Progress is a side trip

I keep pushing, push that poem along. Then the next one pops unbidden into sight. Grinding the poems of other poets into brain dust results in picturesque mobs of detail someday synthesized.

And then I read Chaucer and I want to just drop everything and read him instead. So musical, so weird, such cunning words, so familiar and unfamiliar:

Of al my lyf, syn that day I was born,
So gentil ple in love or other thyng
Ne herde nevere no man me beforn,
Who that hadde leyser and connyng
For to reherse hire chere and hire spekyng;
And from the morwe gan this speche laste
Tyl dounward drow the sonne faste.

-The Parliament of Fowls

Bias against long poems, bias against micropoetry

Just some stray thoughts on the State of Poetry

1. It seems definitely to be a Thing that there is a bias against the long poem. Poets apologize if they are introducing a poem longer than one page. Why is this? I have heard it said of Sylvia Plath's "Tulips", "Gee, this is a LONG poem!" (It is not).  Poets through the ages: Homer, Horace, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Gwendolyn Brooks, Edna St Vincent Millay have all written voluminous, even book-length poems. Wot's uh, the deal?

2. There seems to be a bias (at least in 'the Academy') against micro-poetry; that its not real poetry, not serious poetry. Seriously? (except for haiku). It has also been said to me that the 8 line triolet is too much of a straight-jacket for a current-day poet. Really?

So, we are writing to the Short Attention Span, just not to the tweet?

Stella, Infinite

Stella, Infinite.

I started with the lyrics to Stella by Starlight (the jazz standard) and wrote interpretative, wholly alternative lyrics. These, I revised many times over (perhaps 20 revisions) until I had a poem that I felt was closest to what I wanted to express, what I was feeling. (Stella has figured in many of my previous poems).  In the last revision, I worked to make the poem less inverted and more conventional to read, trying to draw a balance between these two poles.  At that point, I settled on the title, which I thought captured the overall drift of the poem.

I was feeling less than confident in the poem, rating it as the least among the 12 or so I had queued up for possible inclusion in my first transmission for review by my MFA adviser. I decided to take it for review to the workshop group I belong to, not knowing what to expect. They are a very analytic bunch, very fair. Surprising to me, they were wholeheartedly in favor of the poem (with the usual quibbles over my inconsistent punctuation (this is a failing). My confidence in the poem rose. I like the poem, just wasn't sure if it was too saccharine or woozy.  So I guess its a pretty good romantic lyric and I will include it in the first transmission as 1 of the 5 poems I am asked to send along.

I might even submit it somewhere, if I can determine who might publish such a poem. (clueless)

Annie Dillard

So, an assignment was to read "The Writing Life" by Annie Dillard.

query to my colleagues:

I'm not feeling this book at all. Its like listening to people whining on NPR.

I'm only 15 pages in, but I'm getting nothing. 

So far I got:

1. Throw stuff away

2. You don't know what your writing means til next year

3. Writers work left to right (I don't really agree)

4. Emotional involvement in your work is bad (also, disagree)

5. She doesn't like Paradise Lost (?)  (I do)

6. How to catch a bee.

7. A lady catches a jackfish using her own thighmeat as bait.

Armando answered, saying he found it fairly conventional, but was putting it aside after reading about half the book, to focus on reading poetry.  This seemed right to me as I was getting close to throwing the book at the wall after reading about "one of my many studies" in Cape Cod. I really lost interest after reading that.

Dillard seems too cute by 250%. I have to admit that I have always been put off by her after she titled a book "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek". Sheesh. Maybe I'll give her another chance in another lifetime.

Gender Genre Adaptation Translation Kafkaesque?

One of my projects currently underway is a verse adaptation of Franz Kafka's In the Penal Colony. I am interested in seeing what emerges from this transformation. On top of this, I am swapping the gender of the major character, The Traveler, substituting a female into this role. I'm interest in how that changes the narrative.

This is proving to be a somewhat difficult endeavor, even (maybe especially) to think about. I am considering just plunging ahead, adapting intuitively, rather than analytically. This would make it a work of imagination, rather than of applied research. I am unsure there is any research to apply, in this case. I am looking and I have asked my modernist, women's studies professor for texts that might help me think about this.

I don't know, I guess I should prevail upon my advisor for advice.

Some deeper concerns with my project are with Kafka. It is a given for me that this is the text I want to adapt. Kafka's seemingly affectless prose is a challenge to adhere to in an adaptation without spilling my own biases and personality into it.  The story is incredibly relevant and has been so over the eras that have passed since it was written.

Again, I think the only way to proceed is to intuitively process Kafka and the tale and render it in my words, through Kafka's characters (one of whom I have given a sex change). This, I hope will shine light on the difference of poetry to prose and gender on narrative and meaning.

The tale (as noted by Frank Zappa) reflects integrally on the, 60s in the US, as well as other eras, like the fall of the Soviet Union, the current American period and other periods. In short, it is a powerful essential rendering of a universal situation. It describes a failing political structure in terms of human costs.

Anyway, I could use some basic models of adaptation of this nature and gender substitution of this nature, but I'm not sure they exist.

Thinking about Edna's sonnets

My critical piece this month is on Edna St Vincent Millay's Collected Sonnets, an underappreciated artistic edifice that more or less echoes the heft of other sonnet collections (Shakespeare, Sidney, Petrarch, E.B. Browning). She starts as a formalist and stays there fairly much, somewhat varying rhyme schemes later on and writing a few tetrameter sonnets. Not much formal experimentation over a fairly long sonnet career.

However, the strength of her poetry gradually amps up until in the final sequences her insights become more and more subtle, penetrating and meditative. She writes extremely involving love sonnets and varies her background subject matter into ecological, evolutionary and geological musings.

Where she starts as a woman plagued by the male gaze and concerned with her own temporal physical beauty she gradually becomes an independent, assured and masterful poet. 

She is a uniquely early 20th C figure, with some of her word choices looking backward to 19th C diction and her ideas and subjects (equal rights for women, sexual freedom, ecology) looking forward to the present day.

My focus in thinking about ESVM's Collected Sonnets is as a model and tutor for my own work.  I'm thinking in terms of secondary aesthetic concerns (book layout, font, binding), organizational concerns (sonnet sequencing, numbering) and poetic effects (repetition within a single line, formalism, plain language usage, imagery, the tetrameter sonnet, refrain-like repetition). Her choices seem very deft and well-imagined and are instructive for my current sonnet project (80+ sonnets and counting.)

Her choices and consistency seem good models to ponder in arranging a book of sonnets. I really like her sequence of poems when she was living in a rustic house in the country. Her meditations in this section recall Wordsworth and Thoreau a bit, yet are unique rural observations.

I guess I should get started on writing my critical piece after a few admiring passes through those sonnets of Edna's I flagged for further enjoyment.

provisional Aesthetics

Do aesthetic choices like which font to use in poetry still matter, or have these secondary aesthetic choices slipped into a narrow, black and white flat world of Times New Roman?

For that matter, since we may have lost the connection to handwriting and fanciful typeset, does the artistry of a fine hand count for anything? I still admire beautiful script handwriting when I happen to see it over someone's shoulder, but that is really the only time I am likely to see it.

What have we lost in losing hand-lettering? I'm thinking that some art and meaning is lost in translation. There are different neurological phenomena in play in poetic composition when writing by hand than there are when composing on a keyboard. It is difficult to measure, but I think that poetry has changed in this transition.

Also, what would it mean to the poetry reader to read poetry written in native hand or in calligraphic lettering? Is this an impossible idea, due to modern publisher selection, editing and computer composition? We seem to have shifted performance strictly to reading aloud as performance.

Of course, one may utilize the broadside convention for more 'artful' treatments. Self-publishing is another way to publish a more expressive treatment.

Back to the question, does this matter, and if so to whom? Perhaps interleaving handwritten text into a book would be a provisional way to accomplish the restoration.

3rd day of independent study.

Adjusting to MFA solo activities after the high-pitch of the residency in Vermont. I seem to have seamlessly entered this new phase - it is simplified by the circumstances of 1) no job  2) no classroom courses to manage. I follow my own nose pretty much and hit the five deadlines for 'packets', poetry writing and critical essay writing.  I could do this in my sleep, but am pushing myself as much as possible to up my game in both areas. I have additional writing goals and also have a pretty significant reading list to wade into.

My first packet is Feb 1. So, I'm looking forward to that. I am tip-toeing into aesthetics reading (and thinking) and working extensively with my journal. I am three days in. Pretty good. Really getting some mileage out of Edna St Vincent Millay.

Reading List  

1. Ovid – Metamorphoses, Robert Graves Mythology
2. King James Bible
3. Aeschylus – the Oresteia
4. Catullus – the Poems
5. Chaucer – Poems (other than Canterbury Tales
6. Sonnets – Sir Phillip Sidney, Shakespeare, Edna Millay: Collected Sonnets, Petrarch, others
7. French Poetry (French Symbolists and others)
8. Ai: Vice: Selected Poems
9. Kay Ryan
10. Annie Dillard: the Writing Life
11. A.R. Ammons: Garbage
12. Terrance Hayes: How to be Drawn
13. Richard Hugo: Triggering Town
14. Larry Levis: Selected Poems
15. Philip Levine: The Simple Truth
16. C.K. Williams: Tar
17. Max Jacob: Selected Poems
18. Nicano Parrar: Poems and Anti-Poems
19. Ada Limon: Bright Bad Things
20. Amy Clampitt: Selected Poems
21. Natalie Diaz: When My Brother Was an Aztec
22. Donald Justice: Collected Peoms
23. Alberto Rios
24. Juan Felipe Herrera
25. Gary Soto: Collected Poems
26. Etheridge Wright: The Essential
27. Charles Wright
28. Garrett Hongo
29. Victoria Chang: Barbie Chang
30. William Stafford: 100 Essential Poems
31. Carolina Ebeid
32. Kelli Anne Noftle
33. Amy Lawless
34. Carol Ann Duffy
35. Douglas Kearney
36. Major Jackson

Aesthetics, Poetics

1. Aristotle Poetics
2. Critical Writings: Apollinaire
3. Heidegger
4. Derek Attridge (Meter and Rhythm, Quantitative Verse)
5. Babette Deutcsh: Poetry Handbook
6. Mary Oliver: Poetry Handbook
7. Ron Padgett: Handbook of Poetic Forms
8. Jane Hirschfield: Nine Gates (Entering the Mind of Poetry)
9. Best: Cognitive Psychology

One of today's draft poems:  Winterfall, shattered sky

Let winter find me if it will

wind snow ice

everywhere

miles of white horizon

gray sky black-edged clouds

Let winter pursue round and around

your silvering senses blocked

to ice-cannon you to a legibility

you were aftering in laughter

where the emptiness is filling up

Let me find winter in my eyes

goggle-clad searching lens-like

thing-unknown thoroughfare time

blurring white sibilant mist

things transformed silent

You do see things not there, really

air phantasms arcing invisibly invincibly

your ancient visions of paradise

suddenly splintering vertically

will you note that you know not

deifications as they pause

and I think you and I know

the nature of things not churning

as snow kingdoms slowly fall

shards filling skies straightening

icily lofting our practical sheets

like a waved blanket over a bed

Big Dinnertime Literary Discussion

After an abbreviated day culminating in graduation of the 2018 class we wound down after the reception. Later on, the hangers-on who are leaving in the morning met up in the Dewey Cafeteria for dinner and some last literary discussions.

A lot of my first semester buddies - the stylish Armando, awesome Becky the Mountain Climber, Miles the DC teacher and Lauren the news reporter all got into some stimulating discussions of the best way to approach workshops, gender politics, African American poetry, political poetry, women novelists and a lot more.

We were all feeling ready to discuss literature like MFA in Writing students are likely to do. It was hard to let go.

Chance meeting at the VCFA Library

So much stuff happened today PEOPLE-wise at Residency, I doubt my ability to remember or record it. This item(below) is captured in email form.  I met an Indian-American lady poet at the library who was visiting the program and told me a tale (of which I have recorded most, but not all). My mind is pretty stuffed with anecdotes today. This lady, Surekha (Sue) Vijh, asked me to prompt her with her own story, that she might be enabled to create a memoir.  Forgive any grammar errors made in the haste of capturing this. Here is the tale:

Hi Surekha (Sue)

It was great meeting and talking with you today. Your stories are very interesting and magical.

Here is the story as best as I remember it (some of the time sequence may be wrong)

Sue was reading India news online in the library when I went in to update some poetry on my flash drive.

We started discussing India a little bit and gradually she told me how she came to be sitting next to me at

VCFA as a campus visitor.  Ann Cardinal had kept requesting her to come and visit during a residency and

provided a room and access to lectures and events and finally she decided to come and visit right during

the coldest time in many years.  Unfortunately, her train broke down and it took 20 hours to arrive from 

Washington DC, but after a day or so of adjusting, she got at and started visiting events.

Sue began by showing me her poetry books online and talking about poetry events she has been part of

on three continents (!)   Her story unrolled slowly and the more she talked, the more spellbinding her story

became.  She laughed and told me that Ann Cardinal had said that she was afraid she was going to full

off her chair, listening to Sue's story.  

Sue is a journalist, a published poet with awards from Nuyorican Poets in NYC, readings and events in 

DC and all over the East Coast of the US.  She has a weekly television show, numerous reviews on Amazon

and other sites on the internet and a very enviable recent career as a public poet.

By this time she really had my attention, and we were laughing, talking and having a very good time sharing

the late afternoon in the very comfortable library.  I shared a copy of some of my current poems with her, not

knowing that her story was just beginning to get good.

Sue is a very good raconteur and storyteller, by the way. I had seen her around campus and we had said hello

several times, but she seemed shy.  I can tell you now, she isn't really shy, she just needed someone to strike

up a conversation.  Once you get her to talk, she is very jolly and easy to listen to.  And, like I said, she's a 

little bit magical.

Little by little, details of her life in the UK (Scotland and England) began to come out. She had attended Cambridge

after coming over from England and had published a book of poetry at age 19. (She has also lived in Edinburgh

and has attended all the poetry festivals over there to which I aspire to attend). 

This is where it gets interesting.

When she was a girl and just started writing poetry in New Delhi, a poorly-dressed Scottish fellow came up to

her and asked her about what she was writing.  She showed him her handwritten poetry and he asked to copy

them.  Although the people in the library she was in suggested she shouldn't do this, she didn't mind and allowed

him to copy them.  The old fellow seemed nice, but seemed down on his luck.

Some time later, an offer came from him to publish her poems. He was apparently a publisher and had sent her

an official letter and offer to publish.  She discussed this with her father and they agreed it was probably okay and

she had signed the letter and sent her poems off to Scotland for publication.

Her father had previously advised her that poetry was no way to make a living, so she went to college in New

Delhi to study journalism.  Her father doubted the safety of this profession, but allowed his talented daughter to

make this choice.

When she received her book upon its publication, she was counseled  by a family member to send it to the President of India to publish

in India. She and her father doubted this, but decided why not?  So she sent it to the President for his consideration.

The President read her book and decided to publish it, calling her to the palace to celebrate the occasion.  She was

still a young girl, but now an acclaimed, published international poet.

And so it came, that one day a letter from the publisher's daughter came to her offering to pay for a visit to Scotland

as his guest.  Again, she conferred with father, and it was decided that she would go off to the UK for a visit.

She wrote back and soon enough, a letter came from the man's daughter with a ticket for her journey.

Things were about to become even more auspicious for Sue, the young girl with an apparent genius for poetry and a gift for crossing over the threshold into rare literary territory.

In Scotland, she was met by a car and driver and to her surprise was taken to a castle. The publisher turned out to

be the Lord of a Castle and a very rich, titled landowner.  She was taken in and greeted by the daughter, who told her how delighted her father (now in poor health) was to have her as a guest in his house.  The daughter showed her to her room and asked to rest up, bathe and come down for dinner with the Lord and the family.

The Lord was weak and confined to a wheelchair, but was indeed delighted to see her there. They renewed their

acquaintance and she was asked to stay for a few weeks and enjoy the stay in the Castle and on the grounds. She

was given horseback riding lessons and enjoyed her stay, learning many things and talking to the Lord when he was well enough to visit. The Lord told her he would see her in another place.  She understood him to mean by this, the Forever.  This did not sadden either of them as they accepted that this was so and these unlikely friends and associates in Art parted for the last time.

Sometime after returning home to father and middle class home in New Delhi, she received notice that the Lord had passed on.  His daughter, dismayed, stated that the Lord had left Sue one-fifth of his estate. The daughter expressed her displeasure with this in the letter

Again conferring with her father on matters new and unexpected to them both, Sue decided to decline the generous bequest and request only an artwork (of the daughter's choosing) from the estate.  She was bequeathed instead, a work by Pablo Picasso.

After this, Sue went to school in Cambridge, studying with Philip Larkin, whose poetic genius and teaching ability

has stood her in good stead as a poet ever since.  Mr Larkin advised her she would be a poet indeed when she was able to remove the use of "I" and "me", from her poetry.  Sue now advises that this bit of advice made the difference in her artistic career.

She went on to publish her poetry in 16 languages and traveled all over Europe - to Germany, Norway, Spain and 

elsewhere, appearing for readings and talks.

There is much more to Sue's stories after her early literary and life adventures and I have not adequately captured her story, but I am confident that her story is one that many would like to know about.  If Ann Cardinal believes it to be a story to knock even her from her chair on the 3rd floor of College Hall at VCFA, my estimation is mere confirmation of its magic.

One final tale: Sue tells me of Hanuman, who was able to fly from Tamil Nadu to Sri Lanka after being prompted that he could do so. Hanuman, magical creature that he was, had forgotten this ability that he had.  He just needed to be reminded.

Sue, I am reminding you of your story and your ability (you have forgotten) to tell much better than I have. May I prompt you to gift us all with its recounting?

Sincerely

Busy Residency Cold and getting colder

I'm not sure if 0 degrees was attained today in Montpelier. I am currently deciding whether to go across the quad for an 8:30 reading as the temperature has tanked and the wind has risen. I think with a bomber hat and silk long johns I should survive. I need to support my local poets.

There was a very powerful lecture just before dinner on #metoo from a faculty member who is an incest and sex addiction survivor. It was pretty amazing and emotional and you could feel the love in the packed room. This was the highlight of a week of highlights.

I was happy that some of my cohorts asked for poetry from me and was happy to oblige. I put together a melange and printed and copied it at the library and distributed it at lunch.

Some pretty interesting writing prompt exercises today. It would be easy to dismiss this sort of thing, but the exercises really seem to tap into the sub-conscious and help you derive some unexpected epiphanies.  This sounds sort of precious, but it works really well and is enjoyable.

In other news, I went to a talk on "getting your work published and finding an agent".  This part of writing is pretty much everything I'm trying to get away from, so this is a basic decision for me: do I want to just lean on the "Art Project" portion of poetry or also get deeper into the "Commerce Project" portion?  The Commerce part sort of is antithetical to the Art, in my feeling of things. People spend a lot of physical, psychic and other energy on the marketing, sales and promotion part of writing and I'm not yet convinced I can tolerate that part of things.  I don't have to of course. Things are going well now.  I think I will sit this sort of stuff out for the near future and concentrate on the ART angle.

Work Plan and Advisor

In other MFA Residency news:

I was assigned Tomas Morin as my advisor (I was hoping for this assignment)and I met with him in a group and then one on one to plan the semester's work.

Tomas had a lot of good advice for me on revisions and organization for projects I am planning and we worked out practical strategies for all of those projects and ways to get everything reviewed that I would like to have reviewed.

He was also able to write an immediate reading list for me to address all the categories (poetry, criticism and other) that I requested. I'll be doing a lot of reading.  There are over 30 books on the list, and I have a list of my own to include.

After this meeting, I felt very much more secure in my ideas and plans.

I will be sending 5 packets over the next 4 months for review (poems and critical writing), and Tomas will provide feedback in return.

1st workshop of my poetry

Today I workshopped two poems after not being scheduled in the first two workshops. I read my poems "Bad Movie Night" and "Whispering Moonlight" and the discussions were very different. "Bad Movie Night" was somewhat admired, but people wanted more images and examples, while my poem was making a kind of aesthetic argument, wryly. I am uncertain whether I want to make the kind of changes they were suggesting, but think that I would like to insert more of a sense of characters (involved in Bad Movie Nights) and more descriptive details about such an event (PBR, wings, yelling at the screen, whatever).  However, the poem starts with somewhat abstract discussions of good and bad movies and closes with an argument for bad movies.  I like this structure.  I felt like some of the arguments being made reflected what the others would want to put into such a poem, not what my poem was doing.  So, I take the input, mull it over, then revise as my instincts lead me.
"Whispering Moonlight" is a musical, lyrical meditation with a lot of atmosphere and intuitive movement. I think it was very successful because people were struggling to come up with ideas for change. One of the moderators had some ideas for extending it a bit, but wasn't too committed to the suggestions - they were just potential ideas. I think I'll have some other poets look at it, read it somewhere and see where I come out. I really like it because its very lyrical and thought-provoking. It's not really like much of my poetry and just sort of entered my mind and I captured it, making purely instinctive (not logical) choices about how to format it.

Whispering Moonlight is on my website: http://www.johnfbrowning.com/Poetry.cshtml

Here is Bad Movie Night:

bad movie night

When you compare the consensus

worst film acclaimed best c’mon now:

not so different. they contrast in

small details really, not content

I watch them all-  like bad better

Robot Monster, Wild in the Streets!

Citizen Kane? No, boo!

(supposed to be the best)

Bad ones generate deeper thoughts

Good ones sometimes leave a warm glow

dissipated so soon

Trite fare shall persevere

Estimate the number of films

you have endured versus those you

have enjoyed, do the math

which is which? what and who?

Plastered to your innermost skull

Mesmerized in your movie seats

Images and eyelids and cinematics

Art and time and craft and skill

Elaborate, architectural,

Fizzling tinsel and shiny light

Two hours of deadened time

Consecrated, benign

“Let’s watch Showgirls. Again.”

1st poetry reading at MFA residency

So, this is what crazy poets live for: readings in friendly settings. I did 3 poems: "No Debate Now", my reaction to the Las Vegas shootings; "Saturation", a matrix poem commenting on the political-sexual landscape and "Autumn Shade" a love lyric for my sweet wife.

I was the last reader up, out of 12, so that was auspicious, I thought.  I'll take a win, because 5 women colleagues were highly congratulatory. (I think they were mainly hooked on the love poem).

January 1, 2018 Out With the Old, In With the New

The Art of the Sentence lecture by Barbara Hurd very thought-provoking AND featuring sentence diagramming (humorous, retro and inevitably useful). I want to search for sentence diagramming software and/or apps.

My truck started after 4 days and nights of sub-zero weather. Good truck!

Today is New Year's Day!

I saw Ann Cardinal today - my first contact with VCFA. She is everyone's favorite.

In the library, I found a vintage (1941) private press edition of Edna St Vincent Millay's Collected Sonnets. Boy, what a beautifully printed book. I checked it out and the librarian said it is due back in June(!) I'm going to make it my first self-directed poetry reading assignment. Edna was considered a libertine in her time. Today, that snarky personal assessment wouldn't be relevant or even remarkable. In other news, Edna's mastery of the sonnet form was obvious and consummate. I'm going to savor this book.  I have gotten up to sonnet v and already there are some surprises.

I took a nap after the first three lectures this morning.  Listening to jams in the dorm room leading up to dinner.

Happy New Year.