What to expect when you're expecting a poetry book, or, how to talk to a poet about her new publication

There are many kinds of conversations that nearly no one knows how to have.  What to say about a friend's or family member's adoption?  What to say about a miscarriage?  What to say about a death in the family? And, perhaps surprisingly, what to say about a friend's or family member's new book of poems?

As someone who has gone through all of these life-altering events, I can assure you that such conversations usually go badly.  It's not that people are cruel or unusual, just that they don't know what to say. Schools, however rigorous, do not give credits for "kind speech." I count myself among the category "people," by the way. Sorry scripts get repeated in all of these situations, scripts that we might do well to forget.

I'll skip the clichés about the healing process and the getting over it and the it's nature's way and why didn't you adopt an American baby and how much did it all cost and at least you have other children and the weather's really nice just enjoy it and don't look so down just suck it up it's been a couple of weeks and there's always next time and you mean he's still on the answering machine and the rest of it and concentrate here on the least among these conversations, namely what we talk about when we talk about new poetry books.

Here is what the new poet sees and hears when she hands her new book over to friends and family:

--a face that begins to change shape, and eyes that begin to dilate with impulses of fight or flight;

--a voice that hesitates, sounds confused, and then erupts into the certainty of phrases like: "you know I don't understand poetry"; "you know I never did well in English in school"; "wow, that's a lovely cover, but I'm sure I won't get it"; "do you write for other poets?"; "you know I read some of the poems twice and still didn't get it"; "I just don't know what these poems mean";

--or, occasionally, a tell-tale blurt of "I hate poetry." Though, truth be told, that's usually from the kids.

The biologist who was on Colbert last night said that one bodily function that belongs exclusively to humans is perspiration. We sweat.  Well, poets know this well, because not only do poets sweat when they read in public, but they see sweat everywhere around them when they show off their new book. I just found a definition of this sweaty state of terror, here.  Metrophobia, or the fear of poems. And oh my, here's another from the Huffington Post.

Or they hear nothing at all.

Because poets are gifted with great imaginations, they tend to take these responses with utmost seriousness.  They come to feel like the dart board, flinching as each dart (who knew there were so many?) achieves its mark. They are not ever-fixèd marks, but simply targets for the unpracticed rhetoricians they love the most. Having worked for years to perfect the art of communication, or at least years of doing things with words, they find themselves assured that yes, the book's very pretty, but no, they're busy on the evening of the launch. And what does it all mean?

So, in the interest of preventing some of these difficult conversations, I have unsolicited advice for both partner in this unhappy dance.  To the poet I say, expect as much and do not return sweat with more sweat. Don't sweat it. Remember that people are scared of poetry, as scared as they are of death and dismemberment, that what first comes out of their mouths often tends not to sound kind.

To the non-poet, confronted by a book of poems that causes sweat to form on brow and upper lip, for whom poetry has always inspired fear, who feels that he or she ought to love poetry but simply does not, and who, in that not loving, feels something more akin to hatred or aversion than to appreciation, who yearns to understand meaning but cannot find it anywhere in poems. whose high school teacher told her she was stupid for what she said about Keats and whose college professor gave her Z's and scrawled insults on her feeble poems: take a deep breath, and then ask some questions of the poet before you:

--why do you write poems?

--please read one of your poems to me and then tell me where you were when you wrote it, why you wrote it, and what you'd like a reader to get from it.

--do you follow a pattern when you write?  Why?

--why do you think the designer made the book the size and shape she did?  Why the cover design?  Why the font size, letter shape?

And practice some exercises in appreciation that have nothing to do with meaning:

--I like the sound of that poem.

--There's an image here I really love.

--I can hear your sense of humor in this poem.

I hear someone say that last phrase to me about my kids.  We adopted them, so they aren't spitting images of us.  But our senses of humor and theirs are similar, and it's nice when someone notices. Poems are never spitting images of us, either, which is one reason they're so confusing to other people. But consider that poems are the poet's children, that to ask after them is to aim an endorphin-laden dart at their heart and to put everyone at ease.

After-thought: I do have a new book out, but what inspired me to write this blog blurt was a friend with her first book out. She doesn't yet have the appropriate armor.  Try this on for size!

Arguing for Poetry During a Recession

At the University of Hawai`i, the best verb tense one can hope for these days is the conditional. Our building might be renovated next year. We might get a new secretary. In truth, we will get a new secretary, but we will also lose one who works for us now: a gain and a loss equals a might. We might get a new hire in creative writing. This last has occupied my weekend, as I am--for this semester only--director of creative writing. And because last year alone we lost five creative writers from our faculty.

I am arguing for a hire (albeit still a hypothetical one) in poetry. I am arguing that the literature and oratures of Asia and the Pacific (part of our university's mission statement is that we specialize in that region) are more often than not poetic: there are mele, chants, poems in English and translation. I am arguing that our offerings in literature and cultural studies, to say nothing of composition and rhetoric, are heavy on narrative fiction. (Each semester I wade through course reading lists, only to discover that many of the courses whose titles are "Literature of..." are actually courses in "Fiction of . . ." or increasingly "Non-fiction of...") Where poetry is taught, it's taught more as content than as the result of a process, a language game, an art. I am arguing that, while I sometimes find it hard to fill a class in the reading of poetry, courses in writing poetry are well attended, that the only exposure to poetry many of my students get is in such courses. (Easy to avoid that phobic subject, if it's simply not available.) I am arguing (again) that the cultures of Asia and Pacific are often best seen in their poetry, music, hula. I am arguing that, if we are to create an MFA program, we need more than two faculty members who teach poetry on the graduate level. I am borrowing an argument made by Adam Aitken, our current Visiting Writer, that all writers should study poetry, because poetry is all about language. I am arguing that the community is full of poetic energies in its journals (Bamboo Ridge, `oiwi, Tinfish) and in the slam scene, which draws enormous audiences and--more importantly--draws young people into poetry. I am arguing and arguing and arguing.

But we live in a time of scarcity, so my arguments do not seem practical. We live in a time of scarcity where there is more demand for fiction than there is supply of fiction writers to lead workshops. We live in a time of scarcity, when poetry is (as ever in our culture) marginalized as extra, as luxury, as something very few people want to buy. That they don't go to the store to buy it proves that they don't want it (surely a Catch-22 for the poetry pedagogue.)

It's easy simply to get angry, but the fiction writers have a point, too. We work with a lot of graduate and advanced undergraduates who write fiction because they want to. Many of them are extremely good at it. (I know, because I am often called upon to be on their committees, and I read their fiction.) Given too many holes in the curriculum, perhaps all we can do now is fill them in, as we watch fresh potholes form. The ride is awfully bumpy. We could use some of that "slope maintenance" going on down the highway from where I live.

One colleague asks why we are so hung up on genre, anyway. I suspect the reason is that job descriptions are easier to write for fiction and poetry than for "writer." I would much prefer the latter, myself, sometimes, but in a time of scarcity, damn it, I want a real poet who can spread the love of the art, and of its various engagements with language and culture, to our students.

The Seductions of Can't

I dislike those descriptions of poetry courses (not that students often read them) that begin from the negative. "The instructor knows that you are scared shitless of poetry," the description goes, if more euphemistically than that, "and we will spend an entire semester trying to cure you; at the end, you will know some shit." (I think of Kai Gaspar's poem about the traumatized boy who refuses to shit, then aims to punish a cat for watching him make kukae in the woods. See Tinfish 18.5: The Book). I dislike these descriptions precisely because they are true. Students arrive in class tremulous, afraid, risk averse (pun intended after the fact). Negation stains the air like a squid's dark ink. Dis-ease is our dis-comfort as we arrange our chairs in a circle, the better to share our intuitions about the poems we read. We are not immediately readers, but a support group for poetry phobics. (Can you believe I found that link? I can't.)

The poetry professor is a general whose field of battle is a difficult terrain. She requires the full support of her metaphorical army: support staff, infantry, advanced weaponry and, above all, a strategy. She needs Lao-Tzu at her side, maybe even a Prussian master, like Clausewitz. She knows her pen is not mightier than her students' shields, at least not at first.

I have some success as a teacher of poetry, perhaps because I insist on activity, often frenetic activity, in class. Students do exercises, they act out their poems, they mix them up, they cut and collage. We use instruments like scissors and glue, which many of them have not used since early in elementary school. We laugh. When we read poems together, I insist that they read in human voices (lest we drown), demanding that they read passages over and again until their voices unbuckle the belt of monotone wrapped around the syllables that press from their mouths.

And still students come to me in my office and say they can't. Or, as we say in Hawai`i, "cannot." Oddly, Pidgin makes things shorter, but the word "cannot" is kept long, emphasis on the second syllable, used in sentences with the frequency of the word "but," which only in Hawai`i that I know comes not between clauses, but at the ends of sentences. "I went to the bookstore but." "I like that but." Most often, these students look uncomfortable. Doubtless a lot of this comes from their fear that their "cannot" reduces their grade, that there is something they cannot get, like metaphor, like an A.

But in class, as in the life of my family and non-academic friends, there are those for whom "cannot" seems a pleasure, not pain. Their "I just don't GET it's" are spoken with emphasis, with all the life that their reading of poems out loud lacks. There's meter there, an exaltation of form, as Annie Finch might put it, even in this context--for their not getting it is definitely form, formula, repetition as sure as any poetic refrain. As the poet and poetry teacher in my husband's family, I am occasionally and ritually asked what makes poetry poetry, what makes it good, what makes it enjoyable, and so on. But I am not really asked. What might be questions come out as statements:

--I can't understand it.
--I can't write it.
--I can't figure out what's good and what's bad.
--I can't see things that way.
--I just don't get it.

Chalk it up to the verbal jousting that goes on in families, but this is no call to explain or to appreciate or even to read out loud. This is the door slamming shut, with all the pleasure that slamming shut offers us. It's a poetry tantrum for the benefit of the poetry parent.

I wonder how to use this energy, this aggression, toward poetry. Sometimes I say that we are all speaking in words and poems are made of words and so we can read poems. Sometimes I say this poem (by Dickinson, say) is difficult, but we've all felt despair and enjoyed riddles and thought about death and sex (yes, "Wild Nights" comes out first in my quiver). Then again, sometimes I offer up Camille Paglia's reading of Dickinson as an absolute literalist. She says she's sticking a needle in her eye. Well, damn it, it's a real needle and real eye and you'd better wince because she's coming after you next!

My poetry friends Hazel Smith and Lisa M. Steinman have each written textbooks on poetry in the past couple of years. Hazel Smith's The Writing Experiment is directed at creative writers, while Steinman's Invitation to Poetry: The Pleasures of Studying Poetry and Poetics is directed to creative readers. Both are marvelous texts. Each is written in a professional discourse; Smith's sometimes sounds like a sociology text whose concluding paragraphs are abstracts of what just transpired. Steinman's book projects a patience that makes me jealous; if I often feel like a hare in my reading and writing, she walks like the local tortoise, Ku`i, steadily toward her goal. She wins. Her first sentence is a thesis of sorts: "The purpose of this book is most simply to talk about how to read and understand poetry." Yet the title offers the hope of pleasure, surely what we all wish to give our students and family members. I have only started Steinman's book but can already see use value (there's pleasure there, too) in chapters about the sonnet and about "intertextual conversations."

I suspect that these books will be aids to pleasure for many students, especially those pre-disposed to clear their minds of obstacles. It's here that Writing Down the Bones helps; while that book over-emphasizes the "write crap until you drop, because at least you're writing," it does suggest that one clear the mind of judgment, above all things, before embarking on one's poetry experiments. While judgment is an inevitable human pre/occupation, I'd like to banish it from the undergraduate classroom as much as possible. So much enters the first day, unguided yet terrifying, a gift from missionaries, not angels. To clear that surface of dust-bunnies gives the reader (and her professor) the space to play with interior design. The Marvell couch and the Moore love seat; the Stevens lava lamp and the Harryette Mullen upholstry: these can only find their places if the room itself beckons.

There is another possibility, of course. That is teaching poetry as horror. Scared of poetry? This course confirms your suspicion that poetry is very very scary. Freddy Krueger ain't got nothing on W.H. Auden!!

--Consider that the poem bares its fangs at you.
--Consider that the poem is a vampire that sucks your blood.
--Consider that the best poems never shoot blanks, are always better armed than you.
--Consider that "getting" the poem makes it MORE dangerous.
--Consider that the poem has designs on you. All poems are Dick Cheney's.
--Consider your deep paranoia to be the greatest poem. Indulge it.

Dickinson's idea that the poem is what "takes the top of your head off" is then, per Paglia, potentially a literal statement.

In the age of violent video games, or even of Captain Underpants's "The Incredibly Graphc Violence Chapter (in flip-o-rama)," who can go wrong with such a lesson plan, at least those late nights when the next morning's poetry lesson most scares the professor herself?