A Lesson From Life?

It's like jazz; sometimes you play the wrong note, but you play it fortissimo, and maybe it's the right note:

Lines Written At the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum (John Clare)

What I do is for me, for that I came

In a world full of worry, I am to be defamed

I am mine own sound, but mine sound is not the same

Because a hazel wood fire permeates my brain

I long for scenes where men hath never tread

As my doctor, Fenwick Skrimchire, once said

“After years of poetical prosing,” the present insanity ensued

I live among the ignorant a man hungry for food

Disheveled I wander in the quickening maze

East of me, winter, west of me, winter days

I stumble like a chariot hitched to a crippled blaze

Into the world’s own chaos half-crazed

With constructed meaning, with the simple earth’s delight

I am mine own museum vacant of mine own sight

Keith Dunlap

Post-Post-Post Post (After Andy Warhol)

Andy Warhol happened. High and low collapsed into each other. Beauty and truth were replaced by the image as manipulated by commerce to entice the consumer. All this was showcased by Andy Warhol. The lyric was replaced by the jingle. All pop music, even rock, is merely an advertisement for an image. We are not trying to live with integrity to a moral ideal (something greater than the self) but to an image (a substitute self). So, what to do?

I propose nothing. Seriously. NOTHING. I predict that if one lives, reads, thinks, breathes, writes, revises at this moment in time, one will be influenced by this fact, one's work will account for this fact. Don't chase it. Do not try self-consciously through irony, self-reflexiveness, or some other mannered response, to incorporate it. Aim at truth. Aim at beauty. Your efforts will reflect the zeitgeist. Or they won't. You can't force it. You can't avoid it. Any attempt to be new will result in a mere novelty.

Stop chasing your shadow. It will follow you.

The Speed of Light

The speed of light is much too slow

I cannot let my panic go

Starting to snow a deliberate snow

The speed of light is much too slow

Nothing happens quite as fast

Snow follows stars, follows snow falling fast

The stars imply the distant past

I wouldn’t want this day to last

How time curves back to show

The speed of light is much too slow

But I wouldn’t want it any faster

As long as you were here with me

On this the best of days my last

Keith Dunlap

The Only Cardinal Sin

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.

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.

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.

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.

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