Because I am ambitious and I like making lists.
Spain Related
The Sun Also Rises
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Tales of the Alhambra Washington Irving
Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes
(I know this is a poor survey of Spanish lit, but I leave in a few months!)
Poetry Junk
Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry Kenneth Koch
Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore Joanne Feit Diehl
Yes, I Do Have Other Interests
Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West Benazir Bhutto
A History of Modern Indonesia Since c. 1200 M.C. Ricklefs
Friday, May 29, 2009
"Instructions on How to Wind a Watch"
I both avoid and admire prose poetry. Perhaps it's my love of liberal spacing or lack of proper punctuation that prevents me from forming my poem into blocks of words. On the other hand, I often scribble my poems down at first without thought as to breaks or rhythm; breaking up the poem seems more of an afterthought.
However prose poetry is much more than how the poem appears on the page. What separates a prose poem from a work of short fiction is of course what separates poetry from the world. In my simple-minded definition, prose poetry lacks the logic of a proper narrative while at the same time telling a narrative itself. Does that make sense? Poetry is still a playful word experimentation/exploration/examination/etc. even when it doesn't even look like "a poem" as we know it. While the prose poem mimics the aesthetic of a piece of prose, it essentially reiterates the significance of poetry by transcending the normative (aka a poem should be made of shorter lines and such) and bringing the value of a poem back to content and concept in place of form.
Which is interesting because my brother, who studies design, is working to strengthen his "conceptual" abilities while his natural talent for "form" seems less important. Hm, art is so interdisciplinary! I think with my own writing this might be a lesson to learn. Lately it seems that I'm focused on just cranking a poem out that the ideas come out half-baked. And while the words can be pleasing and I can devise a nice cadence, what does that matter if I don't actually know what the heck I'm trying to say?!
But back to prose poems! For example:
Julio Cortázar's "Instructions on How to Wind a Watch":
However prose poetry is much more than how the poem appears on the page. What separates a prose poem from a work of short fiction is of course what separates poetry from the world. In my simple-minded definition, prose poetry lacks the logic of a proper narrative while at the same time telling a narrative itself. Does that make sense? Poetry is still a playful word experimentation/exploration/examination/etc. even when it doesn't even look like "a poem" as we know it. While the prose poem mimics the aesthetic of a piece of prose, it essentially reiterates the significance of poetry by transcending the normative (aka a poem should be made of shorter lines and such) and bringing the value of a poem back to content and concept in place of form.
Which is interesting because my brother, who studies design, is working to strengthen his "conceptual" abilities while his natural talent for "form" seems less important. Hm, art is so interdisciplinary! I think with my own writing this might be a lesson to learn. Lately it seems that I'm focused on just cranking a poem out that the ideas come out half-baked. And while the words can be pleasing and I can devise a nice cadence, what does that matter if I don't actually know what the heck I'm trying to say?!
But back to prose poems! For example:
Julio Cortázar's "Instructions on How to Wind a Watch":
Death stands there in the background, but don't be afraid. Hold the watch down with one hand, take the stem in two fingers, and rotate it smoothly. Now another installment of time opens, trees spread their leaves, boats run races, like a fan time continues filling with itself, and from that burgeon the air, the breezes of earth, the shadow of a woman, the sweet smell of bread.
What did you expect, what more do you want? Quickly. strap it to your wrist, let it tick away in freedom, imitate it greedily. Fear will rust all the rubies, everything that could happen to it and was forgotten is about to corrode the watch's veins, cankering the cold blood and its tiny rubies. And death is there in the background, we must run to arrive beforehand and understand it's already unimportant.
(In case you want to read the original Spanish version, you can see it aquí. I found this poem in Another Republic.)
This poem, like all prose poetry (well, at least the good stuff) strandles a delicate balance between narrative and the poetic. Prose poems have no need for the exposition, conflict, climax, resolution in narratives. But they still give a story, if only a glimpse and not the whole sha-bang (scholarly talk, na?). Here the poetic makes itself very clear against the logical How To spirit of watch-winding. Cortázar explores the idea of time with the physicality of the watch in that one can essentially "change time" by a simple turn of a nob, and also the larger concept of time as something that cannot be outrun nor can it be measured by the perfect ticks of a watch hand.
One of Cortázar's great lines is "imitate it greedily" because it is so appropriate; it hits on the instinctual human fear of limited time and of death, and also the obsession with controlling time, and understanding time. The watch is characterized as something free, though in actuality it is bound by the restraints of its physical limitations: it needs to be wound, it is strapped to somebody's wrist, and so on. Does Cortázar actually mean to say that the watch is free? Perhaps this is where our American ideas of freedom conflict with this Argentinian poet. Free to us is without constraints, autonomy, the ability to act of one's own desires. But perhaps Cortázar simply insinuates that the watch is free from fear (see how prose poetry is still very much poetry? This stuff would never fly in fiction!). Which I know is a silly thought, but that's just what Cortázar gives us. Of course an inaimate object has no fear of death, it doesn't know emotion or doubt or thought. But that's precisely why Cortázar compares the human condition to the watch and points out our longing for life without fear.
On that note, Fear and Death (capitalized!) are not often subjects I chose to tackle in my poetry for fear of being melodramatic and trite. But Cortázar breeches them with great sensitivity and finesse. Death is a being that stands unmoving, haunting the corners of existence as a reminder that time is limited. Of course, Cortázar hints at these ideas by simply placing death in the poem. It is stationary, not any sort of comprehensible form, and thus all the more powerful. Death seems to linger on the edge of the scenes without ubruptly disturbing anything but essentially symbolizing some sort of doom. But Cortázar elicits his reader to conquer death by conquering fear. The fear will rot away the watch just as it rots away the soul. In the end to champion death is to overcome fear and render death insignificant and unimportant.
Alright, that's all I have in me for now. Thanks for reading!
Thursday, May 7, 2009
All Things in Moderation
Some further revelations I've had in regards to "the discussion of poetry" and such:
Recently my poetry workshop was visited by a very talented young poet, whose work I sincerely enjoy and appreciate. Nevertheless, as she led the class discussion, I repeatedly found myself completely lost to what in God's name she was talking about while most of the class nodded in agreement and seemed perfectly in sync with where this woman was going. I was just afraid she'd ask my opinion on the matter and I'd be found out! But I think... just as there are different types of poets (call them schools, whatever) perhaps there are different ideologies as to approaching poetry. I'm not sure where I fit in, but I will say that there seem to be two extremes. There's the highly analytical approach, in which the sole purpose is extracting "meaning" from a poem, which is silly (William Carlos Williams would whoop ya for doin' so) because there is more to a poem than just theme. After all, poetry is both narrative and the exploration of words in relation to the world. On the other hand, there are those who talk about poetry in almost laughably convoluted terms, and while I cringe at the analytical method I am simply baffled by this style of reading.
I belong somewhere in the middle on this spectrum. In reality, my approach to poetry is similar to my approach to discussion of other disciplines: history, anthropology, sociology, etc. You can talk about the negotiation of gender hierarchy the same way you talk about the implications of gender within a poem. Or the creation of nationalism in the same way a poem might talk about one's relationship to a geographical space, a community, the idea of family. There are inherent human experiences that the humanities seem to overlook, or perhaps overlook the importance that these things are happening across the board. Doesn't the fact that it's is happening somewhere else in the world or that it has happened in the past make our experiences now only more rich and true and meaningful? I wrote a poem based on this documentary (Wildflowers) about the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The film showed these Lebanese women mourning for their imprisoned men and the violence surrounding them enacted by the soldiers. The agony on their faces had startling similarity to Picasso's Guernica, the most pure form of pain and sorrow and suffering displayed in two different art forms but essentially it is all real and similar experience. In a similar fashion, Jonathan Safran Foer does a comparative exploration of 9/11 and the bombing of Dresden in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
So maybe this post has become more a discussion of my approach to writing poetry than talking about poetry. But really what I mean by all these global references is that poetry is not all spacey talk of ethereal crap nor is it a formula. When we talk about poetry, there needs to be something concrete that grounds us. Whether it's actually talking about the words on the page or the ideas behind them, let's keep our feet on the ground and our heads out of them clouds, okay people? At the same time, poetry is mystery, it is veiled and there is something sacred about exploring the sacred. I just need to find some like-minded people who share my appreciation of the middle ground.
And a shout out to Summer Ji, perhaps the only person who will read this blog. Thanks!
Recently my poetry workshop was visited by a very talented young poet, whose work I sincerely enjoy and appreciate. Nevertheless, as she led the class discussion, I repeatedly found myself completely lost to what in God's name she was talking about while most of the class nodded in agreement and seemed perfectly in sync with where this woman was going. I was just afraid she'd ask my opinion on the matter and I'd be found out! But I think... just as there are different types of poets (call them schools, whatever) perhaps there are different ideologies as to approaching poetry. I'm not sure where I fit in, but I will say that there seem to be two extremes. There's the highly analytical approach, in which the sole purpose is extracting "meaning" from a poem, which is silly (William Carlos Williams would whoop ya for doin' so) because there is more to a poem than just theme. After all, poetry is both narrative and the exploration of words in relation to the world. On the other hand, there are those who talk about poetry in almost laughably convoluted terms, and while I cringe at the analytical method I am simply baffled by this style of reading.
I belong somewhere in the middle on this spectrum. In reality, my approach to poetry is similar to my approach to discussion of other disciplines: history, anthropology, sociology, etc. You can talk about the negotiation of gender hierarchy the same way you talk about the implications of gender within a poem. Or the creation of nationalism in the same way a poem might talk about one's relationship to a geographical space, a community, the idea of family. There are inherent human experiences that the humanities seem to overlook, or perhaps overlook the importance that these things are happening across the board. Doesn't the fact that it's is happening somewhere else in the world or that it has happened in the past make our experiences now only more rich and true and meaningful? I wrote a poem based on this documentary (Wildflowers) about the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The film showed these Lebanese women mourning for their imprisoned men and the violence surrounding them enacted by the soldiers. The agony on their faces had startling similarity to Picasso's Guernica, the most pure form of pain and sorrow and suffering displayed in two different art forms but essentially it is all real and similar experience. In a similar fashion, Jonathan Safran Foer does a comparative exploration of 9/11 and the bombing of Dresden in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
So maybe this post has become more a discussion of my approach to writing poetry than talking about poetry. But really what I mean by all these global references is that poetry is not all spacey talk of ethereal crap nor is it a formula. When we talk about poetry, there needs to be something concrete that grounds us. Whether it's actually talking about the words on the page or the ideas behind them, let's keep our feet on the ground and our heads out of them clouds, okay people? At the same time, poetry is mystery, it is veiled and there is something sacred about exploring the sacred. I just need to find some like-minded people who share my appreciation of the middle ground.
And a shout out to Summer Ji, perhaps the only person who will read this blog. Thanks!
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
"The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart"
I'm not quite sure how I feel about blogs, blogging, the idea of people actually caring enough to read my "thoughts on life." In my "India Ink" blog my tone resembles that of a cheerleader, a reflection of my delusional, if not noble, attempts to stay positive while spending far too much time flat on my back from food poisoning. My study abroad blog was for an entirely different audience, and looking back I probably was sincere in my somewhat sickening enthusiasm despite the conditions. But this endeavor is unabashedly self-serving; less about keeping the relatives updated and more about improving my writing. Or if I'm honest, more about improving my thinking. Last week I gave a presentation in my poetry workshop about an Octavio Paz poem "Vrindaban" (from which the title of this blog originates) and I totally bombed (the cheerleader voice rears its ugly head). Not that it really mattered as far as "point value" in the class, but more as an issue of pride and my own intellect. To be honest, even now I couldn't really tell you about the poem, how it functions off of the page, how it speaks to me (though I find that question silly, in actuality it's valid). Living and traveling in India, I sort of had to shut down a lot of my mental capacities in order to simply function when daily faced with extreme poverty, filth, and UTTER MADNESS! It took a good 3 months for me to feel normal again, to start breaking down that hard shell of a woman I'd become and open up to writing and emotions and literature.
Despite the somewhat healing hand of time, writing does not come as easily as it once did. Perhaps I'm still somewhat shut down to that vulnerable place in which I write, or perhaps I've changed and I the writing process will never be the same. Nonetheless, this blog is dedicated to thinking about poetry, and namely other people's poetry. My friend got me hooked on this site TED Talks, which is an online forum for the exchange of ideas. Yes, sounds a bit overreaching but perhaps the "big names" will give it some prestige; there are talks by Bill Gates, Isabella Allende, Al Gore, etc. all about different topics. It's fabulous, as if you could youtube lectures from your favorite contemporary thinkers on their specialty subjects. In other words, a more enriching manner of wasting time than rotting your brain on facebook. Anyway, I watched this lecture by Chris Abani on the importance of storytelling (I didn't know he was so funny, you can watch it here). He cites a few lines from Jack Gilbert's "The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart" which shall be my first poem on this blog (you can read it here or below).
The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart
Jack Gilbert
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
Get it wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not a language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.
From THE GREAT FIRES: POEMS, 1982-1992 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994)
Now I cannot make any promises on my poetry-analysis, after all I'm starting this blog to get better at reading poems. That being said, poems ought not be "analyzed" as if they were computer data, but rather "thought about" or "talked about" (PC enough for ya?).I guess I can start with... things I like about the poem? I must admit I've always had issues with prose poems, though can this really be considered a prose poem? Well, I'm waving my magic wand and saying "Yes" because that's the way the words seem to read, treading the line between normal speech and verse. Except in one instance in the first line, where both clauses seem to end unfinished and incomplete, not abruptly but in a timid fashion, hinting at the MYSTERY of the poetic world. Now this is a concept I love, something that I believe all capital-g Good poems should recognize, revere, and explore. Good writing recognizes that experience and the world cannot simply be boiled down into a few words. Writing is limiting and at the same time the closest we can come to interacting with the unknown and the mystery that is the human experience. And i do believe that is how Gilbert opens his poem and sets up this theme of language moving beyond itself but not in the concrete fashion we've come to expect of it. Looking at the title suggests that something has been lost, we've come to expect language and words to tell us everything when really it's beauty is in its inability to encompass all, leaving us (and our hearts) to fill in the gaps of understanding.
What else can I say? I love the words "psalms" if not purely for religious sentiment. The idea of singing your woes and your joys, the ultimate means of communicating with God, encompassing not only the spoken but the heard, the vocal and the musical. And I enjoy poems with cultural references, perhaps because a lot of my own poetry stems from my studies in other disciplines, namely in cultural studies. It's not that these reference make the poet appear to be more learned, nor are they necessarily meant to proclaim that themes are universal. Because there are agonies that happen other places in the world that I could never understand and I could/should never compare my own life experiences to these tragic events. But there's some beauty in stringing these global ideas together in a makeshift, homespun quilt that recognizes both the similarities and differences presented by cultural divides. Gilbert points out his own far-fetched outlook, recognizing that perhaps the Etruscan texts do not extend beyond what they appear to be, or perhaps the Minoan script isn't even writing but a map. Actually he might be saying that language is a map, only unintelligible to us in this time and place.
I think that may be enough for the evening. I gots papers to write, goodness gracious!
Despite the somewhat healing hand of time, writing does not come as easily as it once did. Perhaps I'm still somewhat shut down to that vulnerable place in which I write, or perhaps I've changed and I the writing process will never be the same. Nonetheless, this blog is dedicated to thinking about poetry, and namely other people's poetry. My friend got me hooked on this site TED Talks, which is an online forum for the exchange of ideas. Yes, sounds a bit overreaching but perhaps the "big names" will give it some prestige; there are talks by Bill Gates, Isabella Allende, Al Gore, etc. all about different topics. It's fabulous, as if you could youtube lectures from your favorite contemporary thinkers on their specialty subjects. In other words, a more enriching manner of wasting time than rotting your brain on facebook. Anyway, I watched this lecture by Chris Abani on the importance of storytelling (I didn't know he was so funny, you can watch it here). He cites a few lines from Jack Gilbert's "The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart" which shall be my first poem on this blog (you can read it here or below).
The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart
Jack Gilbert
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
Get it wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not a language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.
From THE GREAT FIRES: POEMS, 1982-1992 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994)
Now I cannot make any promises on my poetry-analysis, after all I'm starting this blog to get better at reading poems. That being said, poems ought not be "analyzed" as if they were computer data, but rather "thought about" or "talked about" (PC enough for ya?).I guess I can start with... things I like about the poem? I must admit I've always had issues with prose poems, though can this really be considered a prose poem? Well, I'm waving my magic wand and saying "Yes" because that's the way the words seem to read, treading the line between normal speech and verse. Except in one instance in the first line, where both clauses seem to end unfinished and incomplete, not abruptly but in a timid fashion, hinting at the MYSTERY of the poetic world. Now this is a concept I love, something that I believe all capital-g Good poems should recognize, revere, and explore. Good writing recognizes that experience and the world cannot simply be boiled down into a few words. Writing is limiting and at the same time the closest we can come to interacting with the unknown and the mystery that is the human experience. And i do believe that is how Gilbert opens his poem and sets up this theme of language moving beyond itself but not in the concrete fashion we've come to expect of it. Looking at the title suggests that something has been lost, we've come to expect language and words to tell us everything when really it's beauty is in its inability to encompass all, leaving us (and our hearts) to fill in the gaps of understanding.
What else can I say? I love the words "psalms" if not purely for religious sentiment. The idea of singing your woes and your joys, the ultimate means of communicating with God, encompassing not only the spoken but the heard, the vocal and the musical. And I enjoy poems with cultural references, perhaps because a lot of my own poetry stems from my studies in other disciplines, namely in cultural studies. It's not that these reference make the poet appear to be more learned, nor are they necessarily meant to proclaim that themes are universal. Because there are agonies that happen other places in the world that I could never understand and I could/should never compare my own life experiences to these tragic events. But there's some beauty in stringing these global ideas together in a makeshift, homespun quilt that recognizes both the similarities and differences presented by cultural divides. Gilbert points out his own far-fetched outlook, recognizing that perhaps the Etruscan texts do not extend beyond what they appear to be, or perhaps the Minoan script isn't even writing but a map. Actually he might be saying that language is a map, only unintelligible to us in this time and place.
I think that may be enough for the evening. I gots papers to write, goodness gracious!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
