Documentary Poetry & Being in the World

Several years ago, when we still walked our kids to the neighborhood school in the morning, my husband did a photography project he called "sidewalk blog." Each morning he took a photograph of the sidewalk, one of those concrete suburban walkways that runs parallel to the asphalt road. Looking back nearly at random I find these photographs, some of which he thinks I took. No matter:

--A soap bubble
--A bic lighter
--A worm
--Some leaves
--Metal cover
--Pre-paid movie card

And then are the photos that he printed out and hung on the wall, among them:

--A red curb, fluted cement gutter, leaves
--Manhole cover filled in with multi-colored leaves, twigs
--What appears to be a moon crater

The term isn't used in this way, but these are "found photographs," images in which the world rises to meet us, unmediated (except in the angle of the shot). Photographs like these may prove a corrective to what happens when introductory level poetry students are asked to "write a poem." Even after setting up topics that accentuated the documentary nature of the course (English 273: Docuwriting), most students succumbed to the lure of "Poetry." Instead of looking at the world as it is, they did dervish dances of mediation, remediation, imposing their thoughts, feelings and (alas) cliches on their subjects.

 

But when my Ph.D. apprentice, No`u Revilla, asked these students to take their own photographs of walks they'd been on, they came up with many stunning images.  The ratty stuffed bear who lives under a bench beside Kuykendall Hall, the stylized image of a man's face at the bottom of another bench. They see the world, but can't describe it.

We've set to work removing the veil of anxious subjectivity and clotted multi-syllables from their writing. Having asked them earlier in the class to write verbal portraits of each other (an exercise that caused great consternation), we more recently asked them to compose "verbal portraits or photographs" and to post them on the class blog. I asked them to go for a walk and to take nothing (no phone, no iPod, no iPad, nothing) except for a pad and pen. When they saw an image that they would otherwise take a picture of, they were to stop, sit down, and write the image as they saw it. No commentary. The ticket should emerge from the sidewalk not as evidence of "a lonely night," but as a ratty piece of paper with the numbers 1446-2023 on it.

The results have been good, sometimes stunning.  One that begins with two women talking about pronouns (yes, sound images work, too) includes this series of vivid lines:

Red flowers in clusters, no in umbels,

Behind a brown, rusting fence,
Beneath black lamp posts.
Rows of shrubs line the boundaries of the grey building.
A man in pink picks a leaf.

There are tables shaped as hexagons; there's a girder; there are roofs, pigeons, canoes, a baseball field, motorcycles, a woman in a tank top. Suddenly, we see what we see when we look at the world without so many distractions (such as our electronic devices, our monkey minds). 

Alfred Corn asked on facebook the other day whether we read Stevens or Williams. I responded that I read both, but teach Williams more. In college, when I took a couple of courses from Alfred, I was enamored of Stevens. My poems were full of blue musical instruments, fluttering ideas, lots of ifs. He told me to try to write a poem so utterly like Stevens that I might cure myself of the tendency; at another point, he pointed to Chieftain Iffucan as my muse. I learned later on to appreciate the value of writing about the world as something that was not so much an hallucination behind the eye, but (scary thought when you're 20) a place that confronts the eye, is not the I.

That this is a spiritual, as well as a quasi-scientific, discovery brings the opposition into focus for me, if focus is a kind of synthesis, as I believe it is. This is what I learned best in writing about my mother, that to watch her and to describe her decline as it happened, was difficult precisely because it meant pulling away the veils of my own emotions, memories, desires. Talking yesterday to a colleague in Family Resources with whom I will be teaching a class next semester on Alzheimer's, I was gratified to hear her talk about this act of witness (of a parent's dementia) as one that involves pulling away from personal desires, and of settling into the present tense. Meaning comes after, but only when words themselves can be seen as precisely as that bear who sits under the concrete bench, a companion for the black cat who eats there.

Documentary poetry and tenderness: teaching update

Some questions about documentary poems, misremembered from the white board in my Friday afternoon classroom:

--What genre(s) do we find in the poem?  [Use values?]
--What claim is being made on the reader?
--What is the relationship between the speaker and the documentation?
--Is the poet trying too hard to persuade us?  Not hard enough?
--Talk about the movement between images and words, about lay-out, about empty space.
--Should there be notes?  How should they be presented--in the text, at the end, with or without prose commentaries?

These are mainly technical questions, the kinds you use to investigate poems as if they were word machines set up on blocks, and the workshop members were a group of apprentice mechanics itching to turn their wrenches and loosen (or tighten) some screws.

But what's been most fascinating about my English 713: Documentary Poetry course this semester has been the amount of time spent talking about pain.  I'm as interested in pain as anyone, even have a few things to say on the subject, but my poetry classes tend to be more rollicking, less engaged with tenderness than with "how to do things with words."  I'm as surprised as my students that this class has ventured into such territory: the dying grandfather, the homeless woman, the diabetic, the angry father, the exiled prisoner, the man saved by his art, the mother who died of Alzheimer's. (These questions are quite personal to me, having devoted so many years to writing about my mother's last years)

And so our primary sense of hurt is for others, locates itself as empathy, is the act of bending over at the sight of events on television (Claudia Rankine) or in the streets of Honolulu.

Where pain lives, ethics cannot be far behind, however.  And so one after another, students (a wide ranging group in age, experience, work history) say they do not want to write what they're driven to write.  What if their subject is hurt by their attention to him or her?  What if they reveal bad behaviors in their workplaces or even themselves?  What if their ethnic community feels shame over one of its own?  And on and on.  What if thinking is itself a problematic activity?  What if knowledge is intrusive, not to be trusted?  All of these are real concerns, made stronger yet by living in Hawai`i, where everyone seems to know everyone else, where those who study others have often demeaned them, where our skin is necessarily thin.  Who was it said that William Carlos Williams was a "non-cutaneous" man?

And so my role, more than that of introducing the texts we read, or shepherding the class through the questions at the top of this post, is to pester them to get closer to their subject matter, to this tenderness.  It's not a role I've often assumed in the classroom, where I push students to think harder about their analyses, about their uses of language, about their writing.  Now I find myself pushing writers to get closer to the bone, to use the document not as a way to write about their subject, but to enter a wormhole that may resemble an abyss.  A course about documentation has become one much more akin to self-examination, albeit less confessional than confrontational.  Who might be hurt?  What are you protecting her from?  Are you also protecting yourself?  Are there other goods than privacy?  Is curiosity consumerist, materialist, or can it lead us elsewhere?  What is dignity and why does it feel so necessary to preserve it? What do we publish, and what do we keep to ourselves in this fourth floor classroom?  Or, as Norman Fischer asks in his new book, Conflict: "what's worth protecting / to what extent // & // when // does protection // exceed that worth / its cost in pain[.]"  A rhetorical question without a question mark suggests there is no answer, rhetorical or otherwise.

There are at least two paths out, through.  One is the path Fischer takes in this new book, where he writes down the voices of traumatized vets, those he sits and walks with, but does not identify by name or station.  "we     bear / what we     bear" he writes, and those words belong to all of us.  The other path is by way of the projects the students are discovering themselves starting work on; these projects are far less limited in scope than they'd feared.  It's not grandpa, or the homeless woman, or the angry father: it's these characters in the world that constructed them.  It's not grandpa, though it is grandpa, but it's the journal he kept in his final illness, and it's the cancer that killed him, and it's the doctor who treated him, and so on until the nested eggs--the good ones and the bad ones alike--line up in front of you like the soldiers of Xian.  The poem is order, but it doesn't try to cover the earthly chaos, conflict.

Documentary poetry is perhaps not my favorite form, even now.  But it is the way I love to teach poetry, as it leads further afield and further in-field, engaging questions as large as national identities and as small as the plans for the addition to a house.  And they do that in layers, which attract more layers.  The answer to "a knot ,     is there something // I should be dying for ?          Can I     choose it?" (Fischer, 57) may not be immediately apparent, but we might discover work to live for.

Thanks to Lynn Young for showing us the Jenny Holzer book, whose cover is at the top, where she works with redacted National Security documents.  The first I spotted in the book was a "wish list" for torture methods.

William Carlos Williams Takes On Tea Partiers and Other Puritans

When I teach Foundations of Creative Writing to graduate students, I always include William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain, a messy, exuberant book of essays that undoes the American myth, only to remake it in the image of America's apparent failures. The book offers a transition between the foundational texts (Plato, Sidney, Shelley, Riding, Bernstein, Ho`omanawanui) and those about place that come just after. Williams offers us writing out of a passionate, brilliant, anguished need; he also means to reframe our notions of place and historical necessity. Its genre a strained mix of manifesto, poem, essay, and documentary history, his book threatens to come apart at its various seams. Let be be finale of seams, to misquote his rival poet.

Truth be told, I ask students to read the 234 page book mostly so that they can read the last page, which is my favorite moment in all American literature. It is the chapter called "Abraham Lincoln," in which old Abe becomes a woman, the mother of his divided and grieving country:

It is Lincoln pardoning the fellow who slept on sentry duty. It is the grace of the Bixby letter. The least private would find a woman to caress him, a woman in an old shawl--with a great bearded face and a towering black hat above it, to give unearthly reality. (234)

and then the book ends thus: "Failing of relief or expression, the place tormented itself into a convulsion of bewilderment and pain--with a woman, born somehow, aching over it, holding all fearfully together. It was the end of THAT period."

This writing is worthy of Lincoln himself; it also ends the book about an America that "begins for us with murder and enslavement" (39) on an empathic note. Trans-gender is trans-formation, hard earned by chapter after chapter about American over-reaching and failure.


You can't read the same book twice, of course. This time through I'm noticing ways in which the 1925 manifesto echoes our time, especially its hyper-moralism in the face of actual ethical depredation. Here I'm trying to separate out the "moral" issue of sex from the "ethical" issues of greed, militarism, corruption, and so on. I am helped by the experience of having watched an hour of news and a couple hours of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert with our Distinguished Visiting Writer, Adam Aitken, who comes to us from Australia. Adam's sense of the lunacy of American politics enforces my own, italicizes it. Stewart and Colbert have very little work to do these days; splice some video from Fox News and you have a show, especially when the voice over comes from John Oliver. The latest heroine of the Tea Party movement (so-called, because they're actually Republicans) is Christine O'Donnell of Delaware, whose platform is based on moralizing about sex and gender roles. O'Donnell is best known for her anti-masturbation work. (I have to laugh; when I write about her, or her fellow travelers, every word I write takes on an aura of moral turpitude!) And no, I have not watched the video.

Against O'Donnell and her ilk, I hear Williams calling out the Puritans, making his argument over and again that American violence and American sexual repression are allied. Turn to the end of "Voyage of the Mayflower," and Williams turns O'Donnell against herself (again I blush): "What prevented the normal growth? Was it England, that northern strain, the soil they [Puritans] landed on? It was, of course, the whole weight of the wild continent that made their condition of mind advantageous, forcing it to reproduce its own likeness, and no more" (68). Not only did the Puritans refuse to generate new names for the places, the plants, the animals they encountered in the New World, according to Williams, they also refused to touch the place they entered. Their purity was a mark of their fear, and their purity condemned them to isolation and violence. "It is the Puritan--" he writes in "Pere Sebastian Rasles": "Having it in themselves nothing of curiosity, no wonder, for the New World--that is nothing official--they knew only to keep their eyes blinded, their tongues in orderly manner between their teeth, their ears stopped by the monotony of their hymns and their flesh covered in straight habits" (112).

Against this morality of not seeing, marked as Puritan, Williams proposes a Catholic alternative in the figure of Pere Sebastian Rasles, a French cleric: "It is this to be moral: to be positive. to be peculiar, to be sure, generous, brave--TO MARRY, to touch--to give because one HAS, not because one has nothing . . . He exists, he is--it is an AFFIRMATION, it is alive" (121). Among his affirmations is the "peculiar" particular language; Rasles not only learns to speak the Indian's language, he reveres its pronunciation: "(Note, the figure 8 is used by Rasles in his alphabet of the Abnaki language to signify the unique guttural sound characteristic of the Indian dialects" (124). This is what Williams means by "peculiar," I suspect, this precision of attention to detail, to contact.

To name is to caress, Williams almost says. Not possess: he would be happier if the Puritans had taken on the names Indians gave their places, one suspects. But they should at least have offered up new sounds to go with the new places they lived in. My English 100A class will be reading about names this week, how names are given, how they are taken away and replaced by other names. One of the (shorter) readings is a poem by Tiare Picard from Tinfish 18 1/2:


Ford Island sits within Pearl Harbor, but of course neither name came first in the chain of names placed upon places in Hawa`i. How Moku`ume`ume came to be Ford Island is the subject of Picard's poem, which operates entirely by name, not by link or verb or plot. It's the literal presentation of effacement that she performs here. It's a document Williams would have liked.

In contrast to Williams's attacks on the Puritan come these love letters to the French (I get in trouble again, don't I?). Another of his heroes is Champlain, whom Williams admires simply because he sees the world around him, a quality ascribed to "the feminine": "Champlain, like no one else about him, watching, keeping the thing whole within him with amost a woman's tenderness--but such an energy for detail--a love of the exact detail--watching that little boat drawing nearer on that icy bay" (70). And so Champlain becomes Williams who then foresees (or hears) a poet like Jack Spicer: "This is the interest I see. It is this man. This --me; this American; a sort of radio distributor sending out sparks to us all" (70). Williams elsewhere describes himself as one whose "antennae [were] fully extended: (105). Perhaps he means his figure here to be an insect, but it also the antenna on a radio, taking impulses in, speaking them out to whoever will listen.

When I go to christine2010.com, the website for Christine O'Donnell, I find precious few written words. Her platform resembles a series of tweets. One bullet point is about "values": "Believes our country was founded on core values of faith, family and freedom and will fight to defend those values." Among these values are antipathies to sex of any sort, and to non-standard families. A recent interview had her saying this about science: “American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains. So they’re already into this experiment.” If O'Donnell and other right wingers were attentive to detail, if they were close-readers, they would know that the Constitution does not found the nation on "faith," but on freedom to worship as one wishes. She would also know that mice have not been given "fully functioning human brains," though these days one wonders about the humans with mice for brains.

Both my classes this semester, the English 100 and the graduate course, are about forms of attention. Attention costs--one pays it, after all--but the costs are worthwhile if we are to find apt names for our places, our conditions, and our political process. I say this with some hope, as last night Hawai`i's Democrats nominated Neil Abercrombie for Governor. His platform is largely pro-education; he has ties to the University of Hawai`i, from which he graduated and at which he taught for some years. He was the educated choice, and that bodes well, at least for now. In November, he will be opposed by Duke Aiona, whose platform is God-drenched. We shall see.

[click on images to enlarge them]

Not "why poetry?" but "why language?" Dinner with Ikeolu (Clinton) Terrell

My graduate poetry workshop started from the question: "why write poetry?" We ended up talking a lot--too much--about Avatar, the billion dollar movie, and why poets might still choose to seek out an audience of hundreds. (Hundreds of people, not dollars!) Not a new conversation, and one best left behind. Williams's Spring and All has us thinking about destruction and rebirth, prose and poetry, clean words and words that have acquired layers of ambiguity. I've always loved Williams's line about Marianne Moore, that her words were "clean" because she'd scrubbed them down. Stein's claim that she gave the rose back to itself after centuries of symbolic abuse resonates. Later on, we may organize a boxing match between WCW (the no-simile guy) and George Lakoff (the metaphors we live by guy), by way of activating our arguments about language use. Or a free for all with Don Share, who collects similes as if they were verbal hot rods.



But then Ikeolu (Clinton) Terrell came to dinner and called our bluff, my bluff, Lakoff's bluff, Williams's bluff, even Stein and Moore's bluff. He came close to calling the bluff on bluffing itself. Clinton, who is Executive Director of Breakthroughs for Youth at Risk in Hawai`i, declared language itself to be the problem. (Fast backward to my first class, where the question is not, "why write poetry?" but "why speak or write at all?"). In an odd way, he was echoing Williams's call to live and write inside the NOW, though Clinton believes in non-verbal communication. It might have Laura (Riding) Jackson in our living room, declaring an end to poetry because it is inevitably involved in bad faith issues, like professionalism, like competition, like decoration.

"What is this?" Clinton asked of the book I passed him, containing a poem about the Dogon (On Spec, by Tyrone Williams). "It's poetry," was my response. A phrase that validates everything for me did nothing for Clinton. As someone who works with parents and children who are unable to communicate effectively, he concentrates on developing their non-verbal communication. Just as our ability to see prevents us from using other senses, Clinton thinks that our ability to talk interferes with other, more profound, means of communication. (He blind-folds kids and their parents so that they expand their abilities to perceive the world.) Without speaking, he got up and felt my husband's energy field, which extended at least a foot into the living room.

As I argued for the power of language, my examples accrued in support of his assertion (hate it when that happens!) that language cannot always be confused with communication. For example:

--When we adopted our daughter, Radhika, she was three years old. She talked, talked a lot, but in Nepali, which we do not speak. After 9 days together in Kathmandu, we headed to Hawai`i, a trip spanning days, to Bangkok, Japan (six hours in an airport) and then Honolulu. While it would have been nice to communicate in words, what I discovered is that language between daughter and mother is less important that I might have imagined. When Radhika began to speak English, her uses of single words communicated more than I might have thought, too. On the H1 freeway at rush hour, she sat in the backseat and yelled "TRAFFICS!"

--For a couple of months after coming to Hawai`i, Radhika had frequent crying jags in the evening, loud and dramatic ones as befit a girl who had just come so far with us. We had an old cat, Jon Stewart, who had come to us from a hard life in the parking lot, who would climb up on her and put out his paw to reassure her. Forget that she was scared of him, and screamed more loudly--the cat understood, the cat expressed himself.

--My mother is almost without language now. She--and the other residents of her home who lack words, or speak them randomly (to our ears)--are still human beings. They are still expressive, convey shock, surprise, happiness, sadness. That the triggers are invisible to us does not mean that they are not there. My mother is not exactly who she was with language (though when she said on the phone yesterday that she was "flopping about," some of her linguistic personality re-emerged), but an essence (what is that?) remains. My mother's silences, even when they seem the place where she would be speaking had she the words to do so, are still expressive. Sometimes I find myself filling them in; sometimes they stand in for themselves as telling silences, in all senses of the word "telling."

My desire to write about my mother grows in proportion to her loss of language, as if I were her proxy. When Radhika and Sangha created their own language one summer in Madrid, composed to what sounded like Hawaiian and Spanish and English words all mixed together, I wrote them down diligently. What I fear I cannot remember is what I write down. Though "what I fear I will not remember" is not so many things, and it's worth thinking about what these things are, even when they flicker into mind with seeming randomness. So perhaps that is the function of language, or writing, for me, a palpable energy field that attempts to maintain communication where it is being lost, or diverted. When I am with my mother, I too am usually silent. When I leave her, I go directly to my computer to write.

I don't usually confess to my students that where I once most adored poetry that bobbed and weaved, obliqued its subject, obscured its content, my loves these days are those writers who make strong claims on me and then permit me access to acting on them. This does not mean that they use transparent language--they are not Ted Koosers--but it does mean that they lay something out, demand that I see it. (It does not even mean that my favorite poets are always poets.) I can read wonderful poetry and be bored by it (like Chris Vitiello reading his own work), while the imperfect (paradise) of a poem that makes something happen (Sarith Peou's Corpse Watching, for example) makes something happen in me. No, I want to say to Ikeolu, or to Laura Riding, or to Plato, sitting in the shadows of my living room, words do matter. They matter in the body (the corps), not simply in the conversational ether. My bodily reaction is the form the poetry takes, a form more crucial than that residing within the poem itself. Poetic form is not an engine to drive the poem; the poem is the engine to drive the form of the reader's reaction. Or, closer to the home that is my body, the writing acts on me, as I live through it.

And so, when Clinton told us that Ikeolu, the name he has chosen, is both an African name and a Hawaiian one, and when I chimed in that Kamau Brathwaite was pleased to hear that his African name was also Hawaiian, I wondered if those words were not participating in the larger energy field that links us together in ways well beyond the word, but given life by it? The word is "communicable," a contagion that either destroys or strengthens the body it inhabits.

"Who am I but my own critic?" Bringing Spring (and All) into a graduate workshop

I mentioned my undergraduate workshop last time, in writing about Kaia Sand's new book. That workshop is focused on place; these first two weeks, students are taking photographs of their neighborhoods (nothing touristic! everything ordinary!), in preparation for getting beneath the image, into history. The graduate workshop, being more advanced, has a less relentless focus to it, at least in my design, but the reading list proposes an agenda, nonetheless. The readings, in that supremest of fictions--alphabetical order--are as follows:

John Ashbery, Three Poems, Ecco Press
Teresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee, University of California Press
Paul Hoover, Sonnet 56, Les Figues Press
Susan Howe, Singularities, New Directions
Ron Silliman, Under Albany, Salt
Derek Walcott, Omeros, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
William Carlos Williams, Imaginations (for "Spring and All"), New Directions

All of these works are self-reflexive, works of poetry but also about it. These are works of poetics as well as collections of poems. Each of these poets holds a mirror to his or her text, but the mirror doesn't just reflect what it sees. This is an argumentative mirror. "This is what I see, and this is why I see it," might be its mantra. Their "why" is also an argument. "It must be so!" (If you can't tell I've been reading Spring and All today, I sure can.)

Why ask advanced writers to read these books? A couple of reasons. First, many of the best writers in our program are writing blind, like fast horses heading toward the finish line (a degree, damn it!), but without a strong sense of why they are doing what they're doing. My program is not alone in sometimes encouraging this sense that the writer not only need not know such things, but should also take pride in not knowing them. It may be hard to teach mystique, but it sells. No mistake that the word "mystification" also comes to mind.

My second reason has to do with that simple word "workshop." The word (not "wordshop") suggests a carpentry shop where someone has tools and materials and works them into something pleasing and/or practical. Carpenters work first as apprentices; so do writers. That makes me into the master carpenter, adept with the tools of the trade, and them the acolytes, still blistered by unpracticed uses of hammer, screw driver, level. (The level is sometimes what I think most matters in workshops, alas.) I'm skeptical about workshops. It's not that I don't like furniture, mind you; it's that I don't like to think of poems as furnishings. Furniture is too easily dozed on.

The Iowa workshop describes what it does in amazingly unambitious terms on their website. Rather than proclaim the rank ambition of the workshop, they merely suggest what they can do to "encourage" writers, if not "make" them. Their placement of the verb "to learn" in quotes marks the following passage with irony as much as realism:

"As a 'workshop' we provide an opportunity for the talented writer to work and learn with established poets and prose writers. Though we agree in part with the popular insistence that writing cannot be taught, we exist and proceed on the assumption that talent can be developed, and we see our possibilities and limitations as a school in that light. If one can 'learn' to play the violin or to paint, one can 'learn' to write, though no processes of externally induced training can ensure that one will do it well."

After decades as the ur-workshop, you'd think they could craft a better sentence than that last one about "processes of externally induced training," which suggests the warning on labels, "for external use only." The "ex" and the "in" seem to clash, and the last phrase suggests an explicit lack of a guarantee. "Take at your own risk" might accompany this bit of medicine. Now I'm sure there are absolutely wonderful teachers and workshops at Iowa; I, who never took a single workshop in grad school, could have used a few. But this milquetoast description might cure us of our literary exuberance even before we set foot on Iowa City's river of ice.

So the poets we read in English 713 are intended, in the logic of the course (a logic that never plays itself out logically, in my experience of teaching), to disrupt the mechanism of the course itself. For what can a master carpenter teach his apprentice but techniques, angles of sight? The apprentice imitates the carpenter who imitates the guy he apprenticed himself to. Just ask Plato how many times that activity is removed from the Idea of a bed! And just ask William Carlos Williams what he thinks--avant la lettre--of the graduate poetry workshop. I hear him chanting, "Kill! kill! let there be fresh meat . . . " (Imaginations 90). Or, to the extent that the workshop is the spawn more of Eliot than of Williams, the good doctor mutters about "plagiarism." He feels the "handcuffs of art" around his wrists (not so good for a writer, or even a typist).

The goal, then, is something of an anti-workshop. Of course we'll talk about each other's poems and make suggestions for revision and think about showing and telling and all those enumerable qualities of poems, but I hope we'll also blow those things out of the water. For what writers need to think on are issues that are nearly impossible to teach (outside the focused theme-driven course), namely problem, content, ambition, demand, desire, effect (and affect). Kenneth Burke's situation strategy is a good starting point: what is the problem you want to try to solve in your writing? From there, it's wise to approach the workshop, as well as our poems, with WCW's violent skepticisms about art.

I'm not talking the kind of skepticism that is merely anti-academic. Here WCW finds himself one among many in a tradition of hating tradition's seat of power, the university. Just today, the political blogger Andrew Sullivan linked to a poet who complained

"The best thing that could happen to poetry is to drive it out of the universities with burning pitch forks. Starve the lavish grants. Strangle them all in a barrel of water. Cast them out. The current culture, in which poetry is written for and supported by poets has created a kind of state-sanctioned poetry that resists innovation. When and if poetry is ever made to answer to the broader public, then we may begin to see some great poetry again – the greatness that is the collaboration between audience and artist."

Leave aside my wonderment at mention of "lavish grants" (where can this poet-edit girl get one?!) but the notion that the university stifles innovation is frankly an old one. This screed could have been written by WCW; it's not as good as one of his bilious tirades, but it will do. I'm not going to touch "the broader public," because I find that the broader public for poetry tends not to like what I find important anyway. Even my colleagues within the concrete tower that is my office building don't read, let alone teach the stuff. But I do think that workshops can effect a dampening of talent rather than an explosion of it.

That's where I'm looking to Williams for an ally--and later on to Howe and Ashbery and Cha and Walcott and Silliman--in my effort to make the workshop into a place where poems are dynamic creations, not snapshots to be carefully painted upon by a toucher-upper. Even if I cannot give the workshop form new life by utterly destroying it, I can put in the back of students' minds the worry that what happens in a workshop can be counter-productive, as well as poetry-affirming. If a workshop convenes to talk "about" a poem, then I want to get us away from that preposition. "About" is not active enough. It's part of the larger term, round-about, which sounds like beating around the bush, drawing "around" into the same sphere of not quite getting AT what we mean to do. "Writing," writes WCW, "is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images" (120). "Like" is a brake, where WCW means to go full-on. The fullness of his writing conveys ideas to the reader as if they were IV'ed to his typewriter; something of D.H. Lawrence's "blood knowledge" occurs in the transaction between WCW and his reader. Everything is dynamic.

And so I'm obsessed with the workshop as a place where we engage in process and where we talk about (ooo that word again). Paul Hoover's Sonnet 56 is on the syllabus as a model for what I am asking each student to do. Pick a poem you want to live with for an entire semester; each week run that poem through the filter of a different form. Hence, what is first free verse or even prose (one student has chosen a Stein prose poem) becomes haiku, becomes sestina, becomes a voice mail message, becomes a grocery list. In these translations, these transactions, these transformations of one text into many others I hope the students learn something about poetic form (what they're supposed to learn in classes like this one) but also a great deal about the energies that can erupt when variations are born (or adopted) of themes.

I have yet to figure out how to lead a workshop discussion in a such a way that we move from the larger issues of ambition, scope, content and so on, organically into the necessary concerns with wording and punctuation, but this semester may provide me a forum for trying to figure that out. Where to start? With word, phrase, line, and then to idea!? Or from the largest scope of the thing down to its miniscule embodiments of poetic energy? In conversation these directions always criss and cross in ways necessary and annoying. But it will be my job to keep our eyes on the prize, the poem that matters (both as material and as claim on its audience to think about the world without the "emptiness" of over-used language. "There is no confusion--only difficulties" (140).

Unlike Andrew Sullivan's poetry blogger, I don't give a damn if my students know a few names of great poets. I want them to know something of poetry as process, as movement, and yes, as contagion.

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the

is how the first poem in Spring and All starts. Nothing quite moves as quickly as the flu or a poem. Let us learn us some poems this semester and fill our classroom with their contagion.

__________

A brief addendum to recent dementia blogging. My weekly phone call to my mother was unusual this week. For years now she has lost language, until her speech consists of only several phrases that I call "language lab English." "I'm so glad you called and everything's all right" has been the most she has said in a couple of years; usually that sentence comes in two or three segments, not one line. But today she said, "I'm just sitting here talking to the people around me." Astonished, I asked what she was talking to them about. "The state of the world," she said. And she was, in that phrase, so much the person she always was. Engaged in the world. "It's not so good now, is it, mom?" I responded. In the old days, what followed would have been a litany of complaint about contemporary politics, but for now that mere statement about "the state of the world" seemed a blessing. No disguise.