Robert Peake

John Baker posted some of my thoughts on the writing process today as part of his series on “Creating A Text.” Thanks to John for collecting such diverse and interesting viewpoints.

The other side of the writer’s coin, of course, is reading. Tom Christensen makes the point that many writers, and especially poets, have strange misgivings about being a writer who reads. I, for one, wholeheartedly agree with Tom that reading is “equally important as writing if you want to refine your writing skills.”

There is much to admire and learn from in Ilya Kaminsky’s Dancing In Odessa. Above all, there is bravery. Kaminsky weaves through a hybrid of forms and—more than just precluding poetry sections with introductory prose—in this book he includes anecdotes, recipes and even a list of new “definitions” for English words. What emerges is a kind of personal and cultural impasto—broad, thick strokes of lyrical “thoughts.”

German actor Ulrich Mühe passed away last weekend due to stomach cancer at the age of 54. His performance in The Lives of Others had a profound impact on my renewed understanding of the importance of art in difficult times. His life off-stage and off-camera seems to have been equally fraught with troubles, as he believed one of his wives to have been a Stasi informant not unlike Martina Gedeck’s character in the film. Perhaps in part due to the immense personal history he brought to the role, the believable humanization of Captain Gerd Weisler may well be the role for which Mr. Mühe will be best remembered internationally.

I was shocked to discover today that French PHP programmer Bertrand Gugger passed away last week due to a heart attack. Bertrand was co-lead on the Net_Monitor project with me, and contributed many valuable additions to the project, including all the SMS messaging support and end-to-end testing of European SMS messaging providers.

Bertrand was a character, to say the least. He was passionate about PHP and often had very strong opinions about how to write code well. This, combined with an imperfect grasp of English, often got him into trouble on the Pear Developer lists. Still, in the end, Bertrand and I always got along really well and he contributed some very valuable code to the Net_Monitor project as well as many other Pear projects. Whatever he did, he wanted to do right, and this commitment to writing high quality code—as well as a voracious interest in contributing to PHP development—will have implications and benefits for other PHP programmers for a long time to come.

Reading the news a week late on the Pear website drove home how little I have been involved with a community that used to be such a big part of my life. After James’s death, I began to refocus my life (and this website) on one of my original loves: poetry. And, with the growth of the company and my development team at work, I rarely delve in to actual PHP code these days.

That said, just the other day a new programmer signed on to the Net_Monitor project, and I am happy to see this work continue. Coding for love instead of money, giving something back to such an amazing community of talented programmers who have made so much possible for me in my own career and life—is a kind of lineage I have been proud to take part in. Bertrand was an important part of that lineage, right up to the end. He is survived by wife and children, who have my deepest sympathies now.

Que vous reposez en paix, Bertrand. You will be missed.

Proofs & Theories is a remarkable collection of essays in which Glück speaks candidly about her experience and thoughts on writing. I want to read these notes on craft not so much because she is a great essayist or critic, but because I value illumination into the mind of such a remarkable poet. Most striking to me was her essay, “Against Sincerity”—the very title seemed designed to shock. After all, I found myself ruefully laughing along with Li-Young Lee in an interview he gave with Rattle when he said:

I heard a poet say to me, ‘Oh, I hate sincerity.’ And I thought, oh, what do you like? Insincerity? I don’t get it.

I didn’t get it either. Perhaps partly because the title is so iconoclastic, Glück begins by defining terms, equating her use of the word sincerity with “telling the truth.”

Clearly, the truth is not always interesting. Nor can a poet force a reader to like a poem simply because “it really happened.” This seems to be the single greatest mistake of poets engaged with the personal lyric in our time.

Contemporary sonnets are not easy to write.

Yet some have done it surprisingly well. Of the poems I liked best toward the latter half of this anthology, there seemed to be three general types of poems that employed either dense music to drown out the form; an “absurd” subject matter juxtaposed against the intricate, labyrinthine turns of the form; or a very faint adherence to the form, giving a vague echo or nod to the tradition while also breaking free.

I have been reading The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, edited by Phillis Levin. I skimmed through the introduction and read the first sixty pages to reacquaint myself with old friends from my undergraduate days: Petrarch, Sidney, Spencer, Wyatt, Dante. It occurs to me just how wildly popular this form remained, largely unaltered, well after Shakespeare wrote into being some of the highest realizations of the English Renaissance sonnet form. Sonnets were a showpiece in courtier times, a means to political mobility as much as artistic merit. The lack of innovation on the form, up until the Romantics, reminds me of the current saturation of our modern poetry “marketplace” with the same cookie-cutter forms of sentimental personal lyric.

Both forms lend themselves naturally to turns of rhetoric and reflection upon a personal subject (be it love or the death of a loved one), and both forms, done badly, often seem to repay the author’s narcissism far more than the reader’s interest. The challenge with the personal lyric is to overcome the limitations of the deeply personal to reach some unique and universal truth. The challenge of the sonnet, especially in modern times, is to overcome the stringent limitations of the form to approach something transcendent. Far too often, it seems poets are content to write lyric poems that simply matter to themselves and their friends or, as with the sonnet, to simply plough through the form, capitalizing on all its traditional advantages and enduring its limitations.

(Or, A History Of My Web Presence, With Nods To
Robert Pinsky And The 14th Century Samurai Creed)

When frames were in vogue,
my address bar remained constant.
When full-page graphics were in,
you could see my big head for miles.
I never used a black background,
I made trendiness my enemy.
When blogs were in fashion,
my thoughts became chronological.
I do not own an island in Second Life,
I make imagination my island.
When no-one hits my website,
detachment is my unique visitor.

The following email arrived this morning:

Dear MFA Students and Alumni,

I just discovered last night that the latest Atlantic Monthly magazine has listed Pacific University as one of the top five low-residency MFA programs in the nation! Jeannine Hall Gailey casually told me this in an email (a post script, no less) and I dashed out to buy two copies of the “Special Fiction Issue 2007.” In there is an article called “Where Great Writers Are Made” and there, in the last sidebar, is our program. We are included with the most venerable low-residency programs in the nation: Antioch, Bennington, Vermont and Warren Wilson.

Building a program is never easy. But it has truly been a group effort and the faculty and students are the ones who have helped make it happen. You are a talented, hardworking and passionate community and I hope you take as much pride and joy in this news as I do.

All best,

Shelley

Shelley Washburn, Director
MFA in Writing
Pacific University

Not bad for a program that has only graduated two full classes so far.

Obviously, I didn’t choose Pacific for its reputation, since it effectively didn’t have one when I applied. But clearly I’m not the only one who sees the means to work so closely with such great faculty as a rare opportunity and privilege. The beyond-the-call-of-duty helpfulness of the staff, beautiful residency settings and challenging-yet-manageable academic structure go further in making this a great experience so far. Hats off to all involved.

Keith Woodruff has a poignant article on his site about his new relationship to statistics since the passing of his son. I, too, have experienced a profound thinning of the security blanket of probability since our own loss. Every time I got on a plane to and from Oregon, I was keenly aware of how I now neither can nor want to go back to the kind of drowsy false security of my privileged first-world life; nor can I bear to live under constant threat in my mind.

Our nation likewise had the psychic fabric of its imperviousness rent by the attack on the Twin Towers by airplanes. It was an immeasurable tragedy. Yet other countries suffer such losses in greater numbers and more frequently; other families lose more children than those who see adulthood. How can we live, awake to such fragility, without, in the process, being crushed?

Poetry is a kind of faith. The audacity of poem-making, in a world saturated with throw-away words, a preference for television and music, and suspicious indifference to all but the ironic—is itself a profession of belief. To commit one’s life to this art in such times is as irrational as any religion. Truly, we write against the odds.

Tonight I have been reading the poems of Ilya Kaminsky—a Russian poet from Odessa, deaf since early childhood, who, a year after arriving in America with little English, lost his father suddenly. He writes about Mandelstam, Akhmatova and others who survived the un-survivable, writing poems for which they could be killed or worse. Here is a fierceness of faith in humanity. What we pass on to each other in such thin books of poems is some likelihood of greater self-understanding—and a precious likelihood of hope.