Lately I’ve been looking for poems of charity and gratitude — maybe because I feel so little of either this time of year. This recording of “Sweet Charity” by John Clellon Holmes is my favorite so far. (Holmes’s books of poetry are sadly out of print, though a few of his novels remain.) The poem was read by Donald S. Hays last year at the anniversary celebration for the Arkansas MFA Program in Creative Writing.

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I imagine myself, when I’m writing a poem, blind almost, feeling my way through the work with other senses, listening, pulling myself along, trying to say what I hear. My other art is all eye. When I’m taking a photograph I have the opposite sensation, one of being mute and having to gesture other-ward in order to say what I see.

Susan Sontag says, in her marvelous book, On Photography,

“A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir.”

Other than the slightly derogatory tone of “souvenir,” it seems to me much of the same could be said for poetry—we keep the aperture open and ready to catch, contain, and present the image, idea, feeling crossing before us—passing through us—ready to be urged into being as another thing, a new state. And poems, like photographs, I would argue, are also a backward-facing mirror, revealing as much about their maker as they express the made.

Sontag says later, and so beautifully,

“Photography is an elegiac art…All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.”

How about that idea of making something as a way of refusing or limiting experience? I’d love to hear what you think about this—or about anything I’ve written here this week.

After my last post, I had a reader send me an email asking, “What is poetry?” And rather than tackle that question myself, I did what all poets do when they’re stuck, I used an outside source. In this case, I used a lot of outside sources. And by “outside sources” I mean my dear friends and family. So, from philosophers to painters, here are few answers to that age-old, age-weary question of, “What in damnation is poetry in the first place.” Most responses were received in the first 24 hours and on the grounds that they remain anonymous. I’m sure there will be more to come, and I’ll post them as I continue to babble with my fingers on this here machine.

First, as way of introduction, a brief dialog on poetry from last nights dinner with one of my favorite poets in town from Alabama (names have been changed to protect the innocent animals):

Owl & Deer Discuss Poetry: A Short Play

Deer: “Wouldn’t it be nice to take a break from writing.”

Owl: “No.”

Deer: “Yeah, you’re right.”

Owl: “I know that I feel my best when I’m writing. It’s like, I think I want to just give up and then suddenly I’m writing a poem and it’s like, wow, life is awesome! Poets may be the only people in the world who could save themselves by writing their own suicide note.”

Deer: “It’s true, I love the new book I’m working on. I mean, it’s completely incomprehensible and unreadable, but I Iove it.”

Definitions of Poetry by Many Anonymous Outside Sources:

Painter & Caretaker on a Ranch:

It’s whatever a person wants it to be.

Playwright:

Poetry is like chocolate pudding. Chocolate pudding with a tiny bit of vanilla pudding swirled in.

Philosophy Professor:

Whereas philosophy works from the outside-in, poetry works from the inside out — therefore philosophy tells us nothing, and poetry everything.

Managing Editor & Poetry Editor, Independent Literary Press:

I think they identify some Gordian Knot in human nature, and tease apart, as much as possible, the tensions between opposing forces in human character. Good poetry books give us a sense that a solution or resolution is at least imaginable if not sustainable, but the beauty is often in the depiction of the dynamic pull between forces.

Poet & Mechanic:

The bitter answer: Poetry is the box we build for the rest of society to bury the English language in.

Maybe a better answers: The fuse we light to explode ourselves and rejoin the rest of the universe.

Poet & Art Director:

Poetry is one of those giant, clear, plastic bags you can put twenty-five sweaters, or two comforters, or ten winter coats in. Then you zip it up, and suck all the air out and the bag shrinks down to the size of a piece of toast. I.e. the world without all that unnecessary air.

Writer,  The New York Times:

Title: Poetry as Ad Copy

1) Poetry is an essay, exhausted.
2) Poetry is the heart’s essay, exhausted.
3) Poetry is the heart telling the head it’s exhausted.
4) Poetry is the heart telling the head to f*ck off.

Media Services Manager, San Francisco Symphony:

Poetry is: impressionist expression.

VP/Associate Publisher, Travel + Leisure:

Poetry is your heartstrings speaking in code.

Professional Actor:

I say poetry is a map to places in the heart that we have a hard time reaching, need to reach, and sometimes didn’t even know existed.

Poet & Professor of Poetry:

Well, since you’re asking me I’ll say what Thom Gunn said that W. H. Auden said: “memorable speech.”

Sculptor & Off-Track Betting Aficionado:

From OTB: Poetry is something best not left to prose. And it can also read “pros”.

P.S. Got DQed out of a thousand dollar super yesterday. Painful.

Stay tuned for more!

Hello, and thanks for having me. The few times I’ve been asked to guest blog somewhere, I’ve been extremely flattered and extremely petrified. Right now, it’s the petrified part I’ve got in my teeth. But nothing better than a room full of strangers to make you feel comfortable, right? (Hello, again.)

It’s taken me awhile to write this post, a clumsy draft of a poem came out first instead, and then there was dinner to be made, and then an old Dean Martin movie was on, and THEN, you won’t believe this—a brass band, full-outfits and all—went marching down the center of my street. So, of course, I had to go out, listen on the stoop for a while and clap as they marched by. An accidental soundtrack for the muggy Brooklyn night. It was oddly comforting, not the usual adjective for the loud horns clanging open the dark, but it wasn’t just the big sound they made. It was the on-lookers, all the open doors to the street, the families on their stoops. Women in their bathrobes, and little kids waving in t-shirts too big to walk in.

All of this happened in a matter of mere minutes. As if, the entire street was ready for any excuse to come out and cheer somebody on. Now, of course, this is the time of year when there are a lot of celebrations, the local Feast, the local church fundraiser and so forth, but what’s nice is that everyone seems prepared to run outside, at any minute, just as they are and whoop and yell.

It’s not just the surprise of it, but the brevity of it. I love a brass band, but a brass band outside your window for eight hours in the evening might lose its charm as you lose your patience. But they’re just walking by, passing through, you’ve got to quick, run out now, catch ‘em while you can. That’s the joy—the thick silence that surrounds it. The hole it leaves in the sky.

What it reminds me of…is poetry. That quick fix of something brief and powerful. The surprise of something finding you unexpectedly, moving you so much that you’ll run out in your yoga clothes, bare feet, and glasses on, give your neighbor a smile and dance awkwardly but without shame. And long after they’re gone, you can still hear the tuba in your chest, slowly changing your pulse to something livelier. That’s what good poetry does for me. Puts a big sound into the night and then lets silence suck it out so its absence reverberates still.

At least, that’s what I hope for, as a reader, as a writer, as someone just waiting for that first note of a brass band to keep me up just a little bit longer. But for now, good night. Hope a brass band comes your way soon, or at least a poem.

Nathan Simpson

Begin with a human figure—a silhouette of a human figure, for the moment, backlit by sunset—a human figure walking down a road. The road is a dirt road, hard-packed reddish-beige earth. Down its center a pair of bare ruts run, where passing cars and trucks and tractors have flattened, hardened, and buffed it to a kind of ceramic sheen. The person in view, however, does not walk in the rutted center of the road, but in the gravel on its narrow shoulder. One’s first interpretation of this fact might be that he—for let us now deploy the masculine pronoun—walks as he does for safety’s sake; but any traffic in a place as remote as this would be obvious even from a great distance, and if he so chose, he could walk the center of the road without danger either to himself or to the animal he leads on a length of hemp rope. It is more likely that his position is a concession to the animal than to any merely human consideration. The old brown mule follows the man at a distance of about six feet, walking entirely off the road, from where it stops often to snatch a mouthful; when the mule stops, the man stops, in a sort of enforced symbiosis of which the mule most often appears the dominant component. Still, the rope is long enough that the man could, if he chose, walk the center, and let the mule still graze the shoulder. Surely it would be easier to walk along one of the ruts, flat and hard as a sidewalk, than in the gravel along the road’s edge; yet surely walking as he does is a choice—dictated perhaps by a deference that precludes his seizing the center.

Though more than fifty years have passed since the time of which I write, if you stood today in the place where I locate the lens of my memory, the scene would be remarkably similar. Both man and mule are decades dead, the road remains still unpaved and fundamentally unaltered though likely now it is in worse repair than it was then.

About the length of hemp rope, who knows?

*

There are questions about everything I have described here. About the road, for instance, it is worth wondering when it came to be here, and how, and especially why. It is a rural road maintained—however intermittently and poorly—by the county board of supervisors, and yet is serves, almost entirely, a single farm. The road is an ovoid loop appended to a slightly wider main road that runs several miles before terminating in a blacktop road that extends another fifteen miles to the nearest (tiny) town. The loop was a three-mile detour, so to speak, through the farm, and was used by almost no one other than those who lived there—all members of one extended family plus their employees. Is it usual for county governments to build and maintain roads for such constituencies and narrow purposes? (more…)

Poet T.R. Hummer posted an interesting discussion on greatness in poetry and the brain chemicals associated with gambling that may explain a couple of things.