Category Archives: Insights

Doomed in Good Company

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Thoughts for Dispossessed Poets

“There is another world, and it is in this one”

-Paul Éluard

“He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.”

-John 1:10

Skull with Top Removed by Leonardo DaVinciBoo hoo. The modern world we live in does not appreciate poetry. Not like it ought to, not like you and I do. We get it. We eagerly await that new journal or book of poems, smuggle it like contraband into our grey morning commute. We find the one poem that, as Dickinson put it, takes the top of our head off. And it stays with us all day, as we go about our work counting beans or scrubbing out loos. It changes who we are and how we see the world. But nobody else really gets it, and the lack of money is there to prove it.

So maybe we’re doomed.

But poetry has already changed the world–yours, mine–irrevocably in altering how we see it. It is in the world, making and re-making it, and the world has not a clue. But we know. And so we go on reading and writing, having great conversations long past bedtime, walking through the gentle misery of everyday living with this secret knowledge, this little spark that could light the whole world on fire–but doesn’t. Perhaps never will.

Maybe we’re doomed. But we are doomed in good company–you and me–which is to say we are blessed indeed. Ask anyone. The poets always throw the best parties. They dance like they have nothing to lose, because it’s true. And you and me, we’ve made it this far somehow, getting by, doing our thing, making life just about work. John Keats died largely unrecognised. But ask his friends at the time, and he meant as much to them then as he does to many of us now. Do we really expect better for ourselves than the respect of a few respectable peers?

The audience is dwindling. Fine. If you need someone to write for, write for me. I mean it. I need your poems as much as I ever did–the ones I can carry around with me, the blue flame, the chip of ice in my heart. Continue reading →

10 Transcontinental Poets for 2013

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Transcontinental 2013The Internet gives us the illusion that the best a culture has to offer will invariably find its way to us. But when it comes to art, I find that so much still comes down to local knowledge. Americans and Brits alike have long maintained a fascination with the literary work of their overseas cousins, but usually only the biggest names make the trip across the pond.

Hoping in some small way to remedy this, I have written an article for the US edition of The Huffington Post on “5 British Poets to Watch in 2013” and, for sake of symmetry, an article in the UK edition of The Huffington Post on “Five American Poets to Watch in 2013“.

How closely you watch is, of course, up to you. My hope is that you will seek out the work of these ten fine poets out for your own sake, to bring a little transcontinental mischief and mirth to your poetry reading in the year ahead.

Ira Lightman: Experiments in Poetry

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“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

-Jack Kerouac, On The Road

The thing about experiments is that they don’t always work out. In this way, experimental poetry can be seen as a high-risk, high-reward art form. Unlike other modes, where poets endeavour to generate sufficient heat to boil water, experimental poets go for either Roman candle effects or stink-bombs–but nothing in between. Much of it ends up the latter for me. I find it falls somewhere between a riddle and an inside joke, packed with cleverness and cerebral effect. It is so often the cerebral quality, above all, that leaves me cold–poems written from the neck up only, leaving the author safe and aloof.

This is why I have so enjoyed discovering experimental poet Ira Lightman’s work. Ira pushes the boundaries of word-play, but retains something of the human in doing so. Consider this poem from Duetcetera, a collection of concrete poems arranged with gaps in the middle:

REPUBLICAN DEMOCRAT
unloved the unhated
hate love
precipitating world's cruising
the within
anchor ending dry
yank dock

Apropos of the current US presidential election, the poem captures a certain sense of foreboding I have detected in Brits who follow the slings and arrows of the American political process. Continue reading →

In Praise of Small Spaces

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“‘This is fine,’ replied Candide, ‘but we must cultivate our garden.’”

-Voltaire, Candide

Click for Photos“It’ll be like living on a boat,” a friend remarked upon hearing of our plans to move to a tiny cottage in rural England. Looking out my office window at the expanse of field and garden stretching beyond the horizon, it now feels more like a toy submarine, at the depths of what my wife’s Aunt used to call, “England’s green aquarium.”

This is not the first time we have downsized–going from California to London was a huge lifestyle shift. But when I tell American friends that our Victorian cottage in the countryside now measures 500 square feet in total, they understandably laugh, since they often have bigger garages than that.

But then, when I describe our narrow strip of garden that stretches back almost 300 feet, in several stages, past apple trees and tall poppies to a honesuckle-clad archway leading into a final, secret garden with its Monet-like profusion of wildflowers and a single wooden bench–well, then they want to come visit. As an American poet, the Walden-like aspect of retreat also appeals to me immensely.

Furthermore, I know that creativity often springs from constraint. Force your thoughts into the tight little “rooms” of a sonnet (which is what “stanza” literally means in Italian) and the language becomes more interesting than if you give yourself indefinite space to ramble on. A concise poem is a more elegant poem. And, as I am discovering, a life with conscious constraints is often a more elegant one, too.

One definition of “elegance” might simply be quality over quantity. When we had lots more space, we had greater potential to unconsciously accumulate lots of stuff. But then I found myself spending more time managing the stuff around me than I wanted to, instead of focusing on the stuff within me.

And so I am learning to take pleasure in the little cultivations of a simple life. A poem comes present line by line, and a garden takes shape snip by snip. Already the results of this recent fierce pruning are beginning to bloom.

Citizen of Poetry

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Cactus BlossomI spent fourteen months in England, working hard to make the odd feel normal. When what is foreign feels odd, it is understandable. But when what was formerly normal now feels odd, that is perhaps the oddest feeling of all.

I now find myself, back in the US for a brief visit, ambling through coastal California towns taking snapshots–both mentally and with my iPhone–that a British tourist might take: cactus blossom, stars and stripes, the shimmering coastline. The very scenery of my childhood and early adulthood has become an archaeological dig.

The “shock” in the phenomenon of reverse culture shock occurs while driving, when I turn at an empty intersection and there is a momentary flash, in that between-lanes space, where I have to think hard to remember which side of the road I should be turning into.

Yet I always make the turn. There is a way in which intersection has become more the norm, and made the counter-shock less shocking than I feared. Sucking on a chili-covered lollipop from Jalisco, Mexico while sipping a mug of English tea, it occurs to me that I have always lived in the interstices of cultures–first on the US-Mexico border, and now as an American in England.

More and more, I feel both “at home” and “on vacation” wherever I go. Although my formative experiences will always make me an American, the context through which I relate to the world has expanded beyond my sun-drenched beginnings. For me, this is the place where poems come from–in fascinated relation to the world at large, through moments of specificity.

Perhaps, in this sense, my travels have made me a citizen of Poetry–that state governed by aesthetic appreciation of human affairs, where the tax is repaid on one’s attention by the ability to abide in liminal mysteries, living deeply, line by line.

Christopher Reid’s Elegiac Scattering

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“Hobgoblin, nor foul fiend; / nor even the jobsworth slob / with a slow sly scheme to rob / my darling of her mind / that I imagined; / just a tumour.”

-Christopher Reid, “The Unfinished”, from A Scattering

A Scattering by Christopher ReidChristopher Reid’s A Scattering is a moving tribute to his wife Lucinda, who died of cancer. A respected English poet recommended it to me after reading my piece contrasting Douglass Dunn and Donald Hall, both of whom also wrote elegies under very similar circumstances. In addition to fine poems, in this book I also found certain insights into how a culture grieves, and what it considers good art.

Whereas Douglass Dunn’s elegies take root in his working-class background, Reid signals his place in the upper class early on in the book when, on the island of Crete, he invokes “ghosts of old schoolmasters” whose lessons, in his mouth, have become, “scraps of misremembered Classical Greek.”

In The Daily Telegraph, a periodical more typically aligned with those who studied Classics as school, Tom Payne assessed, “It is a collection that defies criticism in two ways–first, because it feels wrong to pick over such poignant elegies, and also, because so many of these poems are impossible to fault.” What makes this book seem flawless to this particular slice of Britain–and especially when the topic is such a difficult one?

Two elements more common in American expressions of grief are entirely off limits to Reid: invoking religious faith, and outpouring emotion. Instead, educated fascination with the world, and particularly the natural world, takes the place of religion; and self-consciousness and self-deprecation take the place of emotive self-expression.
Continue reading →

Poetry Versus Angry Birds

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“I have become comfortably numb.”

-Pink Floyd

When I commute into the city centre, I often take a book of poems. I read them eagerly on the way in to work. But after a long day wrestling with technical, logistical, and managerial issues, on the return journey I will invariably whip out my phone and tap away mindlessly at video games.

Certainly, energy is one factor in this pattern. Poetry demands attention (and good poetry rewards it in equal or greater measure); video games demand little but give back instantly in pleasurable (but short-lived) bursts. So, perhaps when I have less to give, I settle for the lightweight option. But this doesn’t explain the pattern entirely, because I often read and enjoy poems in the comfort of my own home when I am equally or even more tired–and I rarely play video games except to “kill time.”

The other factor is how incredibly uncomfortable I find being crammed into a tube carriage with strangers. Many people seem to take it in stride; for me every second counts. More than once, while playing video games, I have missed my interchange or only just looked up in time to get off at my stop. The stimulation and quick reward cycles of video games speed time up, which is exactly what I want at the end of a long day–to fast-forward through the unpleasant commute home.

Reading poetry, time behaves differently. Continue reading →

First Year in London: Lessons in Negative Capability

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“Not wrong, just different.”

-Valerie‘s mantra for overcoming culture shock

Tuesday marks the one-year anniversary of my arrival in London. This afternoon I attended a reading at Keats House in Hampstead. Four volunteers read poems and excerpts from his letters dealing with the concept of Negative Capability. This ability to remain “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” is something I have cultivated in my writing process, and admired in the work of others. However, it occurs to me that living in London has exercised this quality in my life as well.

My first time living abroad has also been my first time living outside of California. Stepping off the curb while looking in the habitual (but wrong!) direction can cause a visceral shock. But the same can happen in conversation. Learning to navigate the labyrinthine streets of London can feel stressful and overwhelming. Likewise, the literary terrain. And semiotic estrangement produced at least one new poem.

Challenged with startling newness, the temptation is to make a split-second decision: either “they” are doing it wrong, or I am. But neither decision is sustainable, or leads to positive adjustment (for there are more of “them” than me, but in the end, I have to live with myself). So instead, I have been repeating my English wife’s third-way statement, which she used extensively while living in California: “not wrong, just different.” This in itself expands my capacity to abide the contradictory.

Also, faced with so much newness, the temptation is often to compartmentalise. Continue reading →

Transatlantic Elegies: Dunn and Hall

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Donald Hall’s keen observations on grief in Without had a profound impact on my understanding of the possibilities of elegiac poems. Since relocating to London, Douglass Dunn’s slim volume Elegies has deepened my understanding of the form, and some of its specific cultural implications. Both collections were written in the wake of the poet’s wife’s death from cancer. And each, in its way, is a remarkable achievement of transcending loss to make art. But here the similarities end, and certain differences–ones I find illustrative of the subtle divide in Anglo-American poetics–begin.

Whereas Hall’s poems are largely confessional, Dunn’s might be called archaeological. Taking the first poems from each book as examples, we find in “Her Long Illness” an account in the third-person that is none-the-less told in scene, revealing intimate details of the couple’s final moments together. By contrast, Dunn’s “Re-Reading Katherine Mansfield’s Bliss and Other Stories” takes us through an examination of the stains on a book’s pages, invokes Robert Frost’s “A Considerable Speck” in addressing a fly, and only obliquely touches on the matter of grief itself in the final words of the poem: “one dry tear punctuating ‘Bliss’.”

Some of this stems from the vantage point taken up by the speaker–whereas Hall is re-living experience, going back to the hospital scenes in his mind, Dunn is reflecting, rooted in the present, casting forward and back. How each poet chooses to reflect or relive, however, and the effect this produces in the poems, brings colour to certain value differences between the two poetics.
Continue reading →

Overcoming Poetic Culture Shock

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“We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.”

-Oscar Wilde, 1887

Oscar Wilde would be pleased to know that, based on my experience so far as an American in London, Britain and America are still very much separated by a common language. More than this, as a transplanted poet beginning to send down roots into unfamiliar ground, I am discovering that the set of poetic impulses that find favour in the UK differ from those enriched by my native soil. This makes sense: so much about art is a matter of taste, and so much about taste can be cultural.

And so, even as I have been experiencing culture shock in my ordinary life, I am also going through a kind of poetic culture shock as I find my way in this new literary terrain. One of the best ways I have found to get through culture shock of any kind is to articulate and embrace what is unique about the new environment. While it would be impossible to describe, universally and categorically, what distinguishes British and American poetics, I recognise certain differences on instinct. The Americas could not have made a Seamus Heaney; the British Isles could not produce a Sharon Olds.

And so, I have been making a personal and highly subjective investigation into the strengths of each culture’s contemporary poetry, by reading and re-reading two books: The Best American Poetry 2011 (Scribner) and The Best British Poetry 2011 (Salt). I took note of the poems I liked most, then listed the qualities held in common by my favourites from each book.

Qualities of Contemporary British and American Poetry
British American
Context and Continuity Invention and Spontaneity
Focus on Music Focus on Narration
Overt Intellectual Core Overt Emotional Core
Academic Influence Psychological Influence

Continue reading →

Small Gestures

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“A short poem need not be small.”

-Marvin Bell

20111018-111259.jpgI am tapping this out on my iPhone from Florence, having left the laptop in London. My first time in Italy finds me marveling at so much grand art, and wondering if there is still a place in the post-colonial, post-modern, post-financial-collapse world for the enduring opera magnifica.

Though my nickname in the seminary was “Dante”, my own poems often focus on small moments, coaxing the universal from the quotidian. To attempt to expiate like Milton these days just seems somehow naïve.

Is it true? Has the grand just become grandiloquent? The epic apocryphal? What is left worth having writ large? If Signor Alighieri knows, he isn’t saying so far.

A Poet’s Tube Map

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And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

-Genesis 2:19 (KJV)

This image has been removedThere are many ways to settle in to a new place. One is to give them names of one’s own. Inspired by parodies giving alternate names to tube stations in London, I have produced a map whose stations take into account the poetic landscape. This is not intended to be the poet’s tube map, but rather a poet’s tube map–mine, representing my own thoughts and experiences at the intersection between London and the lyre.

Click to view the map.