But it was the advent of film that brought new possibilities to poetic collaborations by opening up both fronts–visual and auditory–at once. One of my favourite examples of the successful intermarriage of film and poetry is a segment of the 1987 German film “Wings of Desire” that incorporates Peter Handke’s poem “Als das Kind Kind war” (“When the Child was a Child”):

The advent of interactive online media made poetic collaborations of a different type accessible worldwide. A favourite in this regard is Marvin Bell’s poem “Why do you Stay up so Late?” arranged as an interactive Flash piece by Ernesto Lavandera circa 2005. Here the observer is in control of the pace of the poem, as looped sound segments accompany written words and abstract images served up click by click.

The recent prevalence of video sharing and social media has birthed a new form of collaborative art, so new that the term has yet to be standardised. A Google search as of this writing for the following terms yielded these number of results: poem-film (32k), poemfilm (8k), film-poem (99k), filmpoem (30k). For now, I am going with the majority in referring to these works as “film-poems”.

Aesthetically, these pieces tend to feel like a music video of the spoken word. It is a tricky mix, where both the perils and possibilities are great, owing to both media being intense forms in their own right. Done well, both the film and the poem take on greater impact. But the extent to which the combination seems disjointed or drawn out, the form can quickly feel pretentious or silly. Sparing you that, I will give an example of two very different approaches that seem to work.

American poet Michelle Bitting has been working on a series of “poem-films” this summer in collaboration with her husband. People appear in each of them–both live and through photographs. “In Praise of My Brother, the Painter” is a poem about the speaker’s brother, an artist who committed suicide. The poem-film introduces and emphasises new elements distinct from the poem, using footage of Houdini to draw visual analogies, and special effects, such as the three colourised words at the end, to emphasise their impact.

Scottish poet Andrew Philip collaborated with lens artist Alastair Cook in “MacAdam Takes to the Sea” as part of Alastair’s “Filmpoem” project. This piece is more visually abstract. Despite being about a man, only the back of a head in silhouette appears. The majority of the video is composed of recurring sea imagery. These visual loops create their own texture and rhythm in accompaniment to Andrew’s words.

The film-poem is a nascent but promising form, bringing together one modern and one timeless art, exploring both the visual and auditory possibilities of each. Gaining notice on both sides of the Atlantic at once, it will be interesting to see how this mode develops and matures, and how the audience for poetry will be affected by its rise.

Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems

Bell tells us that “[t]he dead man, like you, entered through an archway of effects,” echoing the first line of another iconic poem, “Why Do You Stay Up So Late?” where he declares, “Late at night, I no longer speak for effect.” In un-death, as in late-night delirium, Bell’s other-self has found the means to integrate worldly overwhelm since, for the dead man, “[i]f it were not for the lateness of the hour, everything he sees would be too much.”

The effects he rejects include “the tautologies that cloak war and torture” and glitzy marketing-speak. Through an at once more direct and more off-kilter relationship to language, the dead man can “[enter] your consciousness without tripping the alarm.” And so, through a broad range of different tactics, including humor, pathos, and brain-bending syntax, the dead man slips in his meaning, juggling around the sometimes-awful truth like the fool in King Lear’s court.

The book opens with two quotes–one about the curious nature of philosophy and another about the naturalness of making art. Bell invokes concepts from philosophy, such as Buber’s “I-Thou”, Zeno’s paradoxes, and Occam’s razor, yet the dead man himself is not loyal to any insignia, treating religion, superstition, and science alike, for he “has worn the lone Star of David and the ankh, the good luck rubber band, the medical alert.” Despite this, “he is at peace with the one fact that most informs science, puzzles philosophy, and troubles medicine: that things end.” The dead man is god-like in this way, an idealised alter-ego capable of great empathy, as well as the “seen it all, done it all” detachment of the immortal undead.

Yet Vertigo is hardly abstract in its philosophical musings. Far from it, this is Bell’s most political collection to date. This dead man lives in “a time of troop surges and redactions, leaks and fire starters, a time of bush-league government.” (Note the lowercase “b” referring first to second-rate baseball, and second to second-rate presidencies.) Of presidents he thinks punningly, regarding the effigies of Mount Rushmore, that “it would be a long way down from these four.” Like Bell, and the rest of us, he lives “in the flickering tube light of rampant capitalism.” Still, his allegiances lie not with the conceptual, but the human, for “[t]he dead man is not loyal to America but Americans.”

This is a decidedly American, cunningly political, and fiercely unnerving collection. Philosophy mixes easily with quantum physics, zen with zeitgeist, held together by deft syntax, archetypal images, and the musical underpinnings of natural speech. Spinning like a dervish to transcend the muck through art, these poems will leave you dizzy, make you think.

Photo by James Brunskill

I am pleased to have two poems appear in the inaugural issue of Aperçus Quarterly. The poetry section features fine poems by colleagues and mentors such as Boyd W. Benson, Cameron Scott, Marvin Bell, and Peter Sears. The collection is  a manageable size, and each poem is worth a read. The images beneath each poem are also striking, evocative, and well-chosen to compliment the written piece.

I wrote the poem “White Pigeons” while still in Ojai. There is a coop nearby my parents’ house. Re-reading the poem from my office in Soho makes me homesick for a place that now seems so far away as to almost have been imagined. It is, for me, a pleasant kind of haunting. Enjoy the poems.

I am off to the office supply store now to get prepared to sign and ship out books this weekend. As a special thanks to everyone who ordered directly from me, I am also including an audio CD of me reading all of the poems in my collection. I only have a handful of copies left from this first shipment, but will be ordering another box from the publisher shortly, and taking additional orders as soon as I can. Meanwhile, it is a thrill to hold in my hands such a beautifully-produced book of poems, and know that many others will do so shortly. [UPDATE: I am taking orders again. Details here.]

Val

I disciplined myself to take just one book of poems from the shelves that line the walls of our small cottage. I am taking Marvin Bell’s Nightworks. His strong voice and piquant musings are a comfort to me on long trips. If there were something like a break room for great philosophers, where they could congregate, sip coffee, and chat, Bell’s poems capture bits of what we might overhear. This book seemed like the perfect companion with which to cross the dark Pacific.

Between friends, family, and marsupials, I don’t know how much I will be blogging in the next two weeks. But watch out for photos on Flickr, and I’ll be back in the Northern Hemisphere again soon.

While my first two pieces, on how to learn from rejection and how to be a poet every day, will remain archived on the site, my latest response to a member question, originally slated for mid-May, will now no longer show up on the site. So, in honor of the first day of the last month of this remarkable community’s existence, in honor of the first day of National Poetry Month, and in honor of Read Write Poem member Julie’s question, I am publishing my final column in this series here, on my own website.

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At work, when I interview candidates for an open position, I always ask what it was like at their previous job. I am amazed at how many interviewees animatedly complain. It is a warning sign to me that, if I hire them, they will likely soon be doing the same about my company. And so, though it seems Socratic, I am compelled to respond, whenever fellow writers ask me if they ought to do an MFA, with more questions, such as: How is it going in your current writing workshops? What is the conversation like between you and your trusted peers, when they give you feedback? Who are your current mentors (including those you learn from solely through their published work)? What are you working on improving about your writing life? Whom do you emulate? What do you absolutely know you still need to learn?

Learning to write well is, to me, a lifelong process of self-education. Just as I consider myself responsible for looking after my health, and enlist medical professionals to that end, likewise I am the one in charge of educating myself as a writer. My attitude, therefore, played a critical part in making my MFA two of the most rich and fulfilling years of my writerly life so far.

That said, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” tells the story of a man who, thorough his attitude, found existential meaning in the midst of his imprisonment in a Russian GULAG camp. And so, having said my piece about attitude, let me turn my attention to the substance of the MFA program I attended. After all, nobody wants to pay tens of thousands of dollars to participate in an experience that feels like a Soviet labor camp.

To hear some speak of the MFA system, it can sound like The Gulag Archipelago, which is probably what prompted RWP member Julie to ask:

I’m curious about how writing can be “improved” or even just taught by teachers.  I’ve always felt that poetry arises out of deeply felt experiences that can’t be articulated in any other way but in the shorthand of poems, and yet your writing (at least what I’ve read so far) indicates that an MFA isn’t the kiss of death for originality and that certain “life” that much of current poetry seems to lack.

I must admit that I feel under-qualified to speak to the current state of poetry, or the current state of the MFA system at large. My scientific sample size is limited to one: just me, attending a single low-residency MFA through Pacific University, Oregon, for two years time. I can tell you what I got out of it. Doing so, in my experience, is a bit like sounding a tuning fork. Some will read this and resonate automatically, based on how they are put together. Others might ask “Did you hear something?” and then move on.

Doing an MFA is not for everybody. There are plenty of great writers without them, plenty of mediocre writers with them–and vice-versa. The best answer I can give is to share my experience. Then, if something goes “ding,” you might want to take a next step toward looking in to this type of education.

One of my faculty advisors, Marvin Bell, said something I found remarkable. He said, “Genius in the arts consists in getting in touch with your own wiring.” At first, this would seem consistent with the idea that good writing can’t be taught. This is especially true if you consider teaching in the narrow and traditional sense of imparting information, and quizzing it back. However, my experience in the MFA had more to do with the part of education that shares a common root with the word “educe”–that is, I felt my true writerly self coaxed out from within.

And so, while good writing may not be “teachable” in a traditional sense, a better question might be: is there value to mentorship in the arts? Reading the exchange from Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet” strikes me as a natural precursor to the faculty advisor exchanges in a low-residency MFA. Let me be clear: MFAs are expensive, and MFAs take time; Peer advice is free, and workshop groups are cheap. What made my MFA worth every penny of tuition, and every second of the two intense years of study, was this timeless process of mentorship and exchange. Pick your mentors well.

I studied with remarkable poets who have dedicated their lives to poetry. Just being around them was a privilege. But more than this, I experienced the traits of an artist awaken in me, through conversation and contact. Plus, their writing advice was invaluable. Though I may have found my own “wiring” eventually, through the support and encouragement of my advisors, I feel that my MFA gave me a jump start on the discovery process–easily compressing ten years of self-educating study (or more!) into two rich and immersive MFA years.

Regarding the “kiss of death for originality” sometimes linked to MFA programs, I see self-direction as the most significant mitigating factor against this syndrome. With regard to mentorship, the difference between the teacher-as-sender/student-as-receiver model of teaching, and the rich and engaging dialog I experienced in my two years, is the difference between potentially getting in touch with someone else’s wiring, and getting in touch with your own.

In workshops, the danger of sucking the life out of a poem is heightened, since groups tend toward consensus, and consensus favors mediocrity. Still, for the self-educating poet, taking temperature readings from a variety of bright, engaged readers, and conversing with them about their reading experience, can be an invaluable precursor to the more terse and ruthless process of sending poems out to a publisher. It is an imperfect science, fraught with false reads and biases. Then again, the literary marketplace is as well. The self-educating poet carries a salt shaker wherever she goes.

Finally, while my low-residency MFA was certainly not a GULAG camp, the results were a bit like going through boot camp. Two years of getting up early before work to write, reading after work, and spending time in the evenings and on weekends revising work and sending out poems helped me to groove new and lasting habits. I could set up the same accountability for free with trusted peers–and since graduation, I have. But the energy required to sustain my focus in the MFA program specifically helped me achieve an escape velocity–leaving behind preciousness and hesitation, propelling me into a new realm of discipline and confidence.

Your mileage may vary. For me, this particular MFA, at this critical juncture in my life, was transformational. I wrote blog entries on my website throughout my time in the program. If you would like to read more about my experience, including a transcript of the introduction to my graduate reading and student speech at commencement, please see the “MFA” category on my site.

“…how amiable the gorgeous advantage of the newly born.”

I am somewhere over the Midwest as I type this, returning to the West Coast from a weekend in Boston. Val and I made the trip to attend a very special wedding. Seeing two dear friends–both kind, courageous men–exchange vows with each other, and blessings with all in attendance, renewed my understanding of what marriage is all about.

We stayed in the Omni Parker House Hotel, home to Emerson and Longfellow’s Saturday Club, and spent what little time we had on this trip getting acquainted with American history up close. We visited beautiful old churches, and made the trip up to Harvard–a school founded by Puritans to unite scholarship with spiritual pursuit.

Though most of us made the trip from California, Massachusetts turned out to be the perfect place for this kind of wedding. It was the first state to abolish slavery, a haven for religious diversity, salvation to the starving Irish, a haunt of Franklin, and later, the Transcendentalists–peopled with the inheritors of great wisdom and fierce compassion; steeped, on every Boston street corner, in our nation’s founding ideals.

We also made this journey to meet a very special wedding guest–the two grooms’ newly-adopted daughter. At lunch today, I got to hold her. She is the first baby I have held in my arms since our son, James, died four years ago. And yet the experience was pure joy. When she opened her eyes, and looked in my face, she started smiling, and laughing, and delight seemed to bounce between us, gathering up our faces in grins and giggles.

I picked up a hard-to-find book of poems by Marvin Bell at Grolier’s just outside Harvard, and have been reading it on the plane. A poem that begins, “The dead man encounters horrific conditions infused with beauty,” also contains the phrase: “…how amiable the gorgeous advantage of the newly born.” I read it, and thought of this lucky little girl, who will come to embrace love’s many facets as naturally as she forms her radiant smile.  And arcing now across a small, dark section of globe, fresh hope lights up inside of me–for myself, for my country, and this beautiful, incomprehensible world.

“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.

There really are two aspects of Yoda that remind me of Bell. First, Yoda is a master teacher of an unteachable magic called the force. Second, and most importantly, in Episode II (the fifth film ever made) George Lucas gave every Star Wars junkie what they had long craved: the opportunity to see Yoda wield a light saber himself. With blinding alacrity and consummate skill, Yoda shows himself not only as a master teacher, but master practitioner. After Marvin’s poetry reading last night, a fellow student leaned over to me in the darkened theater and whispered, “he’s a genius.” Having spent last semester studying with him, I wanted to whisper back, “well, duh.”

“Genius in the arts consists of getting in touch with your own wiring.”

Joseph Millar and Marvin Bell, both former faculty advisors during my study at Pacific, conducted a roundtable discussion around the theme of what writing poetry teaches one about poetry itself. At the forefront of their message was: write! As in, do it.

They focused on the necessity of the process to their lives (not the product)–the quality of humility necessary when coaxing out new work (Millar), and the freedom necessary to write long enough, and bad enough, to get better (Bell).

In this sense, Marvin’s admonition that poetry is a way of life, not a career, and Joe’s analogy that keeping on writing limbers one’s muscles to be flexible and receptive to the dance, renders complimentary angles to a simple but profound message: writing is about writing. Talk is talk. Publication is nice; a fleeting pleasure. Writing.

Hearing about the importance of process, and the transitory pleasure of product, reminded me once again of this great little animation of a recording by Alan Watts.

I now recognize that in my work I have had a tendency to want to end a poem after delivering a few good lines, to “look ahead” to the conclusion and shape the direction toward that end. Reading Marvin Bell’s “Dead Man” poems, which always appear in two parts, helped me recognize just how much can still be said even after the conclusion of the first part of a poem. In some ways, every poem could be said to be just the first part of a poem on that topic.

Reading other longer works has also helped me understand how I might go about resisting conclusions in the effort at arriving in more interesting poetic territory. Being halfway through my third semester in the Pacific University MFA program, I have now read over fifty books of poetry and poetry criticism in the last fifteen months of study. I have learned a lot. Perhaps more importantly, I have absorbed a lot, imbibing poetry as much as analyzing it, and letting it shape my aesthetics from the inside out.

Most recently, I have been reading David St. John’s Study For The World’s Body. I am struck by the success of his longer poems. Comparing his work to another poet whose longer poems I also admire, Li-Young Lee, has helped me to understand some of the qualities of longer poems which I hope to deploy in my own efforts at breaking the single-page barrier.

Foremost among them seems to be a tone that reflects confidence. This sense of confidence about the speaker, and by inference the author, helps me as a reader to give the author permission to dwell on unfolding details, provided they remain grounded in concrete images, interesting language, music, or other elements of good craft. Careful examination of details in this way produces the actual poetry, and gives a sense of focus and precision to the work, despite its length.

The stand-up comedian Billy Connolly is a master at delivering humor through seemingly endless digressions. When he finally comes back to the main topic, long since forgotten in the audience’s mind, he earns not only laughs but trust that he knew what he was doing all along. Good long poems can also function in this way–taking time to deliver poetry through the details, but retaining a sense of focus and direction all along.

In some ways, it seems to me that longer poems do not necessarily have to end on lines as spectacular as those required for the success of shorter poems. A rider who has hung on to a bucking stallion with dignity and tenacity need not necessarily dismount with great flourish to win cheers. The sustained quality and duration of the work is a feat in itself. Such feats I look forward to attempting in practice soon.