I've decided to suspend my weekly New Yorker fiction reviews indefinitely. A few reasons for this. The main one is that I had hoped they would generate discussions about contemporary fiction. They haven't. Plus the magazine routinely puts out novel excerpts without giving a heads up about it. That's lame and wreaks havoc with any attempted analysis. Also, it's starting to feel like a chore, and if you've ever seen the doghair tumbleweeds gliding through our house, you know I don't like chores. And I reckon I miss the old workshop and thought it would be like that. And finally, Nate's comment in the "What did you read this summer?" post --
Why doesn't anyone read poetry? Is it so bad? So insular and unapproachable? I thought this was a literary blog... Call me crazy, but last time I looked, literature went well beyond New Yorker fiction.-- is still haunting me. Because he's right. Why don't I read poetry? I think because I don't feel up to understanding it properly. Because I never really learned to read it. Because it makes me impatient. It's like some exotic cheese meant to be savored morsel by small morsel, when all I've ever done is gobble up cheddar and monterrey jack and, it must be admitted, Velveeta.
Also, the world seems to be going to hell, and it feels indulgent to relentlessly keep on reading and writing about reading and writing no matter what or when.
Fiction's easy to read for pleasure. Right now I'm cruising through The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and loving it. I look forward to picking it up, as if I'm picking up a remote control for a movie in my mind. That has never happened to me with poetry, and I think that's sad, and it means something is wrong, and I've decided to try and fix it.
So I'm starting with the Norton Anthology of Poetry. I'm up to Shakespeare right now. I'm nibbling the exotic cheese a bit at a time.
I loved when Chad was enlightening all of us with his witty responses to New Yorker poetry. But again, there is more to the literary scene than the New Yorker. I had merely thought it would be a good touchstone, something we might all have in common, a starting point to launch conversations about what is working in good writing today and why. But I'm finding you can't make a blog do what you want. Instead, it stubbornly goes about its business as it pleases, occasionally shining with brilliance, often sleeping, sometimes shuffling around grumpy or confused or angry or indignant. It just is what it is, and stays that way. Like a friend.
I'll probably still post story reviews when I get excited about something, or angry or grumpy or confused or indignant about something. I'm eyeing the Ann Beattie story in this week's with hope and anticipation. And last week's was really good, in case you missed it. But now I have to go have a plantar's wart on my heel looked at.
End soliloquy.
(See? I would never had thought of that word without the recent Shakespeare infusion.)
28 comments:
I read a ton of poetry these days because I teach a ton of it; my students tend to engage with it more wholly than with fiction.
I consider myself a poetry convert since Iowa, and I think it has to do with finally giving up the idea that poetry exists to be "gotten." I had known this wasn't true previous to that, but meeting and chilling with poets made it click.
I've sort of regretted making that comment everyday after doing so because I didn't really want to sound like such a crabby lout, & really I'm not, I'm not soooo bothered that no one (& I mean NO ONE) really cares about poetry, at least that grants us a bit of liberty! 'cause if no one's looking who cares what you do or how much you touch yourself or where, for that matter.... but on the other hand, I do sometimes want to be advocate for the art, an ambassador, if you will, & in response to Grendel's comment, I want to pipe in and say, yo, it IS pleasurable, and that there's a huge variety of work, some of which snobs like me and Chad will disparage, but none the less, more or less "poetic" & worthy of a reader's attention; and furthermore, I want to say that even with difficult & weird poetry--generally the kind I like--part of the pleasure, and I do sincerely mean pleasure, is the disorientation that comes with encountering a body of charged language which, although is written in yr native tongue, seems to be pointing its signs and signals in all the wrong directions. That, at least, is the initial marvel. If it's good work, layers and layers of pycho-linguistic-subconsious-symbolic-lyrical-geological-secrets-&-music exist beneath this surface. And one other point, the point is, I think, that in general, you just can't read poetry the way you read prose, because one has to be so aware of all the other weird shit going on, weird shit that frequently changes an "easier" content-based reading.
As for the politics thing, well, that might be a long discussion. I do believe, however, we need the lyric--that moment of extreme individuation, subjectivity and interiority--to counterbalance the political, the social, the wordly--for we can only approaches these issues with our best sense of human-ness if we are constantly reminded of the violent contradictions that exist in subjective experience and the collective life... Yikes, that's high falut'n, come down of that peak, cowboy...
And finally, congrats to Corbin for braving the might Norton. One word of advice: don't go chronological! It's not a linear story!
how do you edit comments?
read "be advocate" as "be an advocate"
read "the might Norton" as "the mighty Norton"
I thought you were being poetic.
Ba dum dum.
Thank you! Goodnight!
No more fiction review? Did the Atlantic Monthly staff take over Earthgoat? Are you going to start excerpting Christopher Buckley's grocery lists?
This is a really interesting conversation--I'm with Grendorbindel--the poetry I like and take the time to 'get' is worth every moment and every iota of extra focus that arriving at that state of contentment requires. I would love to do it much more often and know for sure that I would gain hugely from it--but no one ever taught me to read the stuff, neither by rule nor by example.
I think this matter of 'getting it' is worth exploring, or at least, trying to define a little. Are we meaning "to get" as "to form a concise yet comprehensive, irreducible theory of the poem, such that it can be 'explained' to others in a reasonable amount of time"? Because nah, we know you can't do that. But on the other hand, if "get it" means "to arrive at some kind of holistic, perhaps difficult-to-articulate yet certainly coherent understanding or at least emotional recognition"---well shit, if I can't get that, then what am I sitting here reading this for?
Reading poetry must employ her·me·neu·tics, musn't it? Since reading is after all a process of interpreting. Making sense of symbol-sign-image-sound and alla that good stuff? Nate-dogg, to be frank, your fancy blue-state english paragraph was greek to this roman--I don't know what that violent cotradiction you're talking about is--do I?--or that moment of extreme individuation. Is that the same as an 'ah-ha!' moment? Where you suddenly feel that you...uh...'get' what you're trying to get, and that you have witnessed your own brain folding new wrinkles into itself that will never disappear? Because I like that kind of moment, and that's what happens to me when I sit with a poem for a while. But yo, on the reals, it's gotta be a pretty long while.
And possum and pete--I'm too stupid not to be clever. What does that mean? Do I really have to let go of the feeling of wanting to understand? That's like the holy grail of feelings in my world. Let go of that and I'm one of the 13% who thinks Bush handled Katrina well.
That's mostly what I want to know...I'm not saying poetry is too hard or anything...just that I think that I honestly never learned (or better yet, never taught myself) to read it the right way.
Hey! Since we're taking a short hiatus from the fiction reviews (moment of silence), maybe we can like, discuss some poems? Grendilicious--what say we pick a poem from the Norton and these dudes can teach us a little something?
(I say dudes because there's no poetry chicks cept for possum on here and she's from our class.)
P.S. I know there are a few other beautiful ladies of poetry that are participants on this particular internet weblog. They just ain't never post shit.
P.P.S. Grendelbaum--Velveeta line? Brilliant.
I teach a lot of my composition classes at Malcolm X as poetry appreciation classes. One of first things I tell them is that the point isn't something hidden, it's something intrinsic to every word in every language: sound and meaning, both at once.
Then I demonstrate the point by having half the class write down an adjective and the other half write down a noun. I then call on them in adj/noun pairs. We get weird combinations, but ones we can all "see": "Purple sandwich," "greasy house," etc., all of which mean something (even if it doesn't resemble reality) and make interesting sounds.
For me, and I saw this as a horrible poet with little formal education about poetry reading or writing, this is the point in its entirety. Nothing but language can be sound and meaning at the same time (at least so precisely so), and no other form of linguistic expression focuses itself so essentially on this intersection. It's a point so basic, so plainly reflexive, there's a common assumption that it is more complicated than that. But the thing is this: it is complicated, infinitely so, because language is infinitely complicated. It's everything and nothing at once.
As for cleverness- I think that's a good point, and I think it should apply to fiction as well, and perhaps all art. I'm not saying you can't be funny, or clever in places. But to me, too much cleverness is like too much irony: a millstone. It weighs you down when you should be trying to levitate.
One more thing- CJ- I agree, you might as well look for meaning in everything. I would even say that we generally should look for meaning in everything. (watch out- lapsed Catholic alert). We can't meditate on everything all the time; we need short hands to function. But that doesn't mean the shorthands are beautiful in their own right or really anything more than utilitarian.
Well, I'm sure I'll never be able to fully give up the idea of trying to "get" a poem. But I'll try. I suppose the part of getting it that should in fact happen must include actual understanding of what the poem means. That seems minimal, and without that I don't see why I'm reading the poem. But I don't know that I'd ever be able to say I got the poet's intention -- just what they said.
And to clarify: it's the "Shorter" edition Norton I'm tackling -- a mere 600-odd pages.
Brando, no, the Atlantic Monthly hasn't taken over. FEMA has. But I have said too much already.
As for Never Be Clever, that sounds great, but somebody forgot to tell Shakespeare. The thing I enjoyed about his selection in there was the cleveress. But maybe poetry has changed immensely since then.
Here's my question: do fiction and poetry have ANYTHING to do with each other? I mean, they are both made of words, yes. But a skyscraper is made of glass and steel, and so is my French press coffeemaker, and yet they have few or no points of convergence. It's just not the same thing. It's like fiction is a film, and a poem is a photograph. Or something. The process of reading them doesn't feel even remotely the same to me.
Oh yeah I kind of misread that part of possum's comment. I thought she meant Never Be Clever as applied to READING poems, not writing them. As in, stop trying to 'get' stuff all the time.
See how never clever I am?
I think it is absolutely a communion in poetry, just as it is in fiction. I guess I just think that this communion is always delicate and fleeting whatever form it takes. It's more obviously so in poetry than in fiction, I think. Why is another question.
Maybe it is because there are so many conventions in fiction-- more than I could ever hope to count or name-- that we've sort of all agreed upon as meaningful and useful in certain ways. But I imagine those are present in poetry, too, but as a relative novice I'm less aware of them.
I also think that the confidence you speak of is learned. Someone with an MFA in fiction is probably going to be pretty confident when they read a story. As they should be.
This conversation reminds me of the WCW poem about the wheelbarrow. It has no "point" that I can discern, but I still like it. It's an anti-point, I think; everything depends on everything, and everything is meaningful in the way we've been talking about, even a wet wheelbarrow.
That makes good sense. When I finish a novel, you're right, I don't ask "What was this person trying to do?"--because I'm asking myself that at a subconscious level the entire time I'm reading it, so by the end I already know what I think, pretty much, and the only reason to put it into words would be that I feel the need to solidify the lesson in my mind, since I think it's easier to remember stuff that has been put into words (just like it's easy to remember a particular state of emotion or type of thought by thinking of a poem that corresponds to it).
So yeah, I think we're all agreeing here, kind of. The lament we couple of Phillistines are making is somewhat akin to saying, "I'm so BAAAAD at flying airplanes...why am I so bad??" when we've never really tried to fly an airplane.
Course another interesting question is, when and why did you poets develop your affinity for poetry, when most of us have had similar educations, have at least semi-literate parents, love to read, etc---and why didn't we?
Probably ya'll had more exposure to poetry and poetry lovers somehow, and likely many of you were ultra-wide readers in your yoothz, so you could discover stuff on your own. Speaking for myself, I was not an intellectually curious young'un, nor an ultra-wide reader. I read books my mom gave me, pretty much (she's a librarian)--and she never gave me much poetry. Nor did I have a single good English teacher in high school, let alone someone who could point me to Whitman and Blake or WCW.
So basically what I'm saying is, you poets had more priveleged upbringings than we fiction writers. You were born with silver scrolls in your hands, where we had to work hard for our literaryness. And now you accuse us of taking your jobs?? The stones on you.
i write fiction and i read a fair bit of poetry because i enjoy it. i can't tell you why i enjoy it or when i started enjoying it but i also watch about one movie a year, so maybe we have a finite amount of art forms we can enjoy (i don't really mean that).
two reasonably contemporary poets who i think fiction types might find interesting and easy to appreciate are james wright and philip levine. prose poetry is an interesting gateway drug, and for that i definitely recommend charles simic's _the world does note end_. our boy robert hass--both his lyric poetry and prose poetry--might grab you, too.
I'm a fictionist myself, but for me it was two things:
1) On the whole, poetesses are hot. In college, some friends and I started reading some poetry (Lorca, Bukowski, Yeats) so we'd have an excuse to talk to them. Most of the time, this strategy didn't work. The few times it did, I got my heart broke, which led to a second realization about poetesses.
2) Teaching lit at Iowa. We had to do a poetry unit and I knew that when my students said, "I don't get it," I had to have a meaningful response. I learned grammar that way too. I've gotten better at a lot of things as a teacher simply because I've had to.
There's a good review of Eco's new book about beauty in this month's Harper's. The author, Arthur Krystal, does a good job of summing up a pretty big subject. Anyway, one of the passages from the review put me in mind of this thread. Here it is:
"There is no shame in confessing that part of the pleasure we derive from modern art is the satisfaction of "understanding" it. Pleasure, of course, is a loaded term, but not one we can ignore. It is, after all, what first draws us to art. The sensible George Santayana observed that beauty begins with sensation: what we like immediately, and especially what children like immediately, is the best proof of sincerity [I take this to mean the sincerity of the artist]. And when "sincerity is lost, and a snobbish ambition is substituted, bad taste comes in." But so does ambiguity. Standards of taste cannot be limited to what is immediately apparent. Hume understood this when he proposed the "disinterestedness" that comes from experience [that's a kind of analytical eye that is uninfluenced by a sensual reaction]. At some point, if one makes a fetish of art, the appeal of immediacy wanes, and artwork becomes significant rather than beautiful."
Knawmean?
I'll check out some Frank O'Hara. Enough of my friends in college had a line of his as their email sig that he must appeal to the dawning poetic sense.
As for the 10 readers 10 reactions thing--it reminds me very specifically of the teacher in high school who said, "There's no right answer when it comes to interpreting poems--everyone's reaction is valid." Which in a deeper sense is incredibly true, but in the superficial sense she meant it in, it couldn't be more wrong. I.e. there is a right answer to every poem, but it's not '1789' or 'St. Clementine' or 'To get to the other side'--it's more like an answer set, right? Where the answer, which is less an answer than a set of relevant assocations, falls within some kind of boundaries. Sometimes the boundaries are pretty limited, as with ""The Owl and the Pussycat", and other times they're closer to unlimited, as with the red chicken poem. But your reaction isn't valid unless it falls firmly within the answer set.
I'm verging on stating the obvious here, which is that everyone's reaction to things will be different in the sense that the seventy-eight billion neuronal pathways that light up in their brains when they read a poem will not be identical, even though the general shape of the reaction should be similar. When I read To His Coy Mistress, I think of Jenny Adams from the 10th grade. You think of Hilda Blumenthal from kindergarten--but Marvell got us both to think of the right girl.
And the differences in 'valid' reaction will be even much more variant than that, but they've still got to be substantially similar or else someone is misunderstanding something somewhere. Same as in a novel.
And I think Charlemagne in your second post you're right to dispel the notion of a 'unified' meaning in which all the parts correspond neatly as they would in a scientific theory. Contradiction and misalignment are basic to the way our minds relate to the world.
So yeah, no, yeah...have we made any progress here? I still haven't read any more poetry, despite having spent a couple of hours writing about it on this thread. God blogging's great.
Ha! I just read the sequal to the owl and the pussycat, which Lear didn't finish. Man it totally sucks!!
http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/pw/cop.html
I was thinking about this on the bus yesterday: We tell stories; what do we "do" with poems?
I think it's a distinction worth making: poetry aims to describe preverbal consciousness in language, whereas fiction is a little more transparent: it exists in time in a continuum of "and then," it always has a teller who accounts for his telling.
In response to Pete's last comment: Would it be adequate to think of the difference between narrative & lyric genres as: event vs. state of mind?
Potentially misleading, I suppose, since we all know good fiction entails state(s) of mind, i.e. p.o.v. or simply the poetic sense of the language; and we all know that poems frequently contain tangible "events" -- but still, this distinction seems applicable.
Oh yeah, since he's here already, one great thing that Frank O'Hara said, which I think can inform our discussion of "meaning" or "getting it": in a poem, "you just go on your nerve." In case anyone care's for context (!), that's in "Personism: A Manifesto," a wonderful prose parody of avant-garde manifestos.
Allow me to suggest that you read the post with fresh eyes, fraulein possum. I bet that if cj inadvertantly stuck cj's analytical phallus too roughly into the depths of the line break, it was not cj's intention to cause consternation. Remember, you're dealing with pagans here, those who have only heard god spoken of by the priests, but who've never seen Him for themselves. With grace, every pagan can be saved...
And if anything I've posted has given offense...well, you know where to find me.
Wasn't poetry originally sung? And wasn't rhyme employed so they could remember the words better? Surely that is the origin of the line in poetry, that the end of each line contained a word whose predictable rhyme would trigger the singer's memory in time to keep going -- for hours, if necessary. Think Homer. And even with rhyme modernly excised, the remnant of line makes poetry easier to memorize than prose (at least for me).
This reminds me of the time a certain someone insinuated in a certain tone that myself and a few others around here are too intellectual to write fiction. But really, what I think he meant was his kind of fiction.
Not that you are being anything but nice about it, CJ. I've enjoyed your comments here and at BAF.
But anyway, I think there are a lot of fiction writers who read poetry: are we not reading it like fiction writers? I don't know how much scrutiny such an idea could withstand. I'm far more interested in this point about how it affects one's fiction writing.
For what it's worth, I read poety and do not write "beautiful language" in my fiction. Anyone who ever claims my language is "beautiful" hasn't read it and is just looking for something nice to say.
Just ran into this in Leaves of Grass, 1855 Edition, and thought it was insightful and relevant to what we're talking about:
Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? Have you reckoned the earth much?
Have you practiced so long to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and the sun ... there are millions of suns left,
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand ... nor look through the eyes of the dead ... nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.
I was reading Mary Oliver's "Rules for the Dance" today (I use it as a textbook) and maybe that would be a good place for people to start. The book is about metrical poetry, but makes an excellent case for the importance of breath, something in all uses of language, but particularly conscious in poetry. The more breath is the point for me, the less is "getting" anything.
Has anyone pointed out the divergent reputations of the poetry and fiction programs at Iowa? It seems relevant. They really couldn't be more different, and I wonder if that caricatures the question a little bit. The archetypal Iowa fiction writer and the archetypal Iowa poet might as well be yin and yang.
I'm sad to have come to this so late and could hardly begin to address much of it. I'd suggest Koch excellent book "Making Your Own Days" as a great place for anyone to start who feels he or she doesn't "get" poetry.
One of the clarifying points for me (I think I first read it in 2000 or something) is that poetry is a foregin language. I originally took this as a metaphor, but I now think it is literal.
Pete, what do you mean by the divergent reputations of the poetry program and fiction program at Iowa? I'm a little in the dark about this and wanted to contribute to this extra long post.
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