and blueing.

One enters this kingdom like a guest
careful to remain in one’s own scant preserve,
razor, toothbrush and ragged towel kept apart

from these occult potions, the jar of chalky
pink fluid for the bowels, foot plasters, corn
and bunion removers, gels and lotions, aspirin bottles,

stockings draped casually over the showerhead like
dark mesh for straining opium, lavender powders,
shark oil suppositories wrapped in crinkly foil.

What hubris to imagine a smooth installation.
I managed to donkey the new commode
straight down onto its wax ring seal,

black sleeve wedged in the drain pipe,
its two-inch trapway one hundred percent
glazed white vitreous china, fastened

in place with solid brass bolts. And I never
felt the small collision against my heel in the
half step I’d taken, backward, to admire my labor,

knocking the tank from its resting place
so it fell over the threshold and broke
with a sound like a glacier calving

off the Siberian coast . . .
I stayed on my knees a long time after that
trying to imagine some supplication

to the gods of water and household calm
which might restore my original vision:
to be seated in silence here at last

lost in thought or meditating on the perfectibility
of man, idly perusing a seed catalogue
or “Tintern Abbey,” or the diagram

of a vagina as it appears on a box of tampons,
all the while basking in gratitude
for the roughage in last night’s salad.


Who writes a poem about a toilet? This guy does—and I'm glad he did. What a doozy of a poem! I love the catalog of personal items in this bathroom, the mixture of lovely (lavender, apricot, stoppered rose water, aloe vera) and embarrassing (vagina, tampons, Pepto Bismol, suppositories). I'm charmed by the mixture of serious and frivolous in the poem, particularly the contrast between the speaker's vision for the upgraded toilet and the nightmare of its installation, his Shakespearean hubris and his regal position on his throne. I also appreciate the underlying humor in a formal structure that is so at odds with subject matter. And how about that last line! Worthy of a crown.

Poetry Workshop

Dorianne Laux and Joe Millar

Friday I attended an all-day workshop with Dorianne Laux and Joe Millar. It's been several years since I've gone to a workshop, but I jumped at this opportunity to meet and spend some time with these two poets. The day was organized by Nancy Hechinger who knows both poets from her MFA program at Pacific University. I thought we were meeting in some kind of local cultural center, but the location turned out to be Nancy's incredibly beautiful house. I could not have asked for a nicer, more perfect setting for a day of poetry.

Nancy's house

There were just nine of us, so it was a cozy group. We introduced ourselves as we sat in a circle in the living room. Then Dorianne and Joe led us through a warm-up activity called a "glimpsed memory." We did it orally as a kind of story-telling activity with each new teller beginning with the last line of the previous person's story. We were given 20 minutes to produce a draft of our poems and sent off to various locations to write. Then we shared the drafts and some commentary.

Next came a delicious lunch—pasta salad, cherry tomato and mozzarella salad, roast chicken, and coconut cupcakes. The weather was cooperative, so we ate outside.

Poets enjoying lunch

After lunch we did one more writing activity based on an object or picture we'd been asked to bring. Dorianne and Joe inserted a number of requirements which I always find challenging and fun. This time we wrote for 40 minutes before getting back together.

I returned home with drafts of two new poems and that nice feeling that comes after a day spent doing what you most enjoy doing.

Backyard

View out the living room window

Pond for swimming and fishing

Side view of house

Back view of house

Queen for a Day

I'm thrilled to be the featured poet today at Poetry Daily! Please pay me a visit. The poem is "Seventh-Grade Science Project." It appears in the current issue of the Harvard Review.

As if that weren't enough excitement for one day, I'm now up in Kingston, NY, where I have come in order to take an all-day poetry workshop with Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar. I haven't taken a workshop in a long time, but jumped at the opportunity to spend time with these two poets. One benefit of being in the workshop is that it will prevent me from sitting around all day staring at myself on Poetry Daily. And I hope to return home with some new poems underway. Details coming soon.

Invented Forms—Part 2

The second form I want to pass onto you is called a "sevenling." J.P. Dancing Bear, the poet and editor of The American Poetry Journal, introduced me to this form. It was invented by poet Roddy Lumsden. It is a poem of seven lines inspired by this short poem by Anna Akhmatova (1889 - 1966).

He loved three things alone:
White peacocks, evensong,
Old maps of America.

He hated children crying,
And raspberry jam with his tea,
And womanish hysteria.

. . . And he married me.

tr. D M Thomas From Selected Poems (Penguin)


Lumsden provides the following rules for the sevenling:

The first three lines should contain an element of three - three connected or contrasting statements, or a list of three details, names or possibilities. This can take up all of the three lines or be contained anywhere within them. Then, lines four to six should similarly contain an element of three, connected directly or indirectly or not at all. The seventh line should act as a narrative summary or punchline or as an unusual juxtaposition. There are no set metrical rules, but being such as short form, some rhythm, meter or rhyme is desirable. To give the form a recognizable shape, it should be set out in two stanzas of three lines, with a solitary seventh, last line. The tone of the sevenling should be mysterious, offbeat or disturbing, giving a feeling that only part of the story is being told. The poem should have a certain ambiance which invites guesswork from the reader.


Here's an example by Lumsden. The poem seems to have no title.


All those buzzsaw years I ran the show,
all those kids who asked me for advice,
The Architect, the Miraclist, The Man.

The starlets kick-line, that was my concoction,
the sailor boys, the peacock feather spotlights;
till one night in a blackout, I let slip

what it is I say to all the girls.



And here's my own example from The Del Sol Review:

Woman with Fruit

Raisins, prunes, and apricots,
the dried fruits she hungers for,
done now with ripeness, the mess of juice.

Especially she craves figs,
their turtle-textured skin, resolute stem,
quirky resilience of the pendulous bladder,

and inside the sack, seeds that crackle like grit.

Now try your hand at the sevenling.

Invented Forms

Last summer I became interested in invented forms. I gathered together a bunch of them and tried my hand at some. I liked the challenge of them and often the zaniness. And in several cases, I liked the results. Recently, I submitted two invented form poems to The Del Sol Review, an online journal. Both appear in the current issue. I thought some of you might like to try your hand at these two forms. I'm offering you one today; the other will soon follow.

Today's challenge is an anagram poem. The instructions come from Terrance Hayes in his collection, Hip Logic. According to Hayes' note, he found the instructions in the puzzle section of newspapers.

First, choose a word of substantial length. Then quickly form as many words as you can from that lead word. You will need a minimum of eleven. Words should consist of four or more letters. That's the rule, but one I easily broke, and I allow you to break it also. You are not allowed to make a three-letter word into a four-letter one by the addition of s. I broke that rule also and so may you, if you like.

Then from your list of words, write an eleven-line poem. Each line must end with one of the words on your list. So if your list contains fifteen words, you will use only eleven of them. You could go on longer if inclined, but I obeyed this rule.

I found this form quite addictive. I was intrigued and pleased by the resulting sounds—the near rhymes, the alliteration, consonance, and assonance. Here's one of my favorite anagrams.

Ecdysiast

You think it's easy
to unravel the boa of feathers and cast
it off, to turn the act
of undressing into an art, suggest Yes
to each hungry face, go just so far and then desist?

Not one can touch, but all must leave feeling sated.

Sequins sparkle as she slinks across the dais,
peels the skirt and tosses it as if rolling dice,
and then the bustier, hook by hook, and thrown aside,
a spider molting, her gaze at once smoldering and icy,
the swivel of hips, to keep the tease slow and steady.

Happy Birthday to Blogalicious

Today is my blog's first birthday. It was exactly one year ago that I launched this blog. I did so with some trepidation. Would I be using up time that I ought to be spending on other endeavors? Would I write fewer poems? Would I be taken less seriously as a poet if I became a blogger? Would anyone bother to visit my blog?

I'm happy to say that starting a blog has been a very good experience. Sure, I guess I should be off right now cleaning something or reading something, but those things will get done (okay, maybe the cleaning won't get done). I don't write any more poems than I did before the blog, but I don't think I write any less either. One thing's for sure—I've written a lot more on a variety of topics, stuff I would never have written without the blog. In fact, in the past year, I've written 138 posts! Whoever thought I'd turn into such a blabbermouth.

I can't say if anyone takes me less seriously as a poet now that I'm a blogger too, but I can say with certainty that I continue to take myself quite seriously. And I've certainly bought and read more poetry, some of it because of exchanges here on the blog.


I think I'm more observant. I'm listening carefully for topics that might be useful on the blog. I read more carefully, again thinking about some response I might make on the blog. I pay more attention to books and chapbooks now that I might want to feature one on the blog. I take more photos as I love adding visual effects. That kind of makes life more fun. And really, that's what I enjoy about blogging, i.e., it's fun. I've made contacts with lots of people I've never met and I've learned a thing or two. And I like to think that I've put a few poems out into the world that maybe you hadn't seen and that I've helped a few poets sell a few books.

Like that baseball field, it seems that once I built it, people came. Readers have come from all across the US: Oklahoma, Missouri, California, Massachusetts, Florida, and so on. And they've come from outside the US: Canada, Scotland, Germany, India, Holland, Brazil, and Singapore.

Please, have a piece of cake before you leave!

Share on Facebook