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.