balanced on the edge

The frozen socks have been a big hit with Red and Duffy. They chew on the knotted socks until the socks thaw, and then they play tug-of-war with them.

This morning they ran in circles through the kitchen, living room, and dining room, and now they’ve gone to their separate corners to chew on fresh, frozen socks.

With the house now quiet and the world calm, I’ll return to reading Eliot’s 1920 Poems. Randy Malamud’s critical introduction to The Wasteland and Other Poems has been big help in my understanding of the collection. There are so many seemingly random allusions that I was scratching my head in bewilderment.

I’m thinking of writing my research paper about this question: does the anti-semitism in Eliot’s poems contradict his application of Buddhist philosophy?

What would Red and Duffy say? They’d probably tell me to stop running in circles, chew on a frozen sock, and then take a nap.

My office looks out onto rat’s alley. Yes, I’m alluding to The Waste Land, but there really are rats down there. They must like the vat of discarded fast-food grease next to the parking deck.

But there’s a view, with natural light. And the air conditioning works. A huge improvement on last year’s basement office.

I’ll be honest, I’m not much interested in literary theory. When I read a poem I look up words I don’t understand or references that I’ve never heard of, but in general I prefer to figure out the gist on my own. That’s what’s fun about reading, isn’t it?

I offer that statement as an apology for my musings about poems, because probably all of it has been said much better by someone else. So you could say I’m writing these musings for myself, or for some future reader who comes along, surfing the web the way some people still troll through microfiche.

The Epigraph

I took a course on modern British poetry many years ago, and I’ve read T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” several times over the decades, but I never bothered to look up the Italian epigraph until now, and I guess I should have, because it does inform the poem. Or it could be that I forgot the meaning after so many years.

William Blake: "Dante's Inferno, Whirlwind of Lovers."

The epigraph comes from a section of Dante’s Inferno, and is the speech of a man who apparently committed some heinous misdeeds, because he’s consigned to one of the lower circles of hell.  Roughly, the stanza says the man would not tell the story of his sins if he thought the listener could return to the world to relate the man’s crimes, but since he has never heard of anyone escaping from the fiery pit, he will go ahead and spill the beans, or wag his flaming tongue. He has been so terrible that he has lost his human form, and has become only a tongue of fire.

The Poem

When J. Alfred invites the reader to go on a walk with him through the city streets, he believes we are with him in hell, never to return.  If he tells us what’s really on his mind, it’s because he thinks we’re stuck in this place with him.

Prufrock admits he has tried to create a persona to win favors from the world. He admits he’s getting old, and reveals his paltry efforts to conceal his aging. He shows us his hurt when a woman he has either seduced, or tried to seduce, tells him, “That is not what I meant at all./That is not it, at all.”

Yet he thinks he really does have something to say. He wants to come back from the dead like Lazarus to tell everyone about the “mermaids singing, each to each.” But he doubts himself. He doesn’t think he’s a prophet. He doubts the mermaids will sing to him.

But what he has to say is that at night we dream we are mermaids riding the waves out to sea, and it’s only when we wake up that we drown.

Prufrock is  like the rest of us ridiculous humans, caught up in our gains and losses, always thinking we have time to make our “visions and revisions/Before the taking of toast and tea.”

Lately I’ve been reading about Buddhism and the need to follow the Dharma right now. We might die at any moment. It could be in an hour, when we drive to the market, or later on, while walking the dog. And so the need to die with a peaceful mind is of the greatest importance. Catholics might say something about needing to be in a state of grace during the moment of death.

Prufrock obsesses about our having time for all the things we haven’t done yet. But really there is no time left for that. He knows his time is up, yet he clings to the idea of himself: parting his hair down the back, rolling his pants legs up, walking the beach in white flannel, all the images of himself as a lady’s man or an urbane gentleman amid the sordid yellow smoke of the city.

The collection Prufrock (1917) is dedicated to Eliot’s friend Jean Verdenal who, according to the inscription, died at the age of 26 during WWI at Dardanelles. Maybe this character of Prufrock is a satire of Eliot himself and others. Through revealing the character’s weaknesses he exposes our frivolities and our vanities, which at our death amount to nothing.

My favorite lines from the poem are these:

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:

and

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

Those lines make me believe Prufrock might not be a bad sort at all. Because he has told us about the mermaids, after all. If he’s in hell, maybe he’ll have a chance to climb out of the pit.

Off I 75 in North Georgia

The following passage continues where I left off in the first post about contemporary poetry.

Contemporary poetry, and contemporary art in general, reveals the Zeitgeist of the 21st century–we seem to live in a moment in which we are reevaluating the myths that motivate us; as a culture we question the roles language, poetry (or art), science, and religion play in our lives. This reconsideration of reality has produced eclectic collections from both younger and older poets.

Each of the books we discussed this semester in our contemporary poetry course, in varying degrees, serves as a barometer of our country’s mood as perceived through the feelings and thoughts of the individual poet, although the psychological and emotional landscapes differ in their representation.

I will identify some essential questions that underlie or motivate three of the individual projects, examining poems from It Is Daylight by Arda Collins, Matthew Dickman’s All-American Poem, and Claudia Emerson’s Late Wife. My hope is that these sample poems will serve as emblems for the poets’ overarching motivations to write, as well as illustrate the wide spectrum of aesthetics in contemporary American poetry.

Among the books we studied, Arda Colin’s It Is Daylight represents the collection least inclined toward the Romantic ideal of union with nature. Luis Glück, who chose Collins’s collection for the Yale Younger Poet’s Prize, characterizes Collin’s poetry as “savage, desolate, brutally ironic” (vii).

Glück later states that “[a]t the heart of the poems is shame, which results not from something the poet has done, but rather from being” (vii). Even though there is an overt depiction of shame in Collins‘ collection, I would say the heart of her poems also contains a desire to understand what being alive means to a neurotic speaker (whom we shouldn’t confuse with the author). (more…)

Cloudland Canyon, my one destination for spring break

Now  that we’re on spring break, ten beautiful days, I have some spare time to update this blog. Don’t imagine me living it up in Cancún, however. I’ll be at home, catching up on laundry and writing a paper. I never was one of those Daytona Beach types, anyway. When I was studying Spanish in Madrid, I spent a whole week reading La Regenta while my compadres went to Egypt. Ugh.

Since a few people have wondered what books we’re reading in the MFA program I attend, I’m providing a list from one of my current courses. This semester I’m taking Contemporary American Poetry; all the books we’re looking at have been published within the last ten years. In fact, most of them are from within the last three years. Each student in the class had the opportunity to choose a collection to present –mine was Slamming Open the Door, by Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno.

I want to add a book that we aren’t studying, but one I’ve read this semester and that I highly recommend.  One of the poets in the class, Emily Elizabeth  Schulten, has a first book that has just launched: Rest in Black Haw.  I’ve heard her read twice in Atlanta-the poems are authentic, intimate, and well-crafted. They’ll floor you with their attention to the natural world and their implications of human connections. Stay tuned for a review in the next few weeks. In the meantime, you can enjoy this amazing poem, “Labor Day Weekend,” featured on Verse Daily.

Bonanno, Kathleen Sheeder. Slamming Open the Door

Collins, Arda. It’s Daylight

Dickman, Matthew.  All American Poem

Digges, Deborah. Trapeze

Emerson, Claudia.  Late Wife

Hass, Robert. Time and Materials

Kaminsky, Ilya. Dancing in Odessa

Kane, Paul. Work Life

Mitcham, Judson. A Little Salvation

Range, Melissa. Horse and Rider

My dreams have been highly charged with symbolic images lately, more than likely due to my reading of Man and His Symbols, by Jung et al. I’ve scribbled a few haphazard images down in my journal, but there’s been little free time to think about what the dreams might mean. Instead, I’ve been reading poetry, attending readings, grading papers, planning for classes, cooking a few dinners here and there, and trying to revise a few poems.

I qualify any interpretations of dreams with a big question mark, because it takes a long time to see the patterns in dream symbols. What does it mean if I see a horse lying on its side in a ditch? The only way to know is to take a wait and see attitude.

I let the image simmer for a while, and if it stays with me, I’ll free-write about it. I’ve come up with some rollicking prose poems that way. They’re self-indulgent, but very fun to write. My current project is about miniature foxes.

One of my favorite fiction writers is Kelly Link. She writes about zombies, mysterious rabbits, and homunculi, among other topics. Her stories lend themselves to anyone who enjoys dream imagery, postmodern fantasy, or magic. You can download portions of Magic for Beginners from her website.

The professor of my contemporary poetry course has given us each a chance to present a book published within the last ten years. My presentation was over Slamming Open the Door, (Alice James Books, 2009) by Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno. We discussed the book mostly in terms of its overall effect as a project. The topic is every parent’s worst nightmare–the death of a child. Ms. Bonanno’s daughter Leidy was murdered by an ex-boyfriend, and the book chronicles some of the moments of the family’s trauma, from the night she and her husband find out what happened to their daughter, to the trial, and the memorial service.

It’s a gut-wrenching book that is successful as a collection because it stays very honest–the speaker allows the reader a glimpse into her experiences, without decoration or maudlin metaphors. The poems read as though they were written in the moment, yet they are grounded in concrete images. The pacing and sequencing of the poems are also effective. There are flashbacks to when Leidy was adopted, as well as to her graduation party, where the killer  first appears.

Slamming Open the Door does not come out of an academic tradition of poetry, even though the author is a contributing editor of The American Poetry Review. Although American literature includes countless examples of poems about grief, most of the poems in our literary canon are either formal, or pay great detail to the flow of the language.

To me, writing  highly stylized poems would not accurately portray the raw grief of a mother whose daughter has been strangled to death. On the other hand, staying true to the bestial nature of raw grief requires a certain measure of control that Ms. Bonanno maintains throughout the work. These are poems that had to be written, as the speaker explains in the first poem of the book, “When Death Barged In.” If the book were mine, I imagine I’d have to force each line to appear on the page, while at the same time feeling the utter necessity to write them down.

The intended audience seems to be anyone who has suffered an immense loss, whether it be the death of a child, or a spiritual loss of some kind. Anyone who has lived through tragedy would  sense that for a brief moment in time, the speaker was able to relieve herself of her enormous grief by sharing it with others. I hope the writing was therapeutic for Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno. Her family, and Leidy, are in my thoughts and prayers.

I first heard about Ms. Bonanno’s collection while listening to Terry Gross’s interview with her on NPR. I highly recommend listening to the interview–Ms. Bonanno reads several of the poems with feeling and inflection. Her sorrow and rage come across in the reading, as does her self-effacing sense of humor.

In his New York Times review of Slamming Open the Door,  poet David Kirby brings up the concept of subjects for art that some have considered taboo, such as the Holocaust, but  he then defends Ms. Bonanno’s writing by saying that the raw nature of the poems redeem them from any criticism that she might be exploiting her tragedy to make art.  One of my classmates mentioned that art is often born from an apocalypse, as Elie Wiesel proved with his memoir, Night. Our professor also cited the poetry of Paul Celan as an example of poetry that has come out of the Holocaust.

One of the reasons I chose Slamming Open the Door is because I’m searching for a way to write about my own life in the form of poetry. I ask myself, how does one write about an event without turning it into a plea for pity or a tract against others? How do we make sense of past events without, in my case anyway, unduly exonerating ourselves? Ms. Bonanno didn’t allow herself to escape uncriticized in her poetry memoir. She put herself under the spiritual microscope as much as she did her daughter’s killer.

Poet Andrew Hudgins,* in his essay, “The Autobiographer’s Lies,”  writes about using one’s own life as material for poetry. He discusses the idea of how looking at the events in our lives distances us from the story and gives us the ability to look at ourselves as characters in a play or a novel.

In her interview with Terry Gross, when discussing her poem “How to Find Out,” Ms. Bonanno states that she felt she was acting out a role she had been given by fate: “Mother of the murdered daughter. So in effect, I use – I speak directly to the reader in second person in the poem “How to Find Out” as if now that I’ve gone through this, I’m capable of teaching the next actor in the play.”

Of course, in actuality there’s nothing really that could prepare us for this type of monstrous grief. The directions Ms. Bonanno gives us are almost ironic, because the subtext is that there is no rehearsal for how we will react to the murder of a child. No cop dramas on TV, no courtroom scenes, not even honest poetry can ever completely prepare us for a scene we never want to be in.

The most we can do is read the poems and try to put ourselves in the speaker’s place. Because on a spiritual level, what happens to one of us happens to us all. As Annie Dillard has said, we are all swimming together in the same tide of time. For this reason, I’m very glad Ms. Bonanno has had the courage to write about her experiences. We who read the book will put on our sack cloth and cover our faces with ash along with the speaker, on a spiritual level.

Slamming Open the Door is a mother’s wail to the universe. That huge loss we know is coming, the day our child  leaves home to strike out on her own, descended upon this mother like a monster, and part of her life’s journey now is to slay the beast that this loss has created. The book has become the speaker’s rite of passage,  a boat to transport her to the side of time where she can get up in the morning and go to work with at least a glimmer of hope that the grief will someday subside.

Because of the brutal honesty of this book, the sequencing, the simplicity of the language, and the many concrete images, Slamming Open the Door is a highly convincing, successful collection.

* Thanks to Dana Guthrie Martin for sharing this essay with me on her thought-provoking blog, My Gorgeous Somewhere.

We’re just finishing Pathways to Bliss in my poetry course, and then we’re going to read the first two essays from Man and His Symbols, a collection of essays edited by Carl Jung for the everyday person. I’m ready to take on Jung after Campbell’s excellent recap  of modern psychology in Pathways to Bliss, from Freud to Adler, and from Jung to Maslow.

In Jung’s introduction he says the basic function of dreams is to restore psychic balance in our lives. We tend to evade the truth in our waking life, and dreams try to open us up to modes of behavior we might not be ready to admit to ourselves. Dreams can also reveal our hidden potentials to us. As an example of the former, Jung says,

“It explains why people who have unrealistic ideas or too high an opinion of themselves, or who make grandiose plans out of proportion to their real capacities, have dreams of flying or falling.”

I love to have flying dreams. Even the ones where I just bounce around. When I wake up I feel exhilarated, ready to take on any challenge, especially artistic challenges. But after reading this passage, I began doubt myself again. I started wondering if I’m like some of the poor schmucks on American Idol, self-delusional with little chance of a public reception of my work. I don’t want to be someone who says, Well, the world just isn’t ready for me yet.

On the other hand, I also ask myself if I would continue to write poetry and short stories if no one else read them. I think I would. I would be my own reader, which is basically my current situation anyway. And since I prefer to continue writing no matter matter what, I interpret my flying dreams as meaning I need to embrace my hidden potential that I didn’t have the confidence to see until I flew.

This past fall I took a graduate course covering Robert Frost, the sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wallace Stevens, and Richard Wilbur, all American poets esteemed for their attention to poetic form. The professor gave us his in-depth analysis of the lives, the times, and the poems of these poets. Although my appreciation for Stevens has changed from awe and confusion to a quiet respect, there are areas concerning his life and his work that still make me pause.

Recently I posted a painting of Susanna and the Elders by Thomas Hart Benton, because it depicts a scene in a Stevens poem we read: “Peter Quince at the Clavier.” Peter Quince is a character from A Midsummer Night’s Dream–he was one of the players who served as comic relief. In this poem, Quince is the speaker. Using Quince’s name was Stevens’ way of making a joke, because Quince could never have expressed himself as eloquently as the speaker does in the poem.

The poem uses the story of Susanna and the Elders as a rhetorical situation for the speaker. Quince plays the piano (the clavier) because of the desire he feels for his beloved.

The basic argument of the poem is that poetry is feeling. If I feel desire, I will make music. My art (or poem, song…) will convey my feelings to the viewer or the listener. The reader of the poem will have similar thoughts to my own– the mere thinking of  “your blue-shadowed silk” becomes art (or music, poetry, etc…). Thought and feeling equals art when it is reproduced for another to perceive.

But the story of Susanna complicates the argument of “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” because the speaker compares his desire for “the blue-shadowed silk” of his beloved to the desire the elders felt for Susanna. And the poem becomes even more byzantine because Quince is playing the clavier. The story of Susanna serves as a backdrop to a concert.

My blogging friend, poet and writer Julie Buffaloe-Yoder, summarized the story of Susanna in my last post on this poem, and she brought up a pertinent point:

[The elders] cornered Susanna in the garden and told her they would have her put to death if she did not have sex with them. If she said no, they told her they would publicly announce that she had been having sex with a young man. The penalty would be death.

She remained loyal to God, and would not have sex with the elders, regardless of the threat of death. God saved her for her faithfulness. The elders were put to death for their false witness. It was unusual in her time and culture for a woman to be spared death when accused by elders.

The elders were blackmailers, voyeurs, horrible in every way. The story is part of the Apocrypha, portions of the Old Testament that were excised from the Protestant Bible. Susanna and the Elders comes from Book 13 of Daniel.

I’m still confused why Stevens used the Susanna and the Elders story to depict merely lust. In the Old Testament, Daniel saved Susanna from the elders by proving their false testimony. And Susanna would not relent to the elders’ lust for her. Maybe Stevens uses the story as a symbol for lust, and I’m over-thinking it. The symbol could be just one more Modernist affectation, to be considered in an abstract light.

What do you think? Was it a good story to invoke the feeling of lust? I think many women will balk at Stevens’ poem, in spite of its perfection of form.

Saturday evening New South, the GSU literary journal, hosted a reading at the Highland Inn Ballroom in Atlanta. James May, editor-in-chief of New South, invited me to read, along with fiction writer Jody Brooks and poet Jessica Hand. Jessica is completing her MFA at Georgia State, and Jody is a lecturer at GSU in the creative writing program. Both writers have received many awards for their work.

Here is a sample of Jessica Hand’s poetry, from Limp Wrist, titled “Ode to My Pentecostal Right Arm.” She is a very animated, passionate reader who knows not only how to write, but how to deliver. She read a few poems about the Iraq War, and others about being gay and how she and her wife react to the world. She also read some poems about a fictitious character named Jane. Very imaginative work.

Here is one of the short stories Jody Brooks read, from the e-zine Hot Metal Bridge, titled “The Fire Extinguisher Grenades.” This story reflects her previous profession as an architect. Her prose is elegant, understated, and full of concrete imagery that becomes symbolic as the narration progresses. I’m looking forward to reading a whole collection by Brooks.

I read two new poems that I’ve worked on this semester at GSU in the poetry workshop I’m taking, as well as two older poems.  I also read a short story that was recently up at Scapegoat called “Foreclosure” and a prose poem published on riverbabble titled “Dusk.”

The venue was nice–a stage next to a bar, with couches and tables set up in front. I had a glass of wine before I read, which helped with the stage fright. It was also a comfort to have both my sons there, and my husband. After I read I asked them if I sucked, and they assured me I didn’t. My youngest, who’s in a band and has performed many times in public, said, “we all (the band members) used to get depressed for a few days after a performance, wishing we had done better, but we finally realized that you have to just enjoy the moment, and be grateful for the chance to be up there performing.” He’s an old soul, that boy.

My oldest son told me my best poems are the ones with surreal imagery. He didn’t like the short story as much. I think I agree with him. I read a new piece that’s sort of a hybrid called “Locker Room Privacy,” written in third-person limited point of view from the perspective of  an inanimate object. I don’t think it quite worked, and I’m not sure what to do with it, besides let it sit on my computer to collect cyber dust.

It was also very nice to see some of the other writers from the poetry workshop. One of them brought her adorable one-year-old daughter, who toddled across the room like a character from a video game, full throttle. She approached the stage just as I was about to read my Frida Khalo poem, and for some weird reason my brain went into Spanish, and I said something to her like “Hola, chiquita….” It must have been nerves. Her mother ran up to the stage and scooped her baby up.

One of the reasons I wanted to go to GSU was to be a part of a writing community. I’m very grateful to poet Jim May for inviting me to read, especially because I’m so new. Jim told the audience, “when we read in a workshop we come with the idea that our work is broken and needs to be fixed. We started these readings as a chance to just enjoy the words.”