Concerning the Spiritual in Poetry

I've often thought that poetry is a language within the language. A good poem is atomic, essentially indivisible, unchangeable, whole, and irreducible. The use of metaphor and figurative elements, compression, and sound work upon the language in such a way to make it particularly effective and powerful. In poetry, I believe that spirit talks to spirit. Many writers and artists have felt this way.  

Wassily Kandinsky in Concerning the Spiritual in Art writes: "Literature, music and art are the first and most sensitive spheres in which this spiritual revolution makes itself felt."  In his examination of the writer Maeterlinck (Russian), Kandinsky says:

The apt use of a word (in its poetical meaning), repetition of this word, twice, three times or even more frequently, according to the need of the poem, will not only tend to intensify the inner harmony but also bring to light unsuspected spiritual properties of the word itself. . . the word which has two meanings, the first direct, the second indirect, is the pure material of poetry and of literature the material which these arts along can manipulate and through which they speak to the spirit. (Kandinsky, 15-16)

Kandinsky used color as if it were language; color communicated spiritual meaning. But many poets reach for images to do this.

Jane Hirschfield (editor of Women in Praise of the Sacred and Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry) observes women's poetry that is spiritual frequently offers images of the house.  She says: "spiritual fulfillment is not to be found outside the door of the self."  Just as she uses the image of door to express an idea, so do other women writers.  The house can express the self and its boundaries. "To become the authority of one’s own household is no small thing in many women’s lives, even now, and the lives of earlier women poets are almost always marked by some fracturing with the expectations and course of ordinary life. The same is often true for men, of course, especially mystics."

Poetry is not ordinary language--it's extra ordinary. Consider the words of Czeslaw Milosz from his "Ars Poetica":

The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.

The house again serves as metaphor; it is not just the house but our movement in and out, others movement in and out, that enables him to express changefulness. Perhaps poets are architects of language.

Poetry is what we reach for to say what can not be said. It allows silence to speak. This is a spiritual quality. I don't believe that many good poets set out to say something spiritual; sermonizing never makes for a good poem. It will not preach, convert, admonish, or advise.  But a poem might serve as a prayer, an incantation, a song, a cathedral. It celebrates small things: a chicken coop, a red wheel barrow, a dog.

Why write poetry? What is it that drives a person to use this form? Many people avoid it. Poets generally find poetry is not much of a livelihood. Poetry is outside the market, and perhaps that is its value. It is outside of fashion. Its beauty is not the beauty of youth. It is not the big, fancy house in the exclusive neighborhood, but a humble abode.  Instead of a great view, it offers insight. A good poem will always be fresh, even if it was written centuries ago. As Paul Valery said, a poem is a mechanism that recreates the meaning anew each time it is read.

I want to be at home in poetry. I want to sit at the window and look into the branches of a white pine. Birds fly into the limbs, fly out in the rain, in the wind, in the light.


______________________
Hirschfield, Jane. "Spiritual Poetry."  June 28, 2006. Poetry Foundation. Web. March 22, 2013. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178390

Milosz, Cseslaw. "Ars Poetica." http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/ars-poetica/

Kandinsky, Wassily. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Translated with an introduction by M.T.H. Sadler. c1977. Dover Publications, New York.

Why I Read Anne Carson

I love this poet's work because the boundaries are not fixed. Patterns shift. Formal poems give way to informal. Meaning gives way to language. Poetry gives way to prose. Sources vary. Discourses mix. There is a potluck of essay, fiction, autobiography, poetry. Conventions travel. Cultures blend. Translations err and err again. Words are the stock in trade. Poets conduct raids of other landscapes and lexicons, make forays into art and science and metadata to yield the right friction or energy or fusion.

Anne Carson new book, Red Doc, has this on the book flap:

"To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing."


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/magazine/the-inscrutable-brilliance-of-anne-carson.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&hp

Not the Best: A Book Review

Next Word, Better Word: The Craft of Writing Poetry

c2011 by Stephen Dobyns, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, NY. 

reviewed by Sheila Packa

While not as good as his earlier book, Best Words, Best Order: Essays on Poetry, Stephen Dobyns offers historical context, close readings, insightful critique into poetic concerns: subject, form, line breaks, counterpoint, and metaphor. As a poet and teacher, I'm always ready to enjoy poets writing about poetry, and I did like some of his ideas, but I found his selection of poems (that he explicated) sometimes questionable. 

His first two chapters, I found to be the least strong. Poetry overall is a very big topic. A peevish tone crept in as Dobyns attempted to address young poets. His tone was similar to that of a parent, piqued by the errancy and impulsivity of adolescents.  Whether new poets work will be "ephemera," as he suggests, remains to be seen. I did find the chapter “Aspects of the Syllable,” “Line Breaks,” “Context and Causality,” and all the rest engaging and full of insight.  It was interesting to consider his analysis of syllable, iambic, trochaic, pyrrhic, dactylic, anapest rhythms.  In the book, he says the form and content of a poem is inseparable. The form creates meaning as much as the words.  “The writer’s main loyalty is to the poem,” he writes. This is not a new concept; however, he heightened my own attention to rhythm and meter, and I appreciated that.

I was also engaged by his statement that poetry is either discursive or non-discursive. As evidence, he identified the frequently used form of including a number of propositions followed by a conclusion.  Also, a common examples of this is the "if/then" pattern that presents an argument.  The non-discursive poem is one that tends to be more imagistic and theatrical in its method; these are more enigmatic, dynamic, and they need contemplation.   The non-discursive poem (Merwin or Tranströmer, for example) is more likely to cause the reader to re-read in order to more fully take in the poem.  The poem then is taken in all at once and becomes "a symbol of affective life."

He describes types of closure in poems: "visual, syntactic, narrative, and contextual." Syntactic closure differs with discursive and nondiscursive poems, and both try to use a surprise or a shift in focus in the ending. The contextual, he suggests, may close the poem--he doesn't explain it well, but suggests it also opens out into larger meaning. What I take from it is this:  the image can resonate between the literal and metaphoric; meaning can expand, like concentric waves in a pond.

In his chapter “Revision,” he offers the reader a good examination of the creative process and the need to be expansive.  He has practical tips: after writing the first draft, poets might try starting their poem at different places to see what works the best. He advises that the poet work and revise with both “sound and sense,” and in patterns of tension and rest. Also he cautions against over-revision, or making decisions to cut or omit based on what somebody else might prefer.

I had some difficulty with his selection of poems for analysis.  While I realize obtaining permissions may be a challenge, it seemed that the poems he chose weren’t always good supports for his main points. “Performance Art Piece,” a poem by Bill Knotts (think Mapplethorpe only heterosexual), offended Dobyns; however, he chose to use it anyway in the chapter “Reconciling Paradox.”  He seemed to favor the poem because it was comic instead of earnest. In my estimation, using comic elements doesn't necessarily come across well. If the reader is the same gender or culture, it works; otherwise, it's perceived as dismissive, offensive, or puzzling.  Irony seems different.  Irony, an example being O.Henry's stories, reveal to the reader a complexity of misplaced effort, of good intentions gone awry. It creates sympathy for the character in the reader.

Later, he also presented poems by John Berryman (Dreamsong #4 and #187). These overall I felt weren't that strong poems, but they did have sexual innuendo.  Later, in the chapter “Closure,” he examines Heather McHugh’s poem “I Knew I’d Sing” which presents an incident: her mother washed her mouth out with a family sized bar of Ivory soap when she said the word, c---. He found it “an amazing joining of form and content” but I felt the last line sort of clunked, which I suppose is a form of closure. And later “Brahma” by Phillip Nast presents a sexual relationship in the metaphor of a bull-rider.  Rosen's poem, "Apple Tree," I found the most offensive of all because it describes, in gleeful terms, boys bullying an old woman.

I believe that very good poems are situated in the body; good poems are physical and engage all the five senses, but after considering these selections, I had started to wonder about Dobyns and his motives. Maybe he reached for somewhat racy poems to enliven what might be a dull topic, and maybe he did not consider or care that he comes across as sexist, heterosexist or as--to use an old-fashioned and possibly trite phrase--a funny uncle.  Also he tended to use more poems written by men (eighteen) than women (seven).  Overall, the selection was not balanced, and I’m wondering how balanced are his conclusions. 

As if in response to my question, he includes a chapter “Moral Inquiry” which claims that “a poem or a piece of fiction is, among other things, an instrument of moral inquiry.”  He goes into matter of taste, aesthetic judgment, the context of the times, and concludes that in poetry, nothing is off limits and “to be disturbed is as valuable as an aesthetic experience as to be pleased.” 

But, is it valuable to be disturbed in the way that pornography disturbs? This too has often been described or dismissed an aesthetic choice. It’s so much more complicated; it exploits or distorts love, women, children, relationship and seems to primarily render those in images of power and control. People try to protect their children from it.  Pornography arouses sexual feelings; it is not valuable for community.  I’m not saying that the few poems he uses for examination are pornographic, but that he  uses sexual images. He raises a question, and I raise a question as well. Is it appropriate? Is it useful? 

In other respects, I was satisfied with his ideas in this book and the other work he selected for analysis: WB Yeats, Yannis Ritsos, Walt Whitman, Zbigniew Herbert, Louise Glück, Jane Kenyon. Many of the poets included I was familiar with; a few I was not and welcomed the opportunity to consider their work. 

The book comes to a crescendo with the last chapter “The Nature of Metaphor,” an ambitious synthesis of what’s known about the development of language, the historical role of the poet, and the use of metaphor.  Unfortunately, this chapter also traces the rise of the patriarchy.  Leonard Schlain, in his book The Alphabet and The Goddess, did note that the rise of patriarchy coincides with the development of written word.  Written language made thinking more linear. The only woman mentioned in the chapter on Metaphor was that the courts often paid to poets salaries in eons past, possibly either in cattle or a slave-woman.  When one runs into this habit that some men have of not apprehending history, it's frustrating. He assumes the poets were all men. Has Dobyns heard of Sappho?  

So in summary, if you want to read a great book, read his other book: Best Words, Best Order.  If you love poetry like I do, and if you don't mind spending a day reading a middling book which both bores and provokes, read this one. 

_____

Finnish Women Poets

Because my grandparents immigrated from Finland, and the language of Finnish was lost in me, I often wondered about the poets and writers of that country.  Thinking perhaps that their work was also part of my literary heritage, I searched for their work and found that yes, there was a common root.  This essay traces the history of Edith Irene Södergran, Kirsti Simonsuuri, and Marja-Liisa Vartio.

Blind Pig: Distilling the Language

Lorine Niedecker called making poems "condensery."  It's true; poems must be distilled.  The language is compressed, and poets use line breaks and enjambment in order to create ambiguity and add meaning.  My mother was born right before Prohibition.  Many people built their own stills, called Blind Pigs, and distilled their own liquor. It was illegal, and the results uneven, but it happened.  The image of a still comes to mind when I think about the process of turning language into poems. One must take lessons in compression.

Dancing with the Past

Wonderful poets draw from their own personal history as well as their community or nation's history: Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Wislawa Szymborska, Yannis Ritsos, Rita Dove, Natasha Trethewey, Li-Young Lee, Joy Harjo. 

All writers have these wells of experience.  For many writers who attend writing workshops, the question emerges about how to develop raw material -- a writing exercise, journal entry, or a memory -- into an art.  How do you take a memory and turn it into a poem or a story?

Things, people, places are the basic building blocks of all writing. These quickly focus the writer; a story emerges; the subject arrives. As a teacher, I ask students who are starting a new piece of writing to start from a person, place or thing.

Develop Your Sources

Where do you get material?  Each person, no matter what, has rich sources in the surroundings: the places, people and things. I encourage poets to spend time developing their sources by researching personal history, the history of the place you grew up and live, and the connected events and people. The web offers some useful (and free) tools like Scoop It or Storify. These allow you to collect your links, youtube videos, images, and articles in one place. Here is the collection of materials I've found for my new manuscript. Some of the material directly inspires creative work. I have written poems based on photographs or letters. I've used techniques like persona poems, lists, prayers, songs, stories with this material. It provides me with background and understanding for the work.

http://www.scoop.it/t/vermilion-trail

This serves as a map to places and people. I also use other more personal sources, letters and photographs in the family archive, but this widens my material and enriches the personal stories.

Make your own map and develop your own historical archive. It will reward you with images.

Learn to Use Figurative Language

Work with Images

The Discovery of Poetry by Frances Mayes can be a valuable text for poets.  I’ve gathered some insights from this excellent resource and present them here:

The painter Degas said he had many ideas for poems but couldn’t manage to say what he wanted. His friend, Mallarme, replied, “My dear Degas, one does not make poetry with ideas but with words.”  

There are two kinds of writing: literal and figurative. A literal image remakes something in words; it works as a photograph. A figurative image (also called a trope) will:

• expand the sensory perception beyond the literal meaning

• give pleasure or surprise to the imagination

• impart vigor by the inclusion of another active sensory detail

• intensify the deeper intention in the poem by adding the new dimension of the figurative image

Examples:  
Simile - a comparison that uses the word as or like

Silken Tent
by Robert Frost

She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when the sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To everything on earth the compass round,
And only by one's going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.

Metaphor -  “this is that” -- it transfers the meaning of one thing to another thing

754/   My Life had stood -- a Loaded Gun --
Emily Dickinson

My Life had stood -- a Loaded Gun --
In Corners -- till a Day
The Owner passed -- identified --
And carried Me away --

And now We roam in Sovereign Woods --
And now We hunt the Doe --
And every time I speak for Him --
The Mountains straight reply --

And do I smile, such cordial light
Upon the Valley glow --
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let its pleasure through --

And when at Night -- Our good Day done --
I guard My Master's Head --
'Tis better than the Eider-Duck's
Deep Pillow -- to have shared --

To foe of His -- I'm deadly foe --
None stir the second time --
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye --
Or an emphatic Thumb --

Though I than He -- may longer live
He longer must -- than I --
For I have but the power to kill,
Without -- the power to die --

Besides simile and metaphor, a poet can employ other tropes or techniques:  

Synesthesia : one sense expressed in the terms of another

A crinkled paper makes a brilliant sound (Wallace Stevens)
And the Sabbath rang slowly/ In the pebbles of the holy streams (Dylan Thomas)
I stayed overnight at a motel by the E3./In my room a smell I'd felt before (Tomas Tranströmer)
Use of associations

• Metonymy: an identifying emblem is substituted for the whole name, ex: a red, for communist; old salt, for sailor;

           Her voice is full of money.  (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

• Synecdoche:  a piece of part of the whole represents the whole (keeps to itself for the representing image) ex: redneck

Personification- gives human qualities to a thing or to something not human

Figurative language greatly enhances the power of a poem.  

Source:

Mayes, Frances. The Discovery of Poetry: A Field Guide to Reading and Writing Poetry. c2001. Harcourt Books. Florida.

Buy this book at your local bookstore or from Amazon.com -- http://amzn.to/UGYkZ5

In Poetry: Migrations Reading at the MAC Gallery in Grand Rapids

In Poetry

Sheila Packa

to write is an act of courage

to overcome

doubt, teasing, distraction

to claim solitude

to be awake

and give your body to

both the past and the present

to see, to hear, to touch

to taste, to smell

to write is to become empty

cross the threshold

of the simultaneous

giving birth and dying

to write is to know the imperfect

as beautiful

to find yourself

when all else is lost

to trust

amid a sea of noise

your own voice

unlike any other

and know that is a gift

copyright 2012

Poems that Connect

The writer Richard Rodriguez says, “The drama of the essay is the way the public life intersects with my personal and private life. It's in that intersection that I find the energy of the essay.”  This applies to poetry as well.  

Some poets write poems that are isolated, solipsistic.  It's true there is a way to write so personally that it becomes universal. I search for the crossings between public and private, between history and one life, between many and one.   I search for the edge, the shoreline, the stones. Footsteps have been washed away by waves and wind, but sometimes, in a spot protected from the elements, one appears. I measure it with my own foot.  I fit it into my own steps and inside walks the ghost. 

All of us walk in many worlds, the world of the past, the worlds of others, and the world of our own imagining.  There is the energy of the poem.  The path is difficult to find, sometimes it is broad and other times precipitous.   We climb to the place where we can gaze the greatest distance.