My boyfriend and I have different approaches to meeting authors. I chat them up and ask a bunch of questions (pretending to be a normal person and not a rabid fan) and my boyfriend oohs and aahs over nerdy knowledge he and the author share, waiting for a conversation to erupt. Both methods served us quite well yesterday at the UCLA/Los Angeles Times Festival of books. Where else could we have gotten a signed issue number one of the Tek Jansen comic, or sat in on a seminar with Robert Pinsky, or listened to the poems of Luis Rodriguez, or passed by as Maria Shriver was sharing her inspirations with an interviewer, or paused and sipped a soda while watching a group of kids play “Simon Says” at the storytelling stage? Despite all of the articles, blogs, podcasts and radio programs announcing the death of the book and its readers, I found only evidence of the opposite on Sunday.
The book festival is my favorite LA destination. My first years in Los Angeles I was a featured reader at one of the booths, and later organized field trips for my high school and college students. We hooked up in the food court, had lunch, then would head off to several seminars or presentation stages, always have rich discussions over dinner and in later classes. The Los Angeles book festival really is the best of L.A. Small presses, big presses, large book stores, independent distributors, and writers hanging out a shingle for one-on-one classes can get themselves some good press and make great connections. Not to mention the discounts on books, journals, and magazines. This week I’ll try to share some sights and reflections from my visit to the 2008 festival at UCLA.
ROBERT PINSKY SAYS MY POEM IS “REALLY GOOD”!
Part One–a seminar with Robert Pinsky–chalk board and all. Here’s Robert Pinsky with one of the writing seminar participants, Jaclyn, and a book fest volunteer at the end of our two hour seminar. One of the new features at the festival was this paid-seminar option. Attendees could choose seminars with different authors, the titles of which varied greatly: Ron Carlson offered up The Short Story: Surviving the Draft. Having hung out with Ron at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops last summer, and having read his excellent book Ron Carlson Writes a Story, I thought I might instead adventure into different territory. Thomas Curwen and A. Scott Berg each offered seminars focusing on aspects of literary non-fiction, and Jane Smiley’s Write a Novel in Two Hours! sold out pretty quickly. It was Pinsky, however, who brought me to plunking down my hundred bucks.
The workshop limit was set at 50, but when I arrived to check-in the volunteer told me only 17 people had signed up for the seminar. So, real face time with the former Poet Laureate! Not having read a lot of Pinsky (I can say that now, but perhaps wouldn’t have told him that yesterday) my only real notion of him had been gleaned from a few poems here and there, and his appearances on The Simpsons and The Colbert Report. He didn’t disappoint. I found him funny, engaging, a serious teacher, and extremely generous with his commentary, instruction, and praise.
Despite having earned an MFA almost ten years ago, I feel like I will never have apprenticed the art of poetry-writing fully; thus, I am constantly on the lookout for opportunities to learn from others. I wasn’t alone. The seminar was filled with teachers, MFA graduates, a few “next year” MFA students, and a small handful of prose writers and fans who knew of Pinsky’s work and wanted to get some tips about how he approaches his writing. The workshop began with Pinsky asking us each to “serenade a sentence or two” about our experiences with poetry and our goals for the day’s seminar. Many of us had similar wishes; I noted that I’d often been told I was, musically, a “lazy poet.” This is something I’ve been wanting to address in a more consistent manner, and I thought Pinsky might be able to give me some good tips. After all, in my mind, he was a poet who used ‘form’ without marrying himself to traditional forms. His work is open and contemporary. Other seminar participants were also there for this “Vocality of Poetry” that had been advertised.
Pinsky began the workshop talking a bit about the importance of music. Here are some gems:
“I think American fiction writers are unique in that they don’t “know” poetry. It’s your language–the sounds and the music of your language [. . .] poetry and fiction are two words for the same thing: making.”
“All art is about trying to make something that wasn’t in the world before.”
“Poetry is portable. You have it memorized–you can be a refugee but you still have your culture with you.”
“I couldn’t prove it but I think that if kids are relaxed about reciting [poems], especially from memory, it would help with a lot of writing problems. [. . .] If a kid has got a lot of poetry by heart, the kid is not gonna have a problem with sentences.”
“The music of a sentence is made out of consonants. Develop a faith in the consonants and vowels as a source of inspiration [. . .] What we’re talking about here can only be learned by listening to poems.”
To be a poet, “all you have to do is say something interestingly.”
Pinsky moved through his seminar by asking us to pay attention to consonants and vowels in order to create a vocal, musical poem. We began with an arbitrary idea that we wanted to work on: forgiveness. Pinsky asked us to think about Pound’s idea of poetry as a centaur–“In poetry you’re shooting at a target and riding a horse at the same time.” Poetry should be both physical and intellectual. The class began sharing words that connected to forgiveness, not just in idea, but in sound, form, and consonants too;
forgiveness – regret – unforgiving – arms/embrace – hand/pain – underhanded – understanding – oh forget it – unctious – unguent – I’ll forgive but I won’t forget – nape – ape – remember – dismember
and so on. Pinsky recited several lines of this new poem we were making, talking about how we could begin to turn words inside out and around in order to find the musicality of the words and the connections between words and idea. He warned us against making the poem “too rich,” and asked us to think of the poem as the poet’s attempt to “write for somebody else’s voice” versus writing for our own voice. I thought this good advice, and something I’m always telling my composition students–not “consider your audience” but consider that you want your words to be in the mouth of another person whom you haven’t met. We didn’t write a poem together after this exercise, but instead listened to several models for this musicality. Pinsky read Fine Work with Pitch and Copper as we noted the consonants, vowels, and the changes from and repetition of these sounds.
After a break and a viewing of Pinsky’s Favorite Poem Project, Pinsky asked us each to write a 10-lined poem in which we repeat a word three (or more) different ways, paying attention to consonants and vowels that build the musicality of our piece. Volunteers got to read their poems and receive commentary from Pinsky. My effort got the following feedback: A. “Yes. That’s it. It’s really good.” B. “If we were in a workshop–know that it’s good the way it is–but if we were in a workshop, I would give you an adjective allowance and tell you you couldn’t spend more than that allowance on your adjectives.”
I was happy with that feedback–and with the seminar. A final assignment Pinsky offered up: as an apprentice to poetry (which he noted would be a life-sentence for some of us), we should each build our own anthologies. He says he has his students always type up or hand-write the poems or pieces of prose that they aspire to–that connect with them–that define “making” for them. Keep adding to these personal anthologies. Carry the anthologies around. Memorize them. Study them. Read from them. Learn from them.