Neighbors in October

Neighbors in October

Taking a few minutes to look for a nice, fall poem, I found "Neighbors in October" by David Baker, and also that picture. Baker has been described as the poet of the Midwest to replace James Wright. Though their styles are different, the similarities can be mapped and Wright's influence certainly felt in poems like this one. Born in Maine and growing up in Missouri, he is an English professor and the poetry editor for the Kenyon Review. I had the opportunity to meet and get to know David for one week at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop in 2008.

It was an intense week of writing and discussions that ultimately cemented my love for poetry and instilled some confidence that if I kept working, maybe something could happen...as in, maybe I could become a teacher, like him, who in a week had opened up so many doors to writing that at what had first felt like a studio apartment I was becoming bored with quickly, now was an apartment complex with attractive neighbors, ugly men on the stoop, and someone above me always dropping things.

The poem "Neighbors in October" does not knock you off your feet with an extreme image or unforgiving syntax (though the lines "And how like a field is the whole sky now/that the maples have shed their leaves, too." is a little disjointed from the rest of the poem), but it places people in a context that allows me to visit them for a moment and leave knowing it was real. Charles Simic and James Tate are two of my favorite poets because of their strangeness; in this poem, and in much of Baker's work, the unassuming speaker carries me with him/her and I am drawn to it because it is familiar to me--but familiar without that negative connotation of dullness. I'm excited; I know what these people are gearing up for...and if you live in a place preparing for winter, you know it, too.

Inside Outside

Inside Outside

Linda Gregg discusses the importance of finding a poem, but finding in the sense of detecting it inside of you, of finding the poem you wish to write. And in turn, for the interest of reading, knowing that the poem one is reading has been "found" for that poet and is, that tricky word, meaningful. Here is the formula she gives us: "two elements in 'finding' a poem: discovering the subject matter and locating the concrete details and images out of which the poems are built."

This seems straightforward enough, however Gregg goes on to say, "I am referring to finding the resonant sources deep inside you that empower those subjects and ideas when they are put in poems."

I think I might like to write poems that way, finding the deep well of inspiration stuck behind rib and below a loop of stomach, but often what ends up on the page is some rant about this or that thing, this or that injustice just heard on the radio or read in the paper because the TV is broken, and I'm mad about that, too. Or else, a poem that risks that dangerous word, sentimentalism, something I detect when Gregg says her experiences reading Gerard Manley Hopkins was "a special way of knowing the earth and experiencing God."

Though I don't agree completely with WCW's "a poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words," my poetic-inclination-meter leans more to his view than Gregg's that building a poem in this way can only achieve so much: "You can produce fine poems without believing anything, but it corrodes the spirit and eventually rots the seed-corn of the heart. Writing becomes manufacturing instead of giving birth." A desire to build a machine is still a desire, and if in machines we can create awe by their design, isn't this still valid, and won't the creator want to create something better than her last invention, pulling from something deep within?

Gregg does concede that understanding craft (i.e. how to make part A snap into part B to create the function of C where C is emotional response) is primary. Her call to look, truly look and discover, what is inside you is good advice. And though I can't say I necessarily experience God in a new way when I read a poem like this, I do feel something, I like it, and I think the poet has done something right with all of the elements Gregg discusses.

Poetry on the Brain

Poetry on the Brain

The Poetry Foundation is a great resource with a seemingly endless amount of material to investigate. This afternoon, enjoying the first day of a week's vacation, I checked out this highlighted discussion, which was a little spicy at times, of a new book by Iain McGilchrist called The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale University Press, 2010). Ange Mlinko, poet and critic, approaches the book through the eyes of a poet seeking to understand what can be learned from a book whose purpose is to explore the right and left hemispheres of the brain and how poetry plays its part to stimulate those hemispheres.

The conversation, dipping occasionally into murky scientific waters, did find its way to a familiar topic: is it better to write poems that are more complex or straightforward? is it more fun to read difficult poems, or not?

Modern American poetry's use or non-use of metaphor and metonymy wedged into the back-and-forth, and ultimately the question of accessibility to what the poem wishes to accomplish comes forward to equal that with difficulty comes pleasure in reading and contemplating the poem.

Paradoxically, it is most difficult to make the familiar seem new, and so Iain McGilchrist provides a nice comment of the modern poetic state when he says : "There is a tension between what has to engage our conscious debating minds and what must carry us into a realm beyond any such ratiocination. An excessive fear of being direct, and the worship of the difficult, endemic in Modernism, threaten at times to undermine the direction that poetry inevitably takes, away from what we have to “work out” for ourselves toward what we thought we knew already, but in fact never understood. In poetry, being simple takes more skill than being difficult."

Here is a link to a well-known Ashbery poem that McGilchrist claims abandons the reader at the end when the poem should hold them the strongest. I agree that I do feel a little abandoned, but find joy in that letting go: I was able to ratiocinate (fun word, right?) up to that point well enough, and now the balance has shifted, the tension now in a new "realm" where our minds can, potentially, make connections otherwise impossible.

Mid-American Review

Mid-American Review

Occasionally with some free time I will check out sample content in magazines and journals I find, buy, or am recommended to hit with something inappropriate and large, like a ham. Mid-American Review was the sample content this afternoon while I sat thinking, "Oh, right....I should probably be writing."




There was a poem about crows that I thought was kind of neat , if you are into weird bird poems that lead to metaphysical questions like "Is it that my life is magnesium powder drizzled over flame?" I encourage you to check out the other options, if you find yourself supposedly with free time. I guess I should get busy.

First Post

First Post

I finally have consistent internet access to begin this blog and keep things moving forward. I'm excited. Not as excited as the French are to "manifest," or yell at things that make them mad, but still.

Another reason to get this blog started is I've just found out I will have two poems published by The Portland Review, one online and the other in print. Also, I think it's kind of nice to check out blogs now and again if I like someone's writing, so why not have something available if someone wants to check other poems of my stuff sometime? That, and Megan (wife) has a cool blog she's been keeping for our families and friends back home that has been a lot of fun.