The only mistake I have ever made--and it is one that I have repeated over and over throughout my life--is not having confidence in what I suspect to be true. "Not having the courage of one's convictions" is too strong an expression of this failing, however. My suspicions rarely if ever formally solidify into convictions. Instead, my timidity or thoughtfulness or low self esteem (or whatever) prevents me from announcing/publishing my dimly sensed inner thoughts about something. Rather, I more easily adopt the ideas of others about things, because the holders of those contrary opinions are, in my view, more authoritative, more learned, and generally smarter than I. As a result, I suffer from a peculiar brand of intellectual depravity. For example, other than Yeats and Auden, I never cared much for modernist poetry. Yet, when I was an undergraduate at Columbia in the late seventies, modernist poetry was central to what was taught as poetry. So, I pretended to like Pound and Eliot more than I did. I suppose this is a common enough failing of undergraduates (at least in my day.) Yet isn't it the worst of sins? Better to cling stubbornly and foolishly to a genuinely held even if generally discredited belief. Not trusting one's inner voice leads over and over again into a peculiar brand of disappointment and confusion. It is disappointment tripled: first, one is disappointed in what turns out not to be true; second, one is disappointed in one's elected arbiters elegantiae; and, third, one is disappointed in oneself for having been duped. Attentiveness to one's own opinion leads not only to the dialectical testing of closely held assumptions and perhaps a habit of prudent investigation into those assumptions, but also to a journey of discovery about oneself. It is better to have loved and lost...
Of course, the above is a gross over-simplification. Nothing is more tedious or doomed than someone who only listens to his inner voice, who is tone deaf to the criticisms or insights of others. Yet in the crucible of one's innermost thoughts, there is an alchemy.
Tuesday, December 25, 2012
Friday, November 30, 2012
Things I Don't Like in Poetry
Not a complete list:
A fancy word where a plain, powerful word would do
"Breathy" lines instead of lines informed by stress and letter sounds
Where the poem tells me what to think about the poem, i.e. where the idea of the poem is spelled out in abstract terms in the poem itself so that there's no mystery about what the poem is trying (or not trying) to say
Cliche wrapped in preciousness, any preciousness at all, in fact (often associated with breathiness)
Disingenuous ideas. Try this experiment: next time you read a poem, stop at each distinct thought, and ask yourself: does anyone really think that way? You will be amazed.
In fact, a lot of poems I read stand on either cliche wrapped in preciousness (take away the fancy language and what is really being said is nothing but the obvious) or disingenuous (truly unbelievable that anyone would seriously think that)
I am sure that I am guilty of all these things at one time or another. All the more reason to make a list.
A fancy word where a plain, powerful word would do
"Breathy" lines instead of lines informed by stress and letter sounds
Where the poem tells me what to think about the poem, i.e. where the idea of the poem is spelled out in abstract terms in the poem itself so that there's no mystery about what the poem is trying (or not trying) to say
Cliche wrapped in preciousness, any preciousness at all, in fact (often associated with breathiness)
Disingenuous ideas. Try this experiment: next time you read a poem, stop at each distinct thought, and ask yourself: does anyone really think that way? You will be amazed.
In fact, a lot of poems I read stand on either cliche wrapped in preciousness (take away the fancy language and what is really being said is nothing but the obvious) or disingenuous (truly unbelievable that anyone would seriously think that)
I am sure that I am guilty of all these things at one time or another. All the more reason to make a list.
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Why I Write
Let's be honest. Poetry is a hobby to me, an important hobby, but a hobby nonetheless. It's not putting food on the table and I have no illusions about my stature or talent, except perhaps for the illusion that I have no illusions. I'm good at it. I publish and can probably continue to publish. Beyond that, who knows? I'm probably not the worst poet in America, and certainly not the best (whatever that means). I am neither convinced of my own "genius" nor of my own "immortality".
The question then is why I write at all. Why one writes at all. I mean, why bother? If one is not convinced that one is contributing in an essential way to culture or humanity, what is one doing and why is one doing it? I have always written. I started writing in Third Grade and haven't stopped. That may be a complete answer, but still an evasion.
It may simply come down to a combination of laziness and stubbornness. Really. Writing, I think, is a kind of shortcut to life. It takes this complex impossible task, living, and reduces it to two-dimensions. That is, it provides substitute aesthetic satisfactions for the hard-won real satisfactions of life. I can only speak for myself, but I have no desire to "get ahead" in life. None. Writing is a way of getting ahead OF life without getting ahead IN life. An odd use of one's time, if you ask me. It is, in many ways, of course, self-contained. Its rewards, for me, nonetheless, are spiritual, in a very broad sense of that word. Writing is an exploratory experience which also allows me to confirm my basic ideas about who I am and what's important to me.
Don't get me wrong. I like clean sheets and hot meals and paid bills. I have had periods in my life when I didn't have any of those things and I don't romanticize that insecurity. I'm just saying that, if that is all there is or if getting more of those things than someone else is all there is, I'm not extremely motivated to get out of bed. I am lazy and unambitious in that way. I don't care so much. Perhaps, for this reason, I will never be a "successful" writer.
I like the pretend world better. The world of music and words and ideas. The world of synthesizing all those things into something I call a poem.
The stubbornness? Persisting despite constant discouragement, disappointment and doubt. Somehow, at an early age, I came to believe that writing is important, and despite the evidence of reality, I won't let go of that ideal. Pure stubbornness and laziness.
The question then is why I write at all. Why one writes at all. I mean, why bother? If one is not convinced that one is contributing in an essential way to culture or humanity, what is one doing and why is one doing it? I have always written. I started writing in Third Grade and haven't stopped. That may be a complete answer, but still an evasion.
It may simply come down to a combination of laziness and stubbornness. Really. Writing, I think, is a kind of shortcut to life. It takes this complex impossible task, living, and reduces it to two-dimensions. That is, it provides substitute aesthetic satisfactions for the hard-won real satisfactions of life. I can only speak for myself, but I have no desire to "get ahead" in life. None. Writing is a way of getting ahead OF life without getting ahead IN life. An odd use of one's time, if you ask me. It is, in many ways, of course, self-contained. Its rewards, for me, nonetheless, are spiritual, in a very broad sense of that word. Writing is an exploratory experience which also allows me to confirm my basic ideas about who I am and what's important to me.
Don't get me wrong. I like clean sheets and hot meals and paid bills. I have had periods in my life when I didn't have any of those things and I don't romanticize that insecurity. I'm just saying that, if that is all there is or if getting more of those things than someone else is all there is, I'm not extremely motivated to get out of bed. I am lazy and unambitious in that way. I don't care so much. Perhaps, for this reason, I will never be a "successful" writer.
I like the pretend world better. The world of music and words and ideas. The world of synthesizing all those things into something I call a poem.
The stubbornness? Persisting despite constant discouragement, disappointment and doubt. Somehow, at an early age, I came to believe that writing is important, and despite the evidence of reality, I won't let go of that ideal. Pure stubbornness and laziness.
Sunday, September 16, 2012
An Amateur at Art
I understand, I think, why my manuscript is not getting any traction with potential publishers, despite the fact that a lot of the poems in it have been published in very good literary magazines. For those of you who don't know, most books of poems are published through contests, where the entry fee pays for the publication (and perhaps partly for the distribution) of the book. So, I have been entering my manuscript in contests. I am fortunate that we have the financial resources to pay the fee and absorb the other costs. The manuscript contains about 65 poems and about 25 of them have been published in journals. So far, the manuscript has been summarily dismissed, never making it past the first cut, often being returned even before the deadline for submissions has closed.
The explanation for this distaste is outside of my knowledge, of course. I have no real idea of who is doing the thinking and what he or she is thinking when they take a look at my work and say, "ugh," or "nah". A possible explanation did occur to me, however, and I think it is worth kicking around a bit. I start with an analogy. I have an acquaintance. We haven't seen each other for years. She is extremely bright, a Harvard grad, and, more importantly, an extremely skilled painter. She did not go to art school, but she has spent her life painting. Her paintings are beautiful and skilled. They are representational. She doesn't belong to a school of painting, but, if I had to give her work a name, I would call it post-post-impressionist. If you just glanced at them, you would think that they are not unlike a lot of work that one might see at a craft fair or local art show. In fact, her work far surpasses the stuff where one would instinctively place it, but there it is. That's where she shows. She is not part of the New York or any other art scene. She is an "amateur". She paints beautiful, careful, representational, post-post-impressionist paintings. They are just extremely good.
That's the problem. Now, I don't claim that my work, especially my most recent work, which is what I am really talking about, is on par with this painter's work. Nonetheless, there is something in the analogy. My new work has departed, intentionally, from the kind of post-New York School, post-modern, surrealism, that used to be my trade, and has been making attempts to use very plain, subtly tuned, language, in what often appears to be a confessional mode, i.e. based on personal experience, in a narrative style. Not always, but there's a lot of that. Certainly, at first glance, someone might revolt from the easy rhythms, the use of internal and end rhyme, the first person singular, and dismiss the work as the work of an amateur. I do not, as far as I know, belong to a school. Although, I have an MFA from a good program, it is in fiction, not poetry. Although I read lots and lots of contemporary work in journals and anthologies, more often than not, I am appalled at the lack of musicality, the pretentiousness, and most importantly, the sophomoric thought that passes for profundity. I can see why, in contrast with this work, I seem like an amateur.
In my own defense, I want to say just a few words. One, I am an amateur, I suppose. And gladly. I am outside academia, which, I think, has given me the freedom to write in a way which does not conform to current expectations or taste. Two, given that freedom, I have decided not to hide behind my education and reading, but to try to create substantial work that is not meant to impress anyone, but to get done, what I conceive admittedly, is the work of a poem, that is, carry a "thought" that can only be expressed through the fusion of poetic art (music, diction) with imagination (metaphor, rhetoric). So, what my poems do is meant to look straightforward: I often use form, and I try mightily to let the poem do the work, not me. In other words, I try not to beat the reader over the head with what I call the argumentum of the poem, try not to beat the reader over the head with my erudition or my cleverness, but make something very hard look very easy. I don't want to be part of a movement or a school. I want to write poetry. In fact, I can't help but write poetry. I think there's a lot more than meets the eye in my poems, but easy dismissal may be the price I pay for the path I have chosen. If, at first glance, my work looks like the work of an amateur, I understand.
The explanation for this distaste is outside of my knowledge, of course. I have no real idea of who is doing the thinking and what he or she is thinking when they take a look at my work and say, "ugh," or "nah". A possible explanation did occur to me, however, and I think it is worth kicking around a bit. I start with an analogy. I have an acquaintance. We haven't seen each other for years. She is extremely bright, a Harvard grad, and, more importantly, an extremely skilled painter. She did not go to art school, but she has spent her life painting. Her paintings are beautiful and skilled. They are representational. She doesn't belong to a school of painting, but, if I had to give her work a name, I would call it post-post-impressionist. If you just glanced at them, you would think that they are not unlike a lot of work that one might see at a craft fair or local art show. In fact, her work far surpasses the stuff where one would instinctively place it, but there it is. That's where she shows. She is not part of the New York or any other art scene. She is an "amateur". She paints beautiful, careful, representational, post-post-impressionist paintings. They are just extremely good.
That's the problem. Now, I don't claim that my work, especially my most recent work, which is what I am really talking about, is on par with this painter's work. Nonetheless, there is something in the analogy. My new work has departed, intentionally, from the kind of post-New York School, post-modern, surrealism, that used to be my trade, and has been making attempts to use very plain, subtly tuned, language, in what often appears to be a confessional mode, i.e. based on personal experience, in a narrative style. Not always, but there's a lot of that. Certainly, at first glance, someone might revolt from the easy rhythms, the use of internal and end rhyme, the first person singular, and dismiss the work as the work of an amateur. I do not, as far as I know, belong to a school. Although, I have an MFA from a good program, it is in fiction, not poetry. Although I read lots and lots of contemporary work in journals and anthologies, more often than not, I am appalled at the lack of musicality, the pretentiousness, and most importantly, the sophomoric thought that passes for profundity. I can see why, in contrast with this work, I seem like an amateur.
In my own defense, I want to say just a few words. One, I am an amateur, I suppose. And gladly. I am outside academia, which, I think, has given me the freedom to write in a way which does not conform to current expectations or taste. Two, given that freedom, I have decided not to hide behind my education and reading, but to try to create substantial work that is not meant to impress anyone, but to get done, what I conceive admittedly, is the work of a poem, that is, carry a "thought" that can only be expressed through the fusion of poetic art (music, diction) with imagination (metaphor, rhetoric). So, what my poems do is meant to look straightforward: I often use form, and I try mightily to let the poem do the work, not me. In other words, I try not to beat the reader over the head with what I call the argumentum of the poem, try not to beat the reader over the head with my erudition or my cleverness, but make something very hard look very easy. I don't want to be part of a movement or a school. I want to write poetry. In fact, I can't help but write poetry. I think there's a lot more than meets the eye in my poems, but easy dismissal may be the price I pay for the path I have chosen. If, at first glance, my work looks like the work of an amateur, I understand.
Saturday, August 18, 2012
An Email to a Poet
Jeff:
Thanks for sending the poem. I feel remiss that I never have anything to say, except gushing compliment, but perhaps if I explain the way I read other people's work, you'll understand. My first rule is I don't try to make it something it is not. I don't belong to a "school". In other words, whenever I read anything, I try as best as I can not to look for what's not there or what could be there. At the macro level, this discipline means that if someone gives me a poem or story about a dog, I don't say, you know, dogs are okay, but what if it was about a cat. Obviously, the temptation that requires resistance is more often centered on the argumentum of the poem, not the subject, but you get the idea. [I should hastily add that I have no quarrel at all with either the subject nor the argumentum of this poem, or any of your poems, that's not what I am saying. I am thinking more of other occasions, other writers, but even then, to be frank, I am extremely open-minded and am almost universally delightfully surprised by what other people write about and where that subject leads the poem. The poem you sent is no exception to that general experience. This poem does what, I think, poems do best. It takes a "simple" image drawn from regular life and fills it with beauty, music, love, and grace.]
Instead what I look at are the technical aspects of the poem. How does this poem set out to do what it wants to do? Is there anything out of place, a stylistic detour that jars? Is it ham-fisted or tinny? Does the thought leave the poem at any point to grab some easy substitute, like cliche or sententiousness, etc.? Those kinds of things. And Jeff, your poems never do any of those things. You are skilled and exact. To the point, in fact, where the skill and exactitude seem like a kind of easy going looseness (the hardest and best thing to do.)
This last rule is going to seem weird. I don't expect poems to be "perfect". You know, the Golden Bowl rule. Only an idiot would want to patch the cracks where humanity, humility and grace shine through. Think in terms of meter and rhyme. Nothing is more horrible than perfect iambic pentameter with inflexible masculine end rhymes. I strongly believe that the same is true for every other aspect of a poem.
So, when someone shows me a poem that is skilled, yet human, that comes from love and humility, that doesn't miss a step, yet still seems like a casual stroll, that embraces its own tentativeness and incompleteness, yet leads us to a place of wonder, all I can say is : It's great. Jeff, it's great. I love it.
Keith
Thanks for sending the poem. I feel remiss that I never have anything to say, except gushing compliment, but perhaps if I explain the way I read other people's work, you'll understand. My first rule is I don't try to make it something it is not. I don't belong to a "school". In other words, whenever I read anything, I try as best as I can not to look for what's not there or what could be there. At the macro level, this discipline means that if someone gives me a poem or story about a dog, I don't say, you know, dogs are okay, but what if it was about a cat. Obviously, the temptation that requires resistance is more often centered on the argumentum of the poem, not the subject, but you get the idea. [I should hastily add that I have no quarrel at all with either the subject nor the argumentum of this poem, or any of your poems, that's not what I am saying. I am thinking more of other occasions, other writers, but even then, to be frank, I am extremely open-minded and am almost universally delightfully surprised by what other people write about and where that subject leads the poem. The poem you sent is no exception to that general experience. This poem does what, I think, poems do best. It takes a "simple" image drawn from regular life and fills it with beauty, music, love, and grace.]
Instead what I look at are the technical aspects of the poem. How does this poem set out to do what it wants to do? Is there anything out of place, a stylistic detour that jars? Is it ham-fisted or tinny? Does the thought leave the poem at any point to grab some easy substitute, like cliche or sententiousness, etc.? Those kinds of things. And Jeff, your poems never do any of those things. You are skilled and exact. To the point, in fact, where the skill and exactitude seem like a kind of easy going looseness (the hardest and best thing to do.)
This last rule is going to seem weird. I don't expect poems to be "perfect". You know, the Golden Bowl rule. Only an idiot would want to patch the cracks where humanity, humility and grace shine through. Think in terms of meter and rhyme. Nothing is more horrible than perfect iambic pentameter with inflexible masculine end rhymes. I strongly believe that the same is true for every other aspect of a poem.
So, when someone shows me a poem that is skilled, yet human, that comes from love and humility, that doesn't miss a step, yet still seems like a casual stroll, that embraces its own tentativeness and incompleteness, yet leads us to a place of wonder, all I can say is : It's great. Jeff, it's great. I love it.
Keith
Friday, July 27, 2012
Vote Now
I used to only write poems like this one. Now, I hardly ever write poems of this ilk: allusive, abstract, difficult, whimsical. You know, New York School, y'all. They were my teachers, after all. Is this regression? I thought I'd leave it to a vote. Let me know if you approve or disapprove. Yea or nay. If the response if positive, I will not crawl about the room in despair. If negative, meh.
Machines Made of Meat
The origin of everything is nothing.
In some versions of reality,
You are reading this poem.
In others, you are still in bed.
One is led, therefore, into difficulties,
Except, of course, for Li Po.
That wily bastard is riding a surfboard,
Dangling on the lip of a wave,
Just as his cigarette dangles from his lip,
While he points at an empty space
In the cloudless sky as he sidles by,
Where the moon would want to be,
If it happened to be following along.
Everything is liable to decay.
If someone, traditionally called the observer,
Happened to be following along,
That person would be engaged
In a shameless act of poetry:
Did your friend,
Chang, dream
That he was a
butterfly, or did
The butterfly dream
that it was he?
Nobody knows what’s behind door number three.
Keith Dunlap
Thursday, July 26, 2012
You Don't know What You Don't Know
I feel as though writing poetry has been shanghai'd by people who can't write having their revenge against those who can, much in the same way politics has been taken over by people who can't think, having their revenge against people who can. (I don't really think that, but it makes a good polemic for what follows.) I think writing is intuitive, but it comes with a lot of practice and hopefully a good editor. I know I have written a lot of bad stuff and continue to write a lot of bad stuff, but I've done it so much that I can tell when I've hit my standard at least, so that I am prepared to turn it over to someone else's set of critical eye, because, and this last point is essential, there will always be things I cannot see, good and bad. The worst attribute for a writer is a kind of American Idol defensive righteousness about one's one work. One needs a thick skin, of course, and some detachment from the success or failure show, but there is nothing sadder and more obnoxious than the neophyte convinced of his own posterity. (I should know, having been that guy.) Nothing is harder and more uncertain than good writing.
Sunday, July 1, 2012
Simultaneous Submissions
I am now mostly submitting to magazines that do not accept simultaneous submissions. Why? Not why am I submitting to these magazines (they are generally higher echelon magazines,) but why don't they accept simultaneous submissions? I mean, really. What's the big deal? It is okay for writers to experience constant rejection, but not magazines? In other words, are these magazine's egos so precious that if they accept a poem, and then learn that the writer had neglected to tell them that the same poem had been accepted somewhere else a month earlier, it is an affront that can't be countenanced? I actually accidentally submitted simultaneously to a magazine that does not take simultaneous submissions and the magazine sent me a scathing letter barring me for life from submitting to it (because of an honest mistake). Really? I still laugh about that to myself once in a while. Perhaps magazines do it to simply limit the number of submissions they receive. Really? Does it work? It seems self-defeating: why would you want to limit the number of submissions you receive? Having edited two magazines myself, it seems quite easy to eliminate (for whatever arbitrary editorial reason you espouse) about 95% of the submissions one receives on a quick read; sometimes just the first line tells you everything you need to know (sorry, the very human mind at work). But, if, for whatever reason, (and I suspect the only real reason is because the big magazines can do it,) a magazine does not take simultaneous submissions, I think a necessary concurrent policy is that the turn around time should not exceed four weeks, six weeks at the most. Otherwise, you put writers in the extremely difficult position of not getting poems published until years after a poem is written, if at all. If "magazine a" takes six months to a year to respond to a submission, and then so do "magazine b" and "magazine c", etc., by the time "magazine g" sees the poem, the poet will have evolved, the world of poetry will have evolved, and a very good poem may have become stale, either in the eyes of the poet or the world. Any policy other than accepting simultaneous submissions or not accepting them but promising a very rapid turnaround is only inconsiderate and insecure. It is certainly not writer friendly.
Saturday, June 30, 2012
The New Self by Steve Gehrke (reprinted without permission)
Are you or are you not of brain, matter's boss/ or its crevasse, are you the body itself,/ or more than that, immortal you, crouched/ in flesh, like a vampire packed into a bat?
The entire poem is too long to replicate here, but everything I love about this poem is in this first stanza: the music, beautiful end rhyme and interior rhyme driving the poem into unexpected places; the thought, complex without being pretentious (love crouched instead of couched). Just great. One of many fine poems in the latest issue of Poetry.
Are you or are you not of brain, matter's boss/ or its crevasse, are you the body itself,/ or more than that, immortal you, crouched/ in flesh, like a vampire packed into a bat?
The entire poem is too long to replicate here, but everything I love about this poem is in this first stanza: the music, beautiful end rhyme and interior rhyme driving the poem into unexpected places; the thought, complex without being pretentious (love crouched instead of couched). Just great. One of many fine poems in the latest issue of Poetry.
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Saturday, June 16, 2012
Yesterday, I was sitting on the beach with my friend, the devastationalist, Philip Shelley, talking about a recent discussion I had with my wife about poetry. It is my wife's position that poetry is peculiarly subjective, and that, as a result, the range of what passes for poetry in poetry world is completely unpredictable and wide open (or, at least, for the purposes of this post, that is what I think my wife's position is). This bothers me a little because she is my wife, and rightly or wrongly, it feels as though what she is saying is that the thing you pour your heart, intelligence, and considerable effort into is a flighty and somehow insubstantial thing because it has no standards. I don't really think that is what she is saying. That's my most insecure interpretation of what she is saying. I counter that by saying no, I think there are objective standards of measurement that set one poem higher or lower against another. I agree that there are editors and writers of poetry who have closed minds, who, consciously or unconsciously, have intense predilections for one "type" of poetry over another and whose work and publications are ruled by these subjective criteria, sometimes publishing worse poems because they align with what one thinks the subject matter, diction, look and feel of a poem should be, and ignore better poems because they don't conform to one's prejudices, but that doesn't mean that there aren't poems that engage in cliche or whose music is ham-fisted or whose diction is overwrought or mere jargon, etc., or that there are not poems whose thought is startling and creative, whose music accords beautifully with the thought, and whose word choices are made not for some silly conformist reason, but to bring the music and thought together in this magical way. What do you think?
Sunday, May 27, 2012
On Learning that Wallace Stevens Was A Jerk
Jerk is the polite word for it, I think. I haven't read the autobiography yet, which I plan to do, assuming the Portland library has it. No reason for that to stop me from making my general point, which is: does it matter? First, it matters to me, a little. Stevens is one of my favorite poets. Sunday Morning. Gubbinal. The Idea of Order at Key West. The Poems of Our Climate. The Man With the Blue Guitar. Learning recently that he was an office tyrant and a messy drunk who picked fights with Auden and Hemingway dims my appreciation of what I identify as the essential spiritual element in his poetry. What lifts his poetry from abstraction is what it aims at, a place where beauty matters more than anything. Picking a fight with Auden? Second, it probably shouldn't matter. I don't need a hero. I need great poetry to inform me and lift me and inspire me. Messy drunks don't bother me so much. I've known a "few", most of whom I've loved deeply. But, mean to his subordinates? Inexcusable. Still, the poetry. One must have a mind of winter
Saturday, May 26, 2012
The Art of Poetry
In my mind, this post, even before I write, sounds like one of those annoying family Christmas letters, wind baggy and self-congratulatory, while taking occasional snipes at others. Oh well, here it goes.... It's been awhile, but the poetry empire has been very busy, twenty-two poems published over the last eighteen months, pulling two manuscripts together: 1) a chapbook of consistent, very narrative stuff; and 2) a book, more all over the place, but all these new poems. Sending them out to contests. If anybody has any recommendations, that would be great.
Okay, on to the meat. It occurs to me that my aesthetic is very simple. Try not to write poetry that sounds like pretentious poetry guy poetry: the two main traps (for me at least) being abstraction for its own sake and choosing a "poetic expression" when an ordinary one will do. This is not so easy as it seems, because one still wants to write what the world of readers of poetry will recognize as poetry. Think about it. Along those lines, I put up two new poems below. The first, The Departure Lounge (censored for the internet), fits exactly into the DMZ of my poetry. This is a political poem. This is my voice. I create a persona, a situation, etc., but spend a long time making it "poetic" enough without, straying into that weird Poetry-Land that "poems" inhabit. I think this poetry that I write is unique. I don't see it anywhere, (and I spend a lot of time reading poetry.) I think that my poem's novelty, if that is what it is, makes it hard for editors to get it. Both the subject matter, and what appears to be the artlessness, could be off-putting. Frankly, when editors kindly take the time to comment on my poems in the course of a rejection, they almost always say the same thing: we really liked it, but didn't think it was poetic enough. Okay... That explains the second poem, To An Anonymous Critic, a sonnet, written in iambic pentameter, that rhymes. I pay very close attention to the music of my poems, but work very hard so that music doesn't seem so carefully orchestrated or aesthete.
Okay, on to the meat. It occurs to me that my aesthetic is very simple. Try not to write poetry that sounds like pretentious poetry guy poetry: the two main traps (for me at least) being abstraction for its own sake and choosing a "poetic expression" when an ordinary one will do. This is not so easy as it seems, because one still wants to write what the world of readers of poetry will recognize as poetry. Think about it. Along those lines, I put up two new poems below. The first, The Departure Lounge (censored for the internet), fits exactly into the DMZ of my poetry. This is a political poem. This is my voice. I create a persona, a situation, etc., but spend a long time making it "poetic" enough without, straying into that weird Poetry-Land that "poems" inhabit. I think this poetry that I write is unique. I don't see it anywhere, (and I spend a lot of time reading poetry.) I think that my poem's novelty, if that is what it is, makes it hard for editors to get it. Both the subject matter, and what appears to be the artlessness, could be off-putting. Frankly, when editors kindly take the time to comment on my poems in the course of a rejection, they almost always say the same thing: we really liked it, but didn't think it was poetic enough. Okay... That explains the second poem, To An Anonymous Critic, a sonnet, written in iambic pentameter, that rhymes. I pay very close attention to the music of my poems, but work very hard so that music doesn't seem so carefully orchestrated or aesthete.
The Departure Lounge
A woman beats her frantic child curled
On the floor of the Ladies’ Room
At the airport in Birmingham,
Alabama
With the buckle of her unloosed belt,
Screaming “Don’t you ever sass me again,
“You ****ing little wh***, you ungrateful b****,”
Herself unloosed in a blind and bitter rage.
I tell her if she doesn’t stop, I’m going to call the cops;
But she looks at me as if she doesn’t know what I mean.
Staring at me, belt in hand, glaring at me
As if I’m the one who doesn’t understand.
It makes me old again and weary,
Too old to return home on this flight,
My bones all out of joint on the vinyl chrome-armed couch,
And the earbuds of my i-pod
Drowning any wisdom or compassion out.
My bones all out of joint on the vinyl chrome-armed couch,
And the earbuds of my i-pod
Drowning any wisdom or compassion out.
Instead beneath the strains of Joni Mitchell’s “Little Green”
A mass of static hisses its secret name
And, as the practiced announcement booms around me,
Echoing across the lounge: attention passengers,
We are now boarding
people who need assistance
And families with
small children, my attention follows
The same sniffling child dragged to the gate without
resistance.
Keith Dunlap
To An Anonymous Critic
“How sad it was to envy Pyle.” Graham Greene
When you are young and bold and full of wit,
And have graduated and found a job,
With your cleverness intact, never stoop to think
That, because you have read some books about some other
books,
Your estimation of another’s work has any merit.
Because the girl to whom you cannot give your heart
Laughs with deprecation at your snarky patter,
Because like-minded friends still find you interesting,
Despite the fact you cannot write a thing
That stands alone without your description of it,
Because the one thing you cannot bear is any trace
Of any sense or feeling, you needn’t worry:
You are as silly as I am, and your confusion
As profound, and happily, you might just get the allusion.
Keith Dunlap
Sunday, January 29, 2012
The Administrative Side
I have to admit I find the administrative side satisfying. Sending out poems, keeping track of where I have sent poems, noting where poems have been rejected and accepted. I have now pulled together a chapbook size manuscript from the poems I have written over the last few years (a number of which have been published). The trick is not to be seduced by that, to think that being published or, better, being organized about being published is an art. It is not. It cannot, but will attempt, to substitute itself for the necessary idleness and grace. I don't want to wrap myself in duct tape and think that I have created something..
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Sometimes the Poems Just Write Themselves
Other times, not so much. I like "found object" poetry, poetry that takes a snatch of familiar language, a cliche, an advertising slogan, whatever, and makes it unfamiliar in a pleasing or unsettling way. Speaking of which, I find it very disturbing how undisturbing most poetry I read is (and I read a fair amount of poetry). For me, poetry is one place where the profane is the sacred, where language is free to draw on the grotesque, the violent, the taboo. Not saying any of that is happening below, but it needs to be said.
Erectile Dysfunction
Ask your doctor
If your heart
Is strong enough
For sex and what
Comes after
The exhalation
And the contemplation
Of all the day’s
Little plans and
Jealousies
And the almost
Invisible incline
Compacted
Of coincidence
And stubbornness
Which I suppose
Led your faithless
Heart to this bed.
Keith Dunlap
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