Comments on: Haloed

By: David Sussman

David Sussman — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 17:37:51 +0000

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:
Clients 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

By: Patrick Herron

Patrick Herron — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:12:28 +0000

Yes Linh, indeed. That’s a big part of why there are so many lame poems. I think there’s a bigger reason.
A 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.

By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 11 May 2008 16:30:22 +0000

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!)
On 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!

By: Linh Dinh

Linh Dinh — Sun, 11 May 2008 01:08:58 +0000

As an addendum, I’d like to post a comment by Joseph Hutchison, discussing “diminishing returns” in poetry:
I’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!

By: Angela G.

Angela G. — Sat, 10 May 2008 19:29:50 +0000

I 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.

By: Joseph Hutchison

Joseph Hutchison — Sat, 10 May 2008 16:51:13 +0000

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!