I’m writing you from Lenox, Massachusetts, where I am in the last three weeks of being poet in residence in the Amy Clampitt House. I went for a walk down Old Stockbridge Road this morning. There’s snow here, but what a difference from the weather at home in Minnesota when I left, a little after New Year’s — the sidewalks were caked with ice and it was five below. I’m thinking, as usual, about Amy Clampitt.

I’ve been obsessed with Amy Clampitt the entire six months I’ve lived here, a side effect of the residency I didn’t expect. But it’s an intensely personal residency. I don’t just live in her house, as the poet-in-residence lives in Robert Frost’s farmhouse in Franconia, NH, I live among her things. The chairs and dresser and artwork were hers. There’s photographs of her on the walls, and there’s a K for Korn — her husband was Harold Korn, a Columbia law professor — on the sterling silverware. I’m allowed to leaf through her archived letters. Most of all, the house is full of her books. Hundreds of books. Books on all topics: poetry, of course, but also botany, and vegetarian cookbooks from the seventies, and field guides, travel guides, Greek theater, religion. There’s a book I keep leafing through without actually reading it. It was published in the sixties and is all about different ways to end a poem, called Poetic Closure. Lots and lots of slim volumes of poetry published in the 1980’s, by poets with impressive publications and blurbs that herald each as the next great poet of our age, poets I’ve never heard of. Books that seem to magically appear as I re-read Willard Spiegelman’s Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt: one day, I read a letter she wrote from Assisi, Italy, and it was only then that I noticed the guidebook to Assisi on the bookshelf in the dining room. Books that were actually read, by her, and are still full of penciled notes in her barely decipherable handwriting and the little slips of paper with which she kept her place.

It’s hard to believe that the collection of books in the house represents only half of the books she left behind. Her editor at Knopf, Ann Close, told me that they kept the books that seemed most appropriate for the residency. I am sad that I will leave without having read more than a few; back in August, I dreamed of reading all of them, but back in August, the days were long, and it felt as if I had a lifetime to spend here, writing and walking and reading.

I spend a lot of time wondering which of her books aren’t here.

Someone’s book collection is a version of their thumbprint, a visual map of their brain, and a writer’s book collection is especially fascinating. I always wonder how writers lead their private lives. After all, their published books of poems are art, separate from the poets. But the writers’ book collections, maybe, are where their selves and art meet, are some of the raw material that gets composted into their work.

Once, early in my residency, in a book about Greek theater, I found a note from a friend of Amy Clampitt’s. It was postmarked April, 1950. In the note, the friend thanks Amy for bringing a lobster-mushroom casserole to a recent potluck, and asks for the recipe. I have no idea whether Clampitt ever sent it to her, but I’m almost sure this is it. It’s from a book called Casserole Cookery: One Dish Meals for the Busy Gourmet, published in 1943. In the front of the book there’s a list of substitutions for rationed ingredients.

Is what goes on in the kitchen a poem? No. But I know an awful lot of poets who are great cooks, too.

Lobster and Mushooms (Time: 50 minutes)

Ingredients:
1 package frozen lobster
½ pound fresh mushrooms, sliced
¼ pound butter
3 tablespoons flour
½ cup white wine
½ cup light cream
2 eggs
salt and pepper
grated lemon peel

Melt butter, blend flour. Stir the cream in gradually; heat mushrooms in sauce; add wine (slowly), salt and pepper and lemon peel. Remove from the fire, cool slightly, and stir in the eggs. Add the lobster (slightly thawed). Turn into a low buttered casserole and bake in a medium oven (350) 30 minutes. Serves 4.

The Sun Magazine interviews Wendell Berry. Aside from his usual topics of ecology and economy, Berry touches on his method as a writer:

Fearnside: In your own writing, you seem to confront head-on the speed and thoughtlessness of contemporary society by your deliberate, thoughtful style. Do you consciously write this way?

Berry: I did make up my mind at some time that instead of trying to serve my purposes by rhetorical artifice or personal attacks, I would try to make as much sense as I could. If your cause doesn’t make sense, why defend it? Writing is a test of sense. It’s an exposure of your ideas to your own scrutiny, and then to the scrutiny of other people.

The Monocle Review’s 2nd Edition includes a report on a long-standing Beirut bookshop struggling to survive amidst political instability and changing tastes.

The review is a new video production from Monocle Magazine, a fantastic (and exquisitely beautiful) source for international news on business, culture, and design. Each issue is as thick as a book and includes an ongoing, exclusive manga series. I read it religiously, although I suspect I fall short of its target demographic by about $75,000 per year.

LIFE’s newly launched photo archive contains images of major poets from the 19th and 20th centuries, including Robert Frost, W.H. Auden, and Carl Sandburg. The photos, many of which were never published, go back as far as 1750. In the above picture, Frost entertains guests at a White House party for Nobel Prize winners.

When Johnathon said, and I quote, “Ashley, I take back everything I’ve ever said about your space being messy”, the sentiment didn’t quite seem heartfelt, but–moreover–he was not joking around. My workspace is always an enormous pile of disarray. Proof:

Since the picture cannot possibly do justice to the filth in which I write, I have attempted to draw this eyesore into some semblance of order with arrows and labels. Useful? I hope so. 

To begin: The “desk” is actually two end tables pushed together, which requires the low chair. I like to be hunched over my poems as I’m working. The reasoning behind this is unclear. 

The empty packs of cigarettes are a sure sign that things are going well. Although I’ve recently begun rolling my own cigarettes in an attempt to hurry my death by nicotine, the overflowing ashtray continues to be a signal of significant progress.  I like to think it means that I’ve been too busy writing to empty the ashtray or clean up.

On the other hand, I might just be lazy. It is impossible to tell. Assuming it is the latter, I’ll justify myself with Virginia Woolf: “It is in our idleness…that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.” That’s it.

The excuse regarding the empty Coke can, many of which typically litter the desk I treat with such derision, falls into a similar line of thought. I am pleased to say, however, that my Coke addiction is fading fast: I’m on to sweet tea now. 

Perhaps surprisingly, I can’t write anything even remotely worthwhile when I’m drunk, which isn’t to say I can do so sober, but I think I edge a little closer without the whiskey. As my alcoholism becomes more fully developed, I’m hoping the liquor will become a regular part of my writing process, since writing drunk seems like a positive thing in theory. 

Books are stacked helter-skelter and set askew around the general vicinity. When I’m stuck, it occasionally helps to pick up someone else, to do a quick imitation. Also: this sometimes leads to a poem worth following up on, or reveals a structure that might be useful to my current pet project. Hardy is of great use when it comes to this, which is why he’s right next to the laptop. 

Also: Because I’m stuck more often than not, I’ll have up multiple versions of the same poem while I’m working. For me, a line from a previous failure can generate new ideas in the current take–even if it’s just a rhyme or a juxtaposition of words. 

I’ll leave the rest to you to justify, as I seem to be at a loss. While I would like my workspace to be clean and shiny, chaos is absolutely  necessary to my writing, in which I typically seek order–especially given my control issues. It seems I am a bundle of contradictions, right down to the lipstick prints on my rolled cigarettes. 

Where the Magic Happens: Karen Rigby

Where the Magic Happens: Deborah Ager

Where the Magic Happens: Sandra Beasley

This video makes me smile every time I watch it. Catchy song, too.

YouTube - New Chanukah Song - Fa La Freezing - iPod holiday lipdub.

“’One wants to feel in control,’ Hecht said of his work in an interview with the New York Times last year. ‘If you are writing in free verse, what makes it a poem? A number of my contemporaries wrote in free verse, but it became random jottings from their minds. Some enjoyed a period of celebrity. I don’t think they are going to be read very long. It’s as if someone says, ‘I thought of a butterfly,’ and it becomes a poem because it’s sanctioned by their own brilliance.’”

–From “Anthony Hecht, 81; Confronted Brutality Through Visual Verse” in the Los Angeles Times, Oct. 23, 2004

Philip Hoy: “Maybe I can quote from an earlier passage in Kafka’s diaries than the one I was alluding to just now, only I’d like to hear your reaction to what he says there:

‘Have never understood how it is possible for almost everyone who writes to objectify his sufferings in the very midst of undergoing them; thus I, for example, in the midst of my unhappiness, in all likelihood with my head still smarting from unhappiness, sit down and write to someone: I am unhappy. Yes, I can even go beyond that and with as many flourishes as I have the talent for, all of which seem to have nothing to do with my unhappiness, ring simple, or contrapuntal, or a whole orchestration of changes on my theme. And it is not a lie, and it does not still my pain; it is simply a merciful surplus of strength at a moment when suffering has raked me to the bottom of my being and plainly exhausted all my strength. But then what kind of surplus is it?’”

Anthony Hecht: “I fear that I have never been granted Kafka’s bountiful surplus of energy that he was able to call up during crises or depressions. I can think of few things more enviable. I have no reserves of imaginative energy to draw on in periods of darkness. Ransom, who proposed what might be thought of as a doctrine of ‘aesthetic distance’, which I found easy to adopt, used to say that the poet who wanted to write a love poem would be well advised not to do so in the first fine frenzy of his passion. He would be too close to his experience, too giddy with its pleasing chaos and turbulence to be able even to understand himself, let alone to put his feelings and thoughts into some disciplined order. The writer, Ransom would maintain, who can best create powerful feelings in his reader is precisely the one who has mastered these feelings before trying to set them down on paper. And Eliot would add to this that the writer can also describe and evoke experiences he’s never actually had – a matter that the stunning variety of Shakespeare’s and Dickens’s and Browning’s characters ought unarguably to demonstrate, though the tendency in our era is to regard lyric poems as purely the seismography of the life of the individual soul. Flaubert wrote to his mother in December, 1850, expressing much the same requirement of absolute personal detachment that Ransom recommends, though in Flaubert’s case, far more severely, and by way of explaining that he was determined never to marry, feeling that his vocation as a writer forbade it. He wrote, ‘You can depict wine, love, and women on the condition that you are not a drunkard, a lover, or a husband.’”

–From Anthony Hecht in Conversation with Philip Hoy, 

According to popular superstition, writers are an unruly, and often belligerently drunk, herd of cats. This may be why assignments go over so well in most poetry workshops, typically triggering a frenzied cacophony of embittered grumbles and back-stabbing squawks, the ferocity of which could rival that of this cat, and most of which imply that the particulars of the assignment are clearly informed by the workshop leader’s distinct variety of sexual incompetence. 

For example, I repeatedly smothered, with varying degrees of success, the urge to tuck myself away in the parking garage so that I could pelt a particular workshop leader with frozen peas as she walked toward her car. This impulse was particularly challenging to stifle after she declared—and these were real specifications—that our poems for the following week should include a staircase, a bowl of fruit, a piece of furniture with sentimental value and a past argument recalled in a new light. 

Even so, every so often–despite the initial desire to slingshot spoonfuls of live hornets into her bathroom while she showered or the wild compulsion to teach her small child how to play the SafeAuto advertising jingle on a tin whistle—I did wind up enjoying the play of working with or against the demands of her assignments. 

Like working within a fixed or nonce form, the constraints of abstract or conceptual assignments often provoke me to slip from my own micromanaged garden into an overgrown yard littered with hubcaps, Bud Light bottles and several uniquely disfigured Barbie dolls, the latter seemingly maimed  during the almost phenomenological event that occurred when my neighbor actually mowed his lawn, which happened only once, in April, back before he independently determined his yard was the unlikely home of an endangered black spine-neck swamp turtle—a turtle that is, one notes, most usually found only in Argentina, Brazil or Uruguay–and consequently retired the lawnmower for the rest of the summer.

Put more eloquently, I think what Richard Wilbur said of forms in his 1972 interview with the New York Quarterly can also be said of good assignments: “They are  not simply a straightjacket, they can also liberate you from whatever narrow track your own mind is running on, and prompt it to be loose and inventive, to entertain possibilities it hadn’t foreseen.” 

This sounds a lot like the claim Bret Anthony Johnston makes in the November/December 2008 print issue of Poets & Writers, which is, admittedly, a magazine Donald Hall singles out for belittlement in an essay titled “Poetry and Ambition” as “not so much a trade journal as a hobbyist’s bulletin, unrelievedly cheerful, relentlessly trivial”. Hall is probably cooking with gas, but  Johnston could still have a decent point when he praises writing exercises for providing “loose, empowering structures … [that] bring fingers to keyboards, pens to paper, without bias or expectation.” 

For example, to warm up before writing, Johnston recommends “spending five minutes with nothing but words that start with the letter j.” Another: Open the dictionary blind and point to random entries; once a noun crops up–dishwasher, for example–spend ten minutes writing, trying to showcase that dishwasher. 

The result may not turn out to be stunning evidence of your irrevocable genius, but you will have ten minutes worth of poetry about a dishwasher. Close enough?

When you search on Google for Bad Love Poetry these are the book results:

I find this unreasonably amusing.

Given my penchant for quoting poets—an unfortunate, but mostly harmless, effect of passion, insecurity or both—I was pleased to hear about Quote Poet Unquote: Contemporary Quotations on Poets and Poetry by Dennis O’Driscoll, a working civil servant since the age of 16 whose poetry belt* is, evidently, magical. I see no other option. The structural integrity of an average poetry belt would be debilitated by the unreasonable number of notches his seems to have. Or maybe my poetry belt is just the cheap kind? 

Some excerpts: 

“I started a PhD in English at the University of Chicago because I loved poetry-which I now realize is like saying I studied vivisection because I loved dogs.”

—Michael Donaghy, Verse 

 

“My self-esteem is so low that getting the Pulitzer Prize just made me break even.”

—Franz Wright 

 

“We are all interested in our own poems, just as we are interested in the smell of our own armpits, because they are uniquely redolent of ourselves.”

—Editorial in The Spectator

There are moments of poetic pageantry, I’m sure, but from the handful of one-liners I’ve seen, it seems like it could be worthwhile to wade through the apotheoses?

Then again, those might not be too much trouble for me. I’m a pushover for silver-tongued truthiness, especially idiosyncratic dicta–and I’ve had just enough learning to misquote, which sometimes passes, if I’m lucky, for wit. Yes?

*Arbitrary note: There are, apparently, poetry belts. 

Recently, I read a few essays from Thom Gunn’s “The Occasions of Poetry,” and this is what stuck:

“A few years ago, I found myself preoccupied by certain related concepts I wanted to write about.  They arose from matters real and imaginary so closely tangled with my life that it was impossible, for the time being, to isolate them as a poem.  They were a familiar enough association of ideas, it’s true– trust, openness, acceptance, innocence– but I felt them all the more vividly and personally the more signally I failed to get them into poems.  Well, I knew by now that the thing to do was not to strain, I’d just have to go on living with the values, watering them, hardening them, getting them bushy with the detail of experience, until their flowering presented itself to me as a given fact.  In what sense you might say that innocence can be repossessed, I wondered, and started on yet another sterile poem playing with the figure of a house being repossessed– and if there is on thing innocence is clearly not, it is a house.”

The resulting poem, Three, is actually lovely and exists without trace of a house repossessed– I was able to find (thanks, Google!) a copy of it in a 1995 San Francisco Chronicle article, though, of course, the formatting’s all off.  Sorry.  Imagine quatrains.

However, my coffee has not kicked in yet.  You get cartoons instead!

The picture should link back to its home, Toothpaste For Dinner.  If not, this was just another failed technological experiment– but you got some really awful open mic flashbacks out of the deal, right?  Here’s the link anyway: Toothpaste For Dinner.  Everybody wins!

Hello, my name’s Jennifer Jabaily, and I’m a recent addition to Linebreak–  this is my first post on Unstressed.

Some musicians want so badly to give their poems to the world.  We’ve seen volumes released by Jewel, Jeff Tweedy, Jill Scott, and Billy Corgan, among others.  I’m not going to take any real shots at them.  It’s unsporting.  It’s like mocking a celebutante’s fashion line.

Some are poets by accident or reputation: Christopher Ricks has defended Bob Dylan’s lyrics as poetry, and Harper Perennial advertised “The Lyrics of Tom Waits, 1973-1982″ in the latest issue of “The Writer’s Chronicle.”  Maybe there’s something in it.  Maybe they’re our time’s answer to Arnaut Daniel or Bertand de Born.  Maybe not.

Others have released volumes of poetry with more success– or at least have been shielded by unimpeachable street cred: Leonard Cohen, David Berman, and Patti Smith (as highlighted in a 2006 Slate post by Meghan O’Rourke) are among the comparatively lucky.

Hoping to find some poets who’ve crossed into the seedy world of rockstardom, I came across a 2008 article from The Guardian in which British poet Simon Armitage proves this is not a one-way street.   You can hear some selections from his band, The Scaremongers, at last.fm.  I don’t know what to say, exactly.  There’s a certain forgiveness in a catchy melody.

UBUWEB offers a handful of Erica Baum’s photo collections, including her series of library card catalogues.

I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve been reading Conversations with Richard Wilbur. Maybe I’m a little ashamed. Regardless, I will now regale you with Richard Wilbur quotes. Please don’t despise me too terribly much.

 ”The drug experience is shadow-boxing, and the business of the poet is to be confronting, with his imagination, these solid objects here.”

“[I]n the poetry of this school [the New York School] generally you find a hidden sentimentalism–they all think childhood was the best of times; there’s no sadder sound in nature than the sound of a running-down nursery music box.”

“I don’t care much for confessional poetry when it is just the sort of whining you get at a bar from drunks.”

And, of course, an obligatory quote on form, the length of which probably reveals something about my character:

“If I say hook-book to you, it’s not the same as if I said brush-stadium. There’s some kind of implicit, magical demand made on you by the fact that hook and book sound a bit alike, and your mind starts trying to pull them together in some way or the other…. There are certain kinds of control that you can’t have [in free verse]…. There’s an example–I hope I can quote it properly–a poem of Gerard Manley Hopkins’, one of his terrible sonnets. It begins, ‘No worse, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief;/ More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring./ Comforter, where, where is your comforting./ Mary, mother of us, where is thy relief?’ Notice the relationship between that ‘wilder wring’ in the second line and that ‘comforting’ in the third. The ‘wring’ is a very hard rhyme, and ‘comforting’ breaks off, and it tells you where to break your voice. It almost lets your voice crack at the end of the third line. There’s the kind of accurate music that a fine user of rhyme can force.”

Granted, I had to go through a lot of interviews to find those three gems of snark, but — oh! — wasn’t it all worth it?

Despite our election day jitters, we managed to update Linebreak this morning. Thanks to Sandy Longhorn for the poem, and to Maureen Alsop for the recording.

Enjoy the diversion — then get down to your polling place and vote.

Honor Thy » Linebreak.

As a break from poetry and its accoutrement–letters, biographies, journals–I’ve been reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks. It is, essentially, a collection of case studies of patients with various neurological diseases. It’s charming, light and hopeful for the most part, and as a consequence, it’s been a great relief.

However, while I was reading Chapter Nine, “The President’s Speech”, poetry couldn’t help but elbow in. The chapter seemed to suggest a new way to conceive of what makes a good poem, new questions to raise in the process of revision.

In “The President’s Speech”, Sacks describes how his patients reacted while watching a technically unnamed president ( “the old Charmer, the Actor” ) give a speech: some patients “looked bewildered, some looked outraged, one or two looked apprehensive”. However, the far majority of the “patients were convulsed with laughter.”

This particular collection of patients consisted of two groups: one group with aphasia and the other with tonal agnosia, which is also known as aprosodia. Aphasia is, according to Wikipedia, “a loss of the ability to produce and/or comprehend language” and Sacks describes tonal agnosia as a state when “the expressive qualities of voices disappear - their tone, their timbre, their feeling, their entire character–while words (and grammatical constructions) are perfectly understood.”

Sacks says that while patients with aphasia cannot understand speech on the word level, “something has come, in its stead, has been immensely enhanced, so that–at least with emotionally-laden utterance–the meaning may be fully grasped even when every word is missed.”

As a consequence, he feels that it is impossible to lie to the aphasiac: “to any falsity or impropriety in bodily appearance or posture, aphasiacs are preternaturally sensitive. And if they cannot see one–this is especially true of our blind aphasiacs–they have an infallible ear for every vocal nuance, the tone, the rhythm, the cadences, the music, the subtlest modulations, inflections, intonations, which can give–or remove–verisimilitude to or from a man’s voice. In this, then, lies their power of understanding–understanding, without words, what is authentic or inauthentic.”

Patients with tonal agnosia, on the other hand, have to rely solely on the literal world of language, but can also get along with the aid of observing body language. However, in “The President’s Speech”, Sacks describes “Emily D.”,  a patient with tonal agnosia who is also losing her sight. As a result, Emily had to give “extreme attention to exactness of words and word use, and to insist that those around her did just the same.” He goes on to explain,

“She could less and less follow loose speech or slang–speech of an allusive or emotional kind–and more and more required of her interlocutors that they speak prose–‘proper words in proper places’. Prose, she found, might compensate, in some degree, for lack of perceived tone or feeling.

In this way she was able to preserve, even enhance, the use of ‘expressive’ speech–in which the meaning was wholly given by the apt choice and reference of words–despite being more and more lost with ‘evocative’ speech (where meaning is wholly given in the use and sense of tone).”

In an essay titled “Writing” included in The Dyer’s Hand, W.H. Auden claims that every poet has an inner censor to whom he or she submits work for approval and criticism. He goes on to recommend that “to keep his [the poet's] errors down to a minimum, the internal Censor to whom a poet submits his work in progress should be a Censorate. It should include, for instance, a sensitive only child, a practical housewife, a logician, a monk, an irreverent buffoon and even, perhaps, hated by all the others and returning their dislike, a brutal, foul-mouthed drill sergeant who considers all poetry rubbish.”

After reading “The President’s Speech”, I should like to nominate two new personae for participation in this censoring process: the blind tonal agnosiac and the blind aphasiac, each of whom could simultaneously critique the poem that has been–or is being–written, and both of whom the poet should aim to please.

This would mean that the poem should, on the one hand, be completely emotionally authentic in “every vocal nuance, the tone, the rhythm, the cadences, the music, the subtlest modulations, inflections, intonations”; there should be no emotional misstep.

However,  as Ezra Pound writes in “A Retrospect”, “if a man use ’symbols’ he must use them so that their symbolic function does not obtrude; so that a sense, and the poetic quality of the passage, is not lost to those who do not understand the symbol as such, to whom, for instance, a hawk is a hawk.” A poem has to work on this most literal of levels as well, not relying only on the authenticity of emotion, but remaining clear to the tonal agnosiac who can grasp only the literal meaning of the poem through “the apt choice and reference of words”.

The poem should be understandable both as an inarticulate emotional whole and on the literal level of the “verbal contraption”.

However, as Sacks writes, “We normals–aided, doubtless, by our wish to be fooled, were indeed well and truly fooled (‘Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur’). And so cunningly was deceptive word-use combined with deceptive tone, that only the brain-damaged remained intact, undeceived.”

Maybe it’s time to start passing our poems around at the psychiatric ward instead of in the MFA program? Would that be redundant? I guess the MFA program at least has access to booze. Is that enough of a definitive characteristic?

Although this may be old news to some, New Yorkers seem to be taking the poetry reading to a whole new level, one which includes fishnets, corsets and absinthe: 

“The ‘Madame’ presents a rotating cast of this city’s finest poets (both men and women) engaged in a night of surreal happenings, literary debauchery and private poetry readings. Here’s how it works: The poets play ‘whores,’ visitors play ‘johns’ (and are also encouraged to attend incognito!) but instead of physical intimacy, the poets offer the intimacy of their poetry by giving private, one-on-one readings in curtained-off areas. All of the resident ‘whores’ are available for private readings at any time during the event (for a small fee).”

–From the main page of The Poetry Brothel 

If only I’d known about this during the last AWP.

Poet/translator Geoff Brock (who read D.A. Powell’s poem for Linebreak) has a new translation of Pinocchio coming out from NYRB Classics. NYRB’s book designs are always beautiful, so this one is a definite preorder.

Disclosure: Brock is also my MFA thesis advisor.

(Link via Derek’s Facebook account.)