Metaphors, Masks, Clarity, Roripaugh, Corn: I'm learning how to write

A few months ago I jotted some lines in response to a friend's comment questioning the depth or validity of impersonal public mourning--a pile of bouquets honoring a stranger's death. I knew, or believe, those flowers do indeed represent a sincere grief, and not mawkishness.

The lines I wrote had to do with a scene in Crime and Punishment. Raskilnikov dreams of a horse being beaten to death. It's pretty gruesome, but that is what came to mind, then Princess Diana and the outpouring when she was killed. My thoughts moved closer to home, America--New York and L.A.--cities where I know teenagers are killed by random bullets.

It was all a good idea for a poem but I couldn't move it. The lines sat on the virtual page in my computer. I considered deleting, but didn't, more out of laziness than any belief the poem would ever get legs. But a few days ago, it did. I can't say why, but I returned to it, partly because it was there in the long document that holds all new poems, and I was there. I worked on it every day with glee.

This morning it occurred to me to question my memory of the Dostoevsky. Given that it once took me about fourteen tries to get the name right for Achilles' friend (Patroclus) killed in that war, I knew I should not rely on memory. What I wrote above is correct, but I hadn't remembered it that way. And if I couldn't remember--for my own poem--why should I expect anyone else to?

In the time between my first draft and this morning I read Lee Ann Roripaugh's latest collection, On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year (Southern Illinois University Press). I can't overstate how fine, marvelous, astute, rhythmic, sensual, funny, tragic, transformative and insanely affecting Roripaugh's work is. And what lingered in my para-conscious mind, relative to "For One Who Questioned the Grief," the poem mentioned above, was how clear her work is.

The easy word is accessible but that could be wrongly read as easy, which Roripaugh is far from. As a professor, she has a bead on how all sorts understand and think about poetry, true, but more than that she has the gift--which may also be sheer willingness to write draft after draft--of creating luminosity in the everyday, a caterpillar, a midnight drive home, "the flittering plop of moths."

Not one of the poems in this collection begins, as "For One..." did, "No one mends the horse's leg, / not Raskilnikov, not Fyodor."

I can laugh now. What was I thinking? Not very poetry-y and quite a reach. This is not Tom Sawyer getting Huck Finn to help him paint a fence. Not a paraphrase of "the best of times, the worst of times" & co. In other words, not a reference it's relatively fair to expect readers to remember. It's a reference that must be retrieved from the memory banks, if not Google.

As of this morning the poem opens with, "When a stranger is killed and laid to rest / at the alter for Public Mass of Remembrance." I'm not saying that's my high point but it's clear. For me it's risky in that I'm stating where I'm headed, what this poem is going to be about. For me, that feels--repeat--risky. My training--in life, not poetry--was to be clever. And stylistically, again in life, to hint rather than state. Of course my nature is more blunt so there's always a battle.

I was prompted to write this entry in response to the remarkably thoughtful Alfred Corn's Weblog. His essay today, Metaphor, Masks, Coding

http://alfredcornsweblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/metaphor-mask-code.html
is an exploration of a poet's decision to metaphorize rather than be "straightforward" (Corn's word). The title is almost Margaret Meadish, as if we poets were so distant from our culture as to think we needed masks from any dimension as intercessionary devices.

Anyway, I have felt, over the past month, that I am just beginning to know how to write a poem. Sometimes I purposely metaphorize (nasty word) or create a metaphor because I am bored. In the same way a poet told me to meet her at the little yellow man. When I got to the street corner in Brooklyn there was no little yellow statue. She'd been referring to markings on an online map. This last little incident is hardly conclusive but does demonstrate poets' odd ways of seeing and describing the world.

Note: Sorry I still haven't figured out links, here. Sigh.

The image is young Margaret Mead with an Eskimo mask.

"So conscience was eased" : MFA writing programs

Richard Price is one of the more fortunate graduates of an MFA program. While at Columbia he wrote The Wanderers, a hit as novel and movie, and his subsequent work succeeded in all sorts of ways. If any writer could without hypocrisy hype writing programs, he's that writer. But when asked directly about MFA programs even Richard Price had this to say: "They're cash cows for the colleges." He wasn't entirely happy saying that, I thought, but said it, he did--as one of several writers on a panel (on writing) I saw about a year ago. I didn't ask him the question, by the way.

Cash cows.

MFA writing programs are constantly discussed but have yet to be analyzed in an original way that reveals just why they attract so many. I have more to say than I'm going to here and now and defer. In a recent blog, poet Alfred Corn came as close as I've read, by assessing his time as a teacher. He doesn't condemn or defend, and ends his essay, which you can read in full here http://alfredcornsweblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/teaching-writing.html, in understated conscience. He's one of the few teachers to be frank about student loans. From Alfred Corn:

"On the most general level, I don’t question that writing courses help class members be better readers, and I wish that more people realized the value thereof. Being the chief isn't the only worthwhile goal in life: being a member of the tribe is a noble and honorable estate. It also seems likely that most MFA candidates will acquire the habit of reading new works of imaginative literature as these appear, a solid cultural value. (It would be interesting to know what percentage of the readership for contemporary literature is made up of former writing students.) But the tuition costs and resulting debts began to climb to terrifying levels, at least in some universities. So conscience was eased when I gave up regular teaching. I do occasional workshops, where the tuition isn’t stratospherically high, and that satisfies my wish to work at the classroom context. Sometimes people seem shocked when I say that all I do is write. But writing is (and in truth, always was) a full-time occupation."

image from:

http://www.adobe.com/education/images/winners/2004/craig/cca-writing-catalogue004.gif

Old Wounds Tell Some of the Truth and Tell It Slant

A few years ago a friend generously paid for me to go to an “Earth and Religion” conference at Bard. As soon as I arrived I looked for an opportunity to volunteer, as volunteering is a great way to feel part of something and make friends. I was set to collating and stapling handouts at a table with a few other people, all like minded, and we eased into a conversation.

We were jolly, I was myself, funny, quick witted, verbal, and when someone brought up the topic of crossword puzzles, a man my age, wearing an old beret, looked at me with hatred and sneered, “I’ll bet you’re great at those.”

This may not seem like much, but I was cut. I was bleeding. Here I was at a save-the-earth-through-love event and right off I was hit with a sort of male malevolence I’ve encountered over and over. (The joke here, I’m rotten with crosswords and Scrabble.)

A few days later this same man came up to me with guilt-at least he knew what he’d done. So that’s that.

Recently I was invited to a James Joyce/Ulysses reading and discussion group. There were two other members. One a scholar and poet who once studied with James Wright. The other a new poet sidetracked by marriages and kids. I enjoyed reading Joyce outloud-that’s a pleasure and I think strength of mine-hearing and speaking rhythms.

The scholar was cool and knowledgeable; the nonscholar was sincere and a good soul, but had a concordance which “explained” Ulysses. He was intent on explaining Joyce to me, and not for the first time. I’m not going into the details, but I looked into my heart and realized I had been through similar so many times with with men and just better not show up for this one.

I now swerve to the famous Emily Dickinson quotation, "Tell all the truth, but tell it slant." My swerve is a little suspect, logically. A parabola of jello in the sun. But I was recently reminded of the quote and shortly after, thought of the above two incidents. I flashed on Emily in her well-kept home in Amherst, brilliant Emily, who may have found solitude the only way to keep sane. Maybe she wrote "Tell all the truth, but tell it slant” because, being so innately clever (and, please, I understand that Sarah Sarai : Emily Dickinson :: one daisy : all the flowers of Paradise) because she was fed up with the witless and weary of speaking carefully.

Could be she'd first thought it, in a context other than the poem. Maybe this is Emily being snide or exasperated. For chrissakes, dude, tell, but be hip. You know the old joke. Do Quakers swear? Sure. Fuck thee.

Thanks to Alfred Corn, a very warm soul and extraordinary poet, who reminded me of the Dickinson quote and did so in a far more interesting manner than the above.

Apologies to all good souls mentioned. We all say and do stupid things, have old and new wounds. Ain’t that so.

Image from: http://quakeragitator.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/quakers_prison_ministry.jpg

(I once was a Member of the Religious Society of Friends.)