In his great piece on Philip Whalen, Travis Nichols excerpts a beautiful mess from a Whalen poem, and then comments:

Many poets would instinctively cut the opacity and the interiority out of this poem in favor of straight imagery and profundity. They would skim the “pure and lucid wisdom of the Buddha” off the top and leave the rest to rot. And for good reason. It’s terrifying to see someone purposefully leave all of it in—no one would accept such a submission!—but by doing so, and by addressing the struggle between private thought and public expression as the major theme of his work, Whalen’s poetry shines.

So true! It seems a habit of an overly workshopped mind to cut to the elevated and profound and “leave the rest to rot.” In a fiction workshop I attended last year, Chris Bachelder made the case that workshops have the unfortunate tendency to remove bumps. But some works are bumpy, and should remain that way. Excising such bumps takes away the work’s singularity.
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[Note: After writing this, I realized that apparently it is the Death of Old Technology Week at KR. Thematic!]

Doom! Doom! Call the Kinks! Polaroid will soon stop manufacturing its instant film. Of course nostalgia is one of the most unpleasant poses one can strike (and I have no plans to try to make my computer look like it was designed by H.G. Wells), but this news is wearing my heart out. Why?

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Listen, I hate to question, but… haven’t we come this way before? Really, I recognize those rocks, that dismal swamp, those hungry tigers. And this is the third time I’ve stumbled into this quicksand. (Can you throw me that vine again?) We had a map, remember? Hand-drawn, it’s true, but still a path that ran straight from opening sentence to denouement. So why all this wandering around?

Not that we haven’t seen some interesting things. The fields of flowering perversity were particularly impressive. Who knew it would all be so… vivid? (The rash has mostly healed now. Thanks for asking.) And, yes, the moment when I mistook you for my mother was amusing. But do we have to keep talking about it?

“We’re most human,” you like to say, “in our inconsistency.” Certainly my characters agree. But are you? Human? If so, then why am I following you?

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In the latest issue of Poetry, Eavan Boland has an essay in which she decries the current emphasis on poets being skill-based. In other words, to be a practicing “professional” poet one has to be a reliable and social enough human being to teach workshops and comp/lit courses, give readings in distant cities, edit books and journals, deliver papers at conferences, etc. She argues that there should be a place in poetry for those who are too socially challenged or otherwise unstable to carry out the seemingly required offices of the poet. There are, of course, another group of people who write poetry who simply have no interest in participating in any poetic community outside of themselves and their books, and they should have a place as well.

By “a place” I think what is really meant is a financial livelihood. There are obviously a limited number of grants and fellowships available which are granted strictly on the merit of a writing sample that could support some of these non-skill based poets, but since teaching is the main way that poets make a living, poets who aren’t able or are unwilling to teach may miss out on a way of having a lifestyle in which they can both have financial security and write. This can’t be a good thing for poetry.

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After reading this piece in the Sunday Oregonian on William Stafford, with whom Portland is obsessed, and after learning, on the same day that Gary Snyder has won the Ruth Lilly prize, I got to thinking about legendary Oregon poets, and the difficulty of living and writing in a much-written landscape. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been recently buffeted about by The Digger’s Game, a novel by the late George V. Higgins. I haven’t read much crime fiction but feel strangely comfortable saying Higgins is the best.

The fiction is dialogue driven—with characters occasionally letting loose shards of backstory and explanation to create and color the narrative. Here’s a fragment from early in The Digger’s Game. A robbery is in its planning phases, and the robber (The Digger) is speaking with one of the crime’s organizers (the driver):

“Chickenshit outfit,” the Digger said.
“Well,” the driver said, “it’s really just for the typewriters and, you know, in case the junkies come in and start tearing the place apart. They don’t keep any real dough there. It’s just for intruders, is all.”
“Trespassers,” the Digger said.
“Yeah,” the driver said, “trespassers. Speaking of which, I assume you’re not a shitter or anything.”
“No,” the Digger said.
“You know you’re not a shitter, too, don’t you?” the driver said.
“Well, I’m pretty sure,” the Digger said. “I never done much of this, but when I been in some place, I never did, no.”
“Well, in case you get the urge,” the driver said, “wait till you get home or something.”

According to Wikipedia, Higgins “liked to point out that accurate dialogue was not a verbatim transcription of things said but an imaginative recreation in compressed form.” Often praised for his dialogue, Higgins separates real life speech from accurate dialogue. For him, the description of strong dialogue, “so real it spits,” would be more accurately (if less sonorously) changed to “so imaginatively recreated in compressed form…that it spits.” Higgins hits on one of the problems of using “real” to describe representative art. We, as readers, don’t want what’s real. Full of “ums” and “uhs,” reality makes us wait too long for the exciting parts.

The “newspaper” is just an institution, an abstract entity that gathers and distributes the core product, which is news and other information. The paper it’s printed on is simply a container for that information, a technology of convenience. If we replace the old container with a new one, nothing will be lost, as long as the contents are the same. Whether milk is delivered in a plastic bottle or a waxed cardboard carton, it’s still milk.

A striking article from a Harvard professor: “Hamlet’s Blackberry: Why Paper is Eternal” by William Powers. It’s 75 pages long and beautifully written, but in case you’re too busy skimming other electronic writing, here’s a quick summary: Read the rest of this entry »

When I was seven years old, I was in a production of Alice in Wonderland. I was a centipede. I was also the understudy for the small Alice. I prayed for misfortune to befall the small Alice, but my wish was not granted, and I did not yet know about hit men.

This weekend and last I am/have been in a production of a play by Madeline ffitch, of whom Sean Casey is a big fan. Me too. You can read more about her, and her theatre company, the Missoula Oblongata here, here and here. The play, Go to the Chateau, takes place in and around a moving car, for an audience of two people at a time. I had forgotten, in rehearsing, how completely awesome an idea that is. Now I have remembered and telling you. It is an awesome idea.

In chapter 5 of Alice in Wonderland, Alice meets the Caterpillar. It goes like this:

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Can writing make you happy? Monday’s New York Times carried an obituary of Michael White, an Australian social worker and family therapist who helped to develop the practice of narrative therapy, in which victims of childhood trauma are encouraged to create stories and metaphors to gain control over their experience and reshape it in a more positive light. The goal is “to help a patient recognize personal strengths,” and so develop what another practitioner described as “the ‘preferred stories’ of success and achievement in the patient’s life.” On one level, this strikes me as an accurate description of what we do when we tell ourselves our own stories, revising as we go, until our lives end up with the kind of narrative arc that would make a Hollywood producer happy: we find our strength, triumph over adversity, and write a best-selling memoir (loosely based on a true story) that ends with us smiling on the couch with Oprah as the final music swells.

But it turns out that such narratives may not be necessary to achieving our bliss. A recent study published in the British Journal of Health Psychology suggests that as little as two minutes a day of “expressive writing” twice a week can lead to improved health. It’s being called the “two minute miracle” by some researchers. While the results confirm previous studies about the health benefits of daily writing, those studies required participants to write for 15-20 minutes each day. According to the University of Missouri psychologists who conducted the most recent study, measurable improvements in mood and physical symptoms show up even in these very brief writing sessions. As a form of therapy, writing no longer needs to be like going to the gym. Now it can be like sex. (Or is that just me?)

But all this raises an obvious question: if writing is so good for your emotional health, why are so many writers so miserable?

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There’s a John Hollander poem today on Poetry Daily. I admit that it didn’t embrace me with open arms; to get the full experience, one needs more than a passing acquaintance with Latin.

Hollander’s name will be forever linked in my mind to my favorite book on prosody–Rhyme’s Reason. He was my first guide to verse forms, and the book was so clear and full of wit, so comforting to me as an aspiring versifier, that, to this day, the syllables of his name have a pleasing quality. Even the book’s compact size (88 pages) and handy index contribute to accessibility. The aspiring versifier could put it in a purse or jacket pocket; she could carry it at all times, in case she ever needed to know how to compose a clerihew. Read the rest of this entry »