Of the three poems below, guess which one was composed by a student:
Tears
When the male prostitute started to cry,
I knew right away something
unusual was happening. Something I could
not have foretold that morning, when I passed
my toothbrush under water,
before applying the paste, or zippered
up my bluejeans or took the first crisp
bite out of a hot toasted bagel, spread
with cream cheese. I had been
sucking him off, as
usual, and his cock was
wonderful, very hard. He was
barely moving, as I had asked, kneeling and I,
too, on my knees, bent. First I heard the muffled
catch, loud gurrump in the throat I took
for coming. A loud, clucked swallow—I
stopped. No, he said,
keep going—then
gulped, slung low in
the windpipe. My palms touched
floor before I felt the cold
droplet and looked up and he was
crying. He cried,
and cried and would not tell me. What,
I asked him, what? He had said,
before, his name was Todd. What,
Todd, what?—I kept asking,
but he only cried. I told him no matter
what the dreadful thing was,
nothing could be
that bad and not to worry. Then looked
around for my purse, which had
Mace in it—I’ve read
about these guys, who one day
just snap, like a fist punched through
the universe, and suddenly the world
unstarred and awry and who knows
whose neck they’ll wring next. Quietly,
still crying. Gurgling
din. Coursed
polluted streams across the torso. Drone
ribbon of the ages, what, Todd,
what?—I stopped asking.
And a cool shade
of dullness set in, identical
to the dullness before, the clean grey
walls, bristled nonsmell of
carpet, the dullness of even-tuft, sheerness
of sheets, identical as before but for
the low, persistent white caw of his tears.
Poorly Matched
Poorly matched the world and she
or so her best self would say (knowing her well
and making rare appearances.) But kingside she sits to post her fee
to lumber locks and fucks the jocks. And the malodorous cell
kept her solid for a while. The day came when she planted her feet
elsewhere. With the suggestion of limitation–she drunk it all down
and pushed and pushed her way to the source of the dinner bell–in her seat
she asked: Who are you and what is this we are eating? What gown
has draped this crapshoot? But it was winter and then summer
before she got an answer. Now it was too late for her hanky to drop
onto the centennial and nobody took her seriously. The drummer
drums a march to the wicked world’s beating and we stop
the poem from the real dream that stood underneath her–what she drank
with what she ate. Awfulness only lasts a while, light to green, everything
melts to the deep sea. After dinner she thanked her host–lank
and benevolent for the kind creepiness and social visiting.
Tomorrow the directory says to take up more rooms, more loves,
no matter how unorganic–for Saturn’s last fires have kept her from the infirmary
and her bad seed has turned good. Saluting now the uncool doves
of St. Francis–of her childhood of the sanctimony of another family.
She holds all meetings in secrecy–this for the greatness of chronoscopal times.
Decadent and unyielding, never impairing the strength of a victim’s cry,
she smirched the walls of her house with patterns–gross animal outlines,
tulips, or the quick stumped fox who smiled and bleakly froze to blind her sky.
Sea by Dusk
Comes to gather you from clocks and says be moon,
be progress. Gathers the bitter fact of chance and says
change in every way. Depending on the harvest,
a sadness glassed in autumn, depending on the sea.
Shatters the lullaby, lush and drugged, that would settle
in the downcast reaches. You who bear the light in you
bear the deep compass, unending corrosion,
an irreparable white meadow. Gather what voyage you can,
a sound far into water, susurrous in the array of salt
and drifting sunlight, what is left for us to live. Below water
or close above, rhythms emptied in the flutter of Pacific,
without limit, a human sound breaking hard against this air,
endure, says become what you can in the summer fluency of waves.
Sleep, saline, gathers the currents of blue driftwood,
says a hymnal loose with eiderdown and light—
and comes to prize you in the hour of your late undertaking,
your new and precise fear. Listen, lean, that you might feel,
in the warm blurring of waves, the opening and closing of flowers,
a circadian call that pulls all desolation toward clearing,
be ready, be shirred, task of light, a cadence of star
and constancy, change, dropping far in pressured water,
sails of shadow change in every way. As in the halls of night
the swallows gather up whole acres of past error,
vision into vision, printed in the last coral light spilled out
across the tides, your arms, gathered and withstood
in such arcades of stars and sleeping fish, within, without,
pulling near—do I know you—issued in calligraphies of brine
on darkness, turn, return. We are drifting out of phase,
lost, calendar-sprung, and feel the wings slanting through air
above these fleeting museums of the sea, held
within a single note that moves in pain, pattern, scarcity
and abundance, abide, turn and return, some small, far happiness—
and the nocturne grows within each drowsy marine creature,
rope, tack, slowing muscle of the heart, depending on the tides,
depending on the air, a perfect mammal stillness
beneath all flights of caution, the net cast far into
space, who, clock, stopclock, falling lace, beautiful and slow
across the warming skin, in the slipping borders, your body,
shall be safe, unscheduled beyond the seatorn cemetery,
gracious fields, the gardens, as in a true response
to daylight, here, unearthed in cooling water,
full of suffering, mirrors, moving countries
of fish and floating grass, your hopes, receding
terror, recognize you, it says, no loneliness, no more
loneliness, open, it says, your arms.
Before I give you the answer, let’s eavesdrop on a Ted Berrigan lecture, “Incredible Masterpieces”:
It seems to me that anybody that writes a few hundred poems ought to be able to write a very good one. Probably should be able to write twenty very good ones. Because the first, if you start writing, the first couple of years you write quite a number of pretty good poems; it’s just after that it gets a little hard. And then one wants to see what you do in the next three or four years, and if you’re still around after that six or seven years, you’re probably going to be around. You’re probably going to be a poet. And everybody is rooting for you to do that, but if you don’t, it’s all right. What the hell. We get ours, you get yours. I mean, it’s not quite that brutal, but in a way, it has to be. It’s a full-time thing, and particularly the business of becoming a poet.
That’s an interesting phrase, “the business of becoming a poet.” I’ve encountered a surprising number of excellent poems written by students or occasional poets. What they lack in experience and polish, they more than make up for with a giddy excitement that comes from discovering a method, feeling or insight for the first time. Animated by an emotional urgency, their poems are not merely willed into being, an inevitable practice among those committed to the exasperating business of poetry. We know what Michaux means when he declares, “To will a poem into being is to kill it,” but that statement is also misleading and a little harmful, especially to younger poets, since many worthwhile poems would go unwritten had inspiration been an absolute prerequisite.
If even amateurs can pen a few decent poems, why are there so many lame ones? Because, frankly, too many poems are willed into being by poets who are emotionally numb or beaten down by the ugly business of living. One has to be oddly fierce and a little naive to write inspired poetry into middle and old age. Octavio Paz dismissed Arthur Rimbaud as “heat, not light,” but I prefer Rimbaud’s “immature” genius over Paz’s seasoned stuff. In “A Season in Hell,” Rimbaud examines his loss of innocence, as translated here by Louise Varese:
Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed.
The genius of that first line is the qualifying “if I remember well.” Here, a 19-year-old is speaking about his innocence as something he can barely remember, since it already seems so distant and unreal to him. With maturity, with the awareness of one’s mortality and ongoing decay, one’s appetite is compromised if not snuffed out altogether. It’s one reason why aspiring poets give up, why there aren’t many more poets out there. In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rilke points out:
And I sit, and have a poet. What a destiny. There are perhaps three hundred people in the room now, reading; but it is impossible that each single one of them should have a poet. (Heaven knows what they have.) There aren’t three hundred poets.
[translated by M.D. Herter Norton]
We begin this post with a poem by Youna Kwak, a just-graduated student from the University of Montana, where I taught this past semester. The other pieces are by two of Youna’s professors, Prageeta Sharma and Joanna Klink, respectively. At her best, Youna’s work is already exciting. If she can add the depths of maturity to her youthful intensity and volatility, she’ll be a special poet indeed. Remember her name. Here’s another by Youna Kwak:
Personal
DWM 6’1�? NS 43 entrepreneur turned consultant loves scuba
diving, Mexican food, travel, romance, foreign films, keeping fit, Jesus
Christ adventures, fun, walks by the beach, camping, real estate,
money, laughing, Marx Brothers, Coen brothers, hiking, swimming, boating,
fishing, hunting, stoning, jazz, picnics,
whorehouses, Jews, blacks, fine wine,
microbrews, exploring new places, Easter, Christmas, fireworks, Paris,
Rome, Barcelona, Rio, Afghanistan, Gothic Revival, Arts
and Crafts, Bauhaus, drug-free zones, bomb shelters, world music,
reggae, philanthropy, monkey blood, NPR, NYT, NYRB, MOMA,
MOCA, COCA, POKA, SPIC, shivs, blunts, Macanudos, Jameson’s, Grey
Goose, fair-trade, osso bucco, fireplaces, winter days, spring days,
autumn days, summer days, Mondays, Saturdays, Thursdays, Wednesdays,
January, August, September, February, March
Madness, The Final Four, Proust, Frost, Hemingway, The Wasteland,
theater, red, blue, violet, beige, oatmeal, jokes, funny games, silly
games, serious games, horseback riding, drag racing, tennis, jogging,
mischief, the outdoors, British Airways, finger
fucking, Rockies, Alps, Smokeys, the Renaissance, Victorians,
Modernists, photography, blood-soaked gauze, helicopters, yachts,
BMWs, painting, sculpture, sailing, unwinding, pad
thai, Riesling, Saint Bernards, Jasper Johns, oil.
Nothing is more exciting than to see a student outperform her teachers! I’ll be looking for Youna Kwak’s work from now on. Thanks!
Posted By: Joseph Hutchison on May 10, 2008 at 12:51 pmI could spot the poem right away by the quality you describe as “oddly fierce and a little naive.” That is a great description of “beginner’s mind”! It’s the Buddhist principle is the key to approaching almost anything — especially writing. It’s what Natalie Goldberg talks about in her book, “Writing Down the Bones.” She opens the book with these lines: “”When I teach a beginning class, it is good. I have to come back to beginner’s mind, the first way I thought and felt about writing. In a sense, that beginner’s mind is what we come back to every time we sit down and write.” Best of luck to Ms. Kwak! What wonderful work. I hope to read more of her writing in the future.
Posted By: Angela G. on May 10, 2008 at 3:29 pmAs an addendum, I’d like to post a comment by Joseph Hutchison, discussing “diminishing returns” in poetry:
Posted By: Linh Dinh on May 10, 2008 at 9:08 pmI’ve been contemplating the implications of Debora MacKenzie’s article, in a reductive way, I suppose. It led me to wonder if the Law of Diminishing Returns doesn’t apply to the arts. My bailiwick is poetry, so my thoughts have turned in that direction.
What I wonder is whether the increasing complexity (not to say diversity) of modern poetry doesn’t also produce diminishing returns.
Think of The Cantos. Marvelously complex, but Pound’s key ideas are not only simple but range—for the most part—from crackpot silly to nastily destructive.
For a more recent example, take a gander at Jorie Graham’s fold-out poems in the latest issue of Poetry. The dazzling spatial array of her lines conceal what seem to be a fairly pedestrian set of ideas and perceptions—at least to my jaundiced eye.
What do readers do when they invest vast quantities of joules in such writing and reap such a meager return? Well, they stop reading, mostly. The ones who continue reading go to grad school, where they learn to explain all the complexities of such poetry in ways that are themselves so complex that the majority of readers—even well educated readers—find these explanations willfully unintelligible, or condescending, or both.
I don’t mean to tar all complex poetry with this broad brush. The complexities of Yeats are rewarding, as are the complexities of Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Andrea Zanzotto, and Shuntaro Tanikawa, to name just a few. But it seems to me that writing programs are disgorging many more poets addicted to complexity for its own sake. These poets display complexity the way peacocks display their colorful, shuddering tail feathers—hoping to get laid by the MacArthur Foundation or the National Book Critics Circle or the tenure committee at their alma mater.
Talk about diminishing returns!
If you think the NBCC is going to laud a poetry of ever-exfoliating graduate-program complexity you haven’t been watching the NBCC very closely! But yes, writing programs, like all graduate programs in anything with supposedly preprofessional aspects, encourage overproduction. (Get that first book out! Now! Never mind trying to write only the poems you must write, never mind trying to write poems as unlike one another as you can make them, never mind “a line will take us hours maybe”: finish that book, so that you can apply for jobs!)
Posted By: Steve on May 11, 2008 at 12:30 pmOn the other hand, maybe a system that encourages overproduction for the sake of academic jobs is more likely to result in more really good poems than a system that encourages non-production by requiring poets to earn money in ways unrelated to the writing of poems. I believe it was Auden who thought that the ideal jobs for poets were jobs that paid them for their skills with language, but not for the writing, nor for the criticism of poems. I think Auden came up with two such jobs, one of which was being a professional translator (though the people who actually make their living as translators seem to spend an awful lot of time on instruction manuals, as Ashbery noticed a while ago). I forget what the other “ideal job” was. Really there is no ideal job, just better or worse ones.
I’ll look for more Youna Kwak. All three of those poems have aspects like (none strike me as unbreakable masterpieces) but what’s most exciting about Kwak, in your presentation, is that she doesn’t sound like her teachers.
Pound’s “key ideas in the Cantos” are different depending upon which Cantos you read. It’s no coincidence that the ones we reread– the Pisan Cantos– have, as their key “idea,” something like “we are sad when we feel that our life’s work has failed, so that we are alone at the end of a majestic, world-historical effort, and have nothing to do but sing of our failure.” If I am making this part of Pound sound like late Stevens, or like Tennyson, so be it.
Montana’s a quite exciting place these days!
Yes Linh, indeed. That’s a big part of why there are so many lame poems. I think there’s a bigger reason.
Posted By: Patrick Herron on May 14, 2008 at 11:12 amA poet should develop a sense of when not to write. It becomes increasingly important with age. However to refrain from proiducing is antithetical to any business. A business profits via production and marketing. Getting volume out. And anyone who invests in a writing degree now has a business in debt in some way or other, some debt to repay. So that in turns puts more pressure on making poetry writing an enterprise. (Talk about opening the door to having life beat you down only to have you put that beatdown onto the page.)
This poetry business is misery. We see lots of young poets pandering to one another, networking, even exhibiting a sort of greed for attention that can eclipse greed for money of those on Wall St.
Ultimately the decision not to write is one that goes against the business aspect of poetry. It certainly helps keep away the beatdown.
There’s also a middle way: know when to resist sharing, know when to sweep up the sand from the mandala. Eve when I was proliferating, man, I probably destroyed 9/10ths of everything I wrote. It was gargbage. It’s a good thing to do, to detach yourself. The worst mistake is to confuse yourself with what you make. Let it go.
I do think many of us underestimate the acuteness of a young mind. We even regularly overestimate our own wisdom. Fact is, the brain gets slower as it gets older. Wiser has some benefits, sure, but it also means colder, an attachment to minimalisms, simplifications, overreductions.
Ten years ago I proliferated poetry like a madman. It started terrribly, but I didn’t care. A fire that consumes. At some point the writing became pretty good, good enough apparently for journal editors to begin to solicit poems from me. Really terrific journals. For a man in his late 20s it was just incredible for me.
And then that intensity, that well of seemingly bottomless inspiration, dried up, not completely but just close enough to the bottom that I had to decide whether I should push it, whether I should reserve that remaining inch of water. It’s hard at that point, because recognition in poetry begins to feed your ego, and the more an ego eats, the hungrier it gets.
I think this aspect of my Buddhist training applies to poetry, the ability to recognize when to withdraw. I don’t think beginner’s mind does, however, because even from the hands of a 20 year old you’re nowhere near the beginner’s mind. I mean you’re already quite laden mentally. In fact it’s in your late teen years that the adult world appears, and is traumatic. By the time you’re in graduate school if you’re a rich american your brain and heart has already processed and internalized or fought these facets of this adult world.
Speaking of beginners mind I do think there was a brief submovement of martian poetry in the late 1970s in Britain. I’m thinking of Crag Raine and his “Martian Sends a Postcard Home.” I found that material very interesting mostly for what it could not Martianize, what it could not render unfamiliar. I think for a while it was fresh, attempting to achieve that beginer’s mind, to break the grip of the familiar. But it was never quite at that beginning mind to start with, and its poets did not know when to stop.
Received the following poem from Bob Stanley of Harvard, MA. He is an orchardist and poet, or vice versa, so I offer you his latest rendition concerning tree pruning:
Posted By: David Sussman on December 27, 2008 at 1:37 pmClients will stop
Yes stop dumbstruck
When they see my trees -
Their apple trees as I saw them.
They will turn away
Embarrassed blushing
As I wreak havoc.
They had only stubbed and rotted hags -
Dry shrieks of wild wood -
Only the oldest of witches.
Now I reveal young things
Stripped of all ugliness
Dark limbs of tender purple bark unveiled.
They will blush in the morning brightness
To see such sudden supple branches
Firm, yet bending, Free yet bound
To the task of bearing good fruit.
You should see them
When the slender central leader shakes
Under a jay, night restless.
Fir wood droops from the ends of boughs
As if dripping with apples to be
In a moon dream of harvest.
I have groaned in them.
I was a grunting troll, climbing and cutting
Now I leave them.
Let them stand alone
In the sunlight
As I stand
Tattered and tan
Redolent of sawdust
A man of action again.
Like true love
Our darkness
Has yielded.
RD Stanley