Insights

I would not have been able to complete an MFA in writing poetry while holding down a job as a technology executive had I not been a longtime practitioner of the GTD^® methodology. In a recently released podcast, David Allen, my boss and the inventor of GTD, asked me about how the GTD concept of the ubiquitous capture tool relates to poetic inspiration. (That conversation begins around 16:56.) My process has evolved considerably in the past few years, from capturing phrases and lines whenever they came through my head to “assemble” later into a poem, to establishing a regular practice of opening up to the muse. This shift sees me capturing fewer individual lines in the moment, and focusing more on getting my head clear of work and personal responsibilities—by using GTD—so that when I do sit down to write, I can slip through the keyhole unencumbered into that poetic space.

The practice of capturing inspiration in the moment is nothing new to artists and writers. After the Ojai Poetry Fest Fundraiser, I had a stimulating conversation with a fellow writer who also happens to be a journalist. As our chat got interesting, he whipped out a pad and paper, seemingly on reflex, and began to take notes. He was “off duty” in the sense that he wasn’t taking notes for a news story—but it got me thinking that if one is, indeed, a student of life, there is no “off duty.” And a good student takes good notes about subjects that fascinate. The difference GTD makes, of course, is that it presents a systematic approach for what to do with those notes—including tracking any resulting commitments to oneself or others, and executing appropriate action and regular review in order to make one’s dreams more than just a scribble on a notepad.

So, in case I haven’t said it lately, thank you, David, for bringing this methodology into my life, helping me to bring appropriate focus and attention to the many different worlds I inhabit. The gift of being more present in my life is truly precious.

“I’ve often been quoted: ‘No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.’ But another distinction I made is: however sad, no grievance, grief without grievance. How could I, how could anyone have a good time with what cost me too much agony, how could they? What do I want to communicate but what a hell of a good time I had writing it? The whole thing is performance and prowess and feats of association. “

-Robert Frost

I resisted John Ashbery. In part, for his popularity, and in part, like so many prophets, because I was suspicious of his followers. And so, I came to read Some Trees out of a sense of obligation to be a good citizen in the world of poetry. But the experience of encountering Ashbery’s work for myself, firsthand, and (as much as possible) on my own terms, setting aside outside influence—was significant. Ashbery’s work subverted my expectations even as it illustrated to me the significance of subverting expectation as a fundamental aspect of poetry.

Simply subverting expectation is not, however, enough. There is a sense of coherence in Ashbery’s work, at the same time that one has the exciting sense that any line might follow any other line. That is, simultaneously, there is surprise, and freedom, and a sense of intellectual wildness, tempered by a governing theme. What I learned from Ashbery is that there are specific tactics one can deploy to keep a poem moving—both for the reader and the writer.

“In art, you’re free.”

One of the delights of my web presence is that I sometimes get emails from writers and readers fairly new to poetry. Recently, a young marketing executive in Singapore wrote to me. In our most recent exchange, he rightly points out that, especially in the US, there seem to be countless poets, poetry awards, and poets with awards. How, then, do we define great poets or poetry? He gave me permission to answer publicly, on this site.

In doing so, I first have to admit that I do not feel qualified in any way to define great poets or poetry. I can really only comment on the poets and poems that are great within me. I have been giving this some thought, and have identified a few common characteristics.

Voltaire is reputed to have said, “Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to be read.” That’s a bit harsh. But I am inclined to agree that poetry does involve its own kind of “truth.” It is not a factual truth, but more what Seamus Heaney called “a ring of truth within the medium itself,” since, according to Emily Dickinson, a poet “tells all the truth but tells it slant.” I also think poetic truth needs to be both new and moving in order to reach toward greatness.

Some would argue that newness, especially innovation in language, is all that matters. I think, instead, that innovation is actually a by-product of great poets seeking after new truths (which are often, in fact, old truths newly arranged). The quality of moving the reader in some way is, to me, essential. This does not need to involve an intense emotional outpouring. But if the reader is the same before and after reading the poem, then the reader has not been moved, and the poem can hardly be said to have fulfilled its potential for greatness.

Seamus Heaney and Czeslaw Milosz are two poets I think are great. Among other things, Heaney mostly wrote about The Troubles in Northern Ireland, and Milosz mostly wrote about occupied Poland during World War II. The combination of their position in history, and the profound ways in which they related to such difficult subject matter, make it clear why they were both awarded the Nobel Prize.

I believe there is an energy and intensity that comes with discovering poetry as a means to reconcile life’s difficulties, and then discovering how much one needs such reconciliation, or, at least, creative freedom. However, the drive to write does not necessarily require such epic circumstances. Emily Dickinson wrote poems of remarkable ingenuity and skill in the midst of a repressive life as a Victorian spinster. In fact, I think that anyone sufficiently sensitive to the circumstances of the world in which we live has all the encouragement necessary to seek the solace poetry can provide.

The most common characteristic I can identify among those poets I consider great is their absolute hunger for the freedom in art. It is this quality that galvanizes talent, effort, patience, endurance, and everything else I find inherent within those poets I most admire. It is true, as Marvin Bell points out, that in life we are not free, and even the most privileged life can be a burden. But in art, we are free, and this freedom, and the poetic truth that issues from this free space, can touch to others in ways that are great inside of them as well.

I am on a detox diet that involves soaking in a bath nearly every day. Lately, I have been taking The English Language: A Historical Introduction with me. (It only took dropping my precious iPod touch into sudsy water once to break me of my previous habit.) Aside from the occasional snide remark about pronunciations other than strict-and-snotty RP (like, say, American English), the book is excellent.

I found this passage particularly interesting:

Try speaking the following two sentences as naturally as you can, stressing in each the four syllables marked:

There’s a néw mánager at the wórks todáy
There’s a néw bóss thére nów.

Although the first has eleven syllables, and the second only six, you will find that the two sentences take about the same time to speak. The reason for this is not hard to see: a speaker of English tries to space the stressed syllables evenly, so that both sentences contain four time-units. … This characteristic of the English language plays a part in the rhythm of English poetry, since a sequence of stressed syllables makes the verse move slowly, whereas a sequence of unstressed syllables makes it move fast.

This is an elementary point, but one I found revelatory in that it clearly articulated something I had only understood on instinct before. The book also points out that many languages other than English space all syllables evenly. In our case, however, we have a built-in mechanism for the equivalent of musical rubato.

This is what enabled Gerard Manley Hopkins to cluster stressed and unstressed syllables into a metrical invention he called sprung rhythm, and what allowed the beats to mimic the syncopation of jazz.

At the end of The Bourgeois Gentleman, the main character is surprised and delighted to discover he has been speaking prose all his life. Call me bourgeois, but I, too, am in fact delighted to have discovered this simple, mechanical understanding of the meter-making elements of the language in which I have been inventing, both poetry and prose, ever since my first uttered word.

Stephen Kuusisto posted an insightful take on writing workshops today. Though I have had the good fortune not to encounter those workshop leaders “who want to wave from a considerable height,” his words (and those of St. Augustine) ring true with regard to the conviviality necessary to have a meaningful discussion of art. Sobriety is for the sciences; with aesthetics one must dance around a little in the bacchanal of subjectivity. In this game, stimulation trumps pronouncements, and questions beat answers hands-down.

Thanks to Jason for turning me on to Wordle. It’s a simple program designed to take in text, and spit out attractive word clouds.

My MFA Thesis consists of three parts: a book-length collection of poems, an essay on Seamus Heaney, and a bibliography. According to the Wordle website, “If you do not save your Wordle to the gallery, no information leaves your workstation at any time.” So, I felt comfortable pasting the culmination of two years of hard work in to the site.

First, the essay:

Then, the poems:

As you can see, even though I generated them with different coloring, the word clouds still have a unique impact based on the words alone. Whereas the essay is dominated by a few words, my poems are swarming with numerous smaller words (i.e. less frequently repeated)—and, of course, “like” reigns supreme over my similes.

Just walking my eyes over the clusters of different-sized words is itself a somewhat poetic experience, akin to the hybrid art of visual poetry. So, there you have it—all the words of my creative thesis (minus the bibliography), de-duped and laid out for your delectation. Hmm… “delectation”… now there’s a word I should use more often!

“A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.”

I have been preparing for my final MFA residency—the last requirement before I graduate. In preparing an introduction for my graduate reading, I began reflecting on the newfound significance of the writing process in my life. More than any specific product, like the black buckram-bound book containing my creative thesis, it is the process I have nurtured over the past two years that I will carry forward into the next phase of my life.

In fact, momentarily, holding the bound thesis in my hand seemed to symbolize “the end.” And then, once again, as an act of sheer defiance, I fired up the word processor, opened my running document full of rough drafts, false starts, cheesy ideas, and occasional gems, and just wrote something. Probably something bad—or worse, “just alright.” But in that moment, poetry was, once again, revitalized in my life.

Poetry is an act of defiance, not only against the conventional wisdom that favors a tangible product over a life-enriching process, but defiance of the sound-byte, get-it-now consumer culture, and mind-numbing political-speak. It defies neat categorization, defies polarization of “right” and “wrong,” and challenges us to understand language—a medium we take for granted by its constant use—in unexpected ways.

I am writing this now to encourage myself to remember, once the cover sheets have been signed, and the toasts have been made, to rebel a little each and every day against a world that wants to tell you, “stop, enough, you’re done.”

I woke up recently with a line from a song in my head. The song was “Cemetery Gates” by The Smiths—one of their signature jaunty-melody-with-morose-lyrics numbers. The actual meaning of the song is less important than the way my own subconscious seems to have appropriated the message upon waking. I rolled over in bed and repeated the line to Val: “Keats and Yeats are on your side.” She smiled. “You know, I think that’s true. I think they are on your side, Robert.”

What a strange and comforting thought. What would those generations of poets stretching back into antiquity think of those of us still practicing the art in the era of iPhones and micro-blogging? I think they might be proud. The prospects for wealth and recognition are certainly far greater in other disciplines, and always have been. And yet, in that moment, it occurred to me that the ghosts of poetry past might somehow be rooting for us, now more than ever, as we ply an art that must seem, to some, anachronistic.

Still, the poets of yesteryear probably had the same combination of wild inventiveness and ferocious discipline that attracts us contemporary poets to the page. Had we all met, therefore, we might have got along—and perhaps one day in the poetic afterlife, we will find, despite our factions and fracases, that we were all on the same side all along.

For those of you interested in hearing the whole song, here it is:

“Publication—is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man—”

I must admit I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with sending out poems to awards and periodicals. Actually, that’s not true. It’s more of a hate-hate relationship. The difficulty lies on two fronts: practical and psychological. So, this weekend, determined to let a few more poems from my manuscript finally have a chance at seeing the light of day, I enlisted my wife’s help. She, after all, sees nothing unusual about sending poems she likes to journals with a similar sensibility, and waiting patiently for the reply. After all, they are not her poems.

For me, it’s been a morass of spreadsheets and angst. Though otherwise detail-oriented, I found rounding up the information necessary to send off poems akin to a multivariable calculus exam. You see, the mind-games and doubt have somehow transformed a mildly laborious process into something Kafkaesque. So, making the process simple and methodical has been a key for me to stick with it. Poems, after all, don’t publish themselves.

My process involves maintaining spreadsheets: of poems I have already sent out, when, to whom; and of journals that might like my work. I have recently taken to rating them by the degree to which I think the sensibilities of the periodical might match my own, and by my perception of their reputability. So, then I sort the list (sensibility first, reputability second), and ratchet down one by one, checking submission periods, guidelines, and the number and format of poems to send.

For choosing the poems, I pick from a folder on my computer of poems I both think are done, and are worth publishing. I have a a single, huge document full of continuous writing, and a separate folder with individual files of single poems from that document with which I would like to tinker before declaring them done. Once done, if they’re good, they make it either to a place I call “fossils” (i.e. stuff I might mine later, but not worth publishing) or the to-publish folder I mentioned above. Once the to-publish folder starts looking really full, a combined sense of guilt and duty prompts me to submit a few poems.

This is my method. I have tried to make it as simple as possible so that, like the tasks assigned to astronauts waddling through the vacuum of space, the procedures are so methodical and well-rehearsed that I can execute them even when gazing into the yawning black void. I’d love to know what other people do, what works—both practically and psychologically—to keep putting work out there for consideration. Do you view it as a necessary evil? A pleasant delight? Do you have some other system that really works?

Like it or not, in the end, sending out poems is a part of the process. Making that process bonehead-simple, and doing it even (sometimes especially) when I would rather, instead, be writing a new poem or, better yet, wasting time on Facebook, is an exercise in detachment, perseverance, and yes, you guessed it, continuing to hope.

I had the poignant duty of sending out the email newsletter announcement last night that the 2009 Ojai Poetry Festival has been cancelled. The current financial situation has affected our founders, our prospective donors, and our hopes for ticket sales considerably. So, the committee is conserving its resources in hopes of reviving the festival in 2011. Having already sent hundreds of emails and made numerous updates to the website in anticipation of such a great lineup, I am, needless to say, disappointed.

And yet, I am heartened by the absolute flurry of poetry events passing through in recent weeks. A small but formidable group of women poets are hosting a reading in a beautiful backyard just around the corner from me. The names of two fellow students from long ago found their way to me in announcements of their separate readings. Others seem to be driving up and down the California coast reading poems associated with their recent prize, or book, or just because there seems to be a hungry market for poetry right now.

In some cases, the marketplace of poetry does intersect with the financial marketplace. Those poets who have managed to in some way cobble together a lifestyle of writing and teaching poetry are likely influenced by the recent economic downturn. Yet there exists a separate marketplace for poetry wherein supply can be measured in willing voices, and demand in eager ears. This marketplace seems to work almost inversely to the financial marketplace, in that difficult times bring us back to the necessity of art.

Writing poems is, in many senses of the word, “free.” And during times when it can be difficult to be generous materially, opportunities to be generous with one’s time and creativity seem to represent an outlet for hope. Attending readings, buying and borrowing books of poems, is generally inexpensive. Yet the payoff is significant. From a small investment of time, an enrichment of perception. Therefore, as the stock markets, and other markets, continue to rattle and roll, I say let us all invest our human currency—in reading, writing, and listening to great poems.