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Why Poetry? For Matthew Zapruder, for Me

February 10, 2018 by Isla McKetta, MFA 1 Comment

I’ve been going on and on for about six years about how I don’t know anything about poetry. This repeated admission has been a laying bare of my insecurities and a spur to jump into this abyss I feared so much but could not resist. And in truth, I’ve been writing poetry now, consistently and improvedly, for over three years, but I still hunger to know more and to work through this feeling that there is something I am missing.

So when I first heard Matthew Zapruder mention his (then forthcoming) book, Why Poetry? at a lecture, I knew I had to have it. Now that I’ve consumed the book, though I’m sure I’ll return to it again and again, I have a better understanding of what I was afraid of about reading poetry, the things I’m getting wrong about writing poetry, and the reasons I can’t stay away.

A Little Machine for Producing Discovery

“[I]n the course of writing, the poet eventually makes something, a little machine, one that for the reader produces discoveries, connections, glimmers of expression.” – Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry?

How irresistible is that quote for anyone who enjoys tinkering of any kind? Despite all my tinkering with words, I continue to wonder, “What is a poem, anyway?” I was once told (somewhat scarringly) that something I’d written wasn’t a poem but simply a list of words strung together. Reading Zapruder, I had to admit those words I’d hated to hear might have been right. Why Poetry? examines the core of what transforms words into poetry from so many angles that it’s impossible to summarize, but unlike the prescriptive poetry lessons so many of us were subjected to in high school English classes, Zapruder’s approach is so curiosity-based and full of love for the form that Why Poetry? is a delight to read.

Movement of Thought

What really flipped a switch for me in Why Poetry? was the idea that poetry is a movement of thought which allows the reader and writer to produce and explore new associations and ideas. It’s not something I’d really noticed about the poetry I’ve been reading all these years and, yet, as I’ve been reading poetry since finishing Zapruder’s book, it seems key.

Though I’ve accidentally followed a train of thought in the way Zapruder describes in a few poems, honestly the ones that have felt most successful, I’m excited to explore this concept more. I’m not wholly convinced that without this factor, a poem isn’t just words strung together, but I can’t wait to see what feels right in my writing.

Being Myriad

“A poem does not exist in order to get a single message across, or to privilege one idea above all others.” – Matthew Zapuder

Maybe one of the most freeing things about reading Why Poetry? was the idea that in a poem I could be conflicted, complicated, myriad. This is one of the things I struggle with most in everyday conversation—the inability to communicate the layers of truth in an idea and the places where I know I contradict myself and what that all means. The idea that I could inhabit and explore all of these layers at once is incredibly freeing. It’s like looking into my closet and realizing that there isn’t one character I have to be that day, that instead I can choose any combination of things that I love and just be in that outfit, that moment.

Seeing Connections Others Do Not

“The ear of the poet is not merely attuned to sonic music. It is attuned to the music of ideas in words, the latent resonances, the ones always waiting in etymology, the pasts of words, our individual pasts, and our collective memory.” – Matthew Zapruder

Though I come from a long line of successful punsters, nothing has made me more attuned to language than having a young child who’s learning to communicate with words. Just recently, he was telling my husband that his Batman-obsessed friends were all playing with the Batmowheel. A few years ago I would have simply thought that was cute, but now that I’ve been paying closer attention to words, I see the logic and beauty of the associations he’s making and I’m paying closer attention to my own. I used to be a lot better about this kind of seeing, but I steered away from it when I sensed the power it had to manipulate understanding. Which brings us to…

“Coming Back to Language, to Naming”

“The energy of poetry comes primarily from the reanimation and reactivation of the language that we recognize and know.” – Matthew Zapruder

When I first really started getting serious about poetry, I began by reading it in French and Spanish. I did it because I was scared of many of the things Zapruder identifies are wrong with the way we teach poetry (especially the insistence on symbolism). What I also achieved, though I was not aware of it at the time, was the defamiliarization of language. In Verlaine I heard mostly the sound of the words. In Lorca and Neruda I found words that I understood with my childish Spanish, which sometimes involved seeing most clearly the false cognates. I did not learn much about the strict structure of poetic forms in either language, but I was learning to look at words and to hear them.

“To live morally, to avoid self-delusion and even monstrosity, we have to think about what we are saying, and to avoid euphemism and cliché.” – Matthew Zapruder

Reading Zapruder, I was also reminded of that fear I’d encountered before of the power language has to obfuscate true meaning. I’m thinking of how difficult it becomes to fight against a wrong idea once a strong (but wrong) label like “Patriot Act” or “Pro Life” is applied. In essence, because of my own fear of the power of language, I’d stepped away and let others, who don’t have the same principles, make what they wanted of language and life. Zapruder (and poetry) are of course not arguing for the misconstruing of words, instead the idea is to bring us back to real meaning or even to understand the evolution of language. I can get behind that.

Slowing

“Reading poetry has the salutary effect on me of forcing me to read, and think, at a different pace than the rest of my life demands.” – Matthew Zapruder

I am as guilty as everyone of letting myself get wrapped up on a life full of work and social media, entertainment, and family. Unfortunately, in that order. And I’ve always been guilty of the sin of skimming, especially when reading poetry. I loved this emphasis on slowing and inhabiting, and reading Zapruder’s words here reminded me of the simple relief of focusing on the passage of a single breath. I’m looking forward to mending my ways a little and making more space in moments for words.

Shedding Airs

Something else I’m all too guilty of is applying a poetic mood to my work. A false one. Zapruder says he often sees his students “presenting their poetic qualifications” by being “deliberately obscure and esoteric, because it is a shortcut to being mysterious.” At least I’m not alone? I guess my poetry newbie insecurities show rather obviously in these moments. Which is okay. As long as I learn when this particular way of using language feels authentic to me and when to edit it the fuck out.

Dreams, Strangeness and Being Known

“[T]he true difficulty—and reward—of poetry is in reading what is actually on the page carefully, and allowing one’s imagination to adjust to the strangeness of what is there.” – Matthew Zapruder

The poetic airs, too, have been a shortcut to inhabiting my own strangeness. Not that I’m the enigma I sometimes believe myself to be, but that by frosting my ideas, I can simultaneously be “interesting” and not reveal my true self at all. One of my deepest struggles is this push/pull of being known, and although I’m aware of the hollowness of the game—as long as I don’t share the unvarnished me, I cannot be rejected, but I also cannot be loved for who I truly am—I don’t always stop myself from hiding. Despite how lonely it makes me feel.

“George Steiner defines every speech act between two people as a kind of translation, a negotiation between what he calls ‘the external vulgate and the private mass of language.'” – Matthew Zapruder

“The poem also reminds us of the dual nature of language, how each word means something particular to a person, and how we are also somehow not locked into those personal associations.” – Matthew Zapruder

Does this mean I should blarp all of me, unedited, onto a page and call it poetry? No, and there are some early submittals I’d rescind right now if I could. But it does mean that I can (and must, really) explore honestly my experience of being human. Sometimes that will be messy, sometimes clear. Sometimes it will be both. But I have to stop fighting it because it might be the best chance I have to become the fullest version of me. And I get to do it in the private dialect that until now I never had any reason to believe anyone but my husband would ever understand.

“What I thought was my principled resistance to meaninglessness was really a fear of, and attraction to, a new life.” – Matthew Zapruder

Am I a Poet?

“[T]hat choice to be ready to reject all other purposes, in favor of the possibilities of language freed from utility, is when the writer becomes a poet.” – Matthew Zapruder

Yes. I am a poet. Sometimes. Zapruder helped me see that as much as I’ve been fighting this thing, it really is something I cannot not do. I’m not sure I’d pass that final litmus test above just yet, but I’m willing to consider it as I tinker. And there was one last little tidbit in Why Poetry? that made me feel like I was on the right track:

“Poetry has always existed and always will exist, because there will always be the need to say that which cannot be said.” – Ralph Angel

“Saying that which cannot be said” are the words from an artist statement I wrote long ago that still feel truest to me. In both senses of the word.

To discover your own path with poetry, pick up a copy of Why Poetry? from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Wet Silence – The Poetry of Widowhood

September 6, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA 3 Comments

How many ways can you write about widowhood? In Wet Silence: Poems about Hindu Widows, Sweta Srivastava Vikram explores every nuance of what life is like for a Hindu widow in India. It’s as much a human exploration as a cultural one as Vikram delves into the aftermath of the complex relationships that underlie arranged marriages. Some of the widows in this collection are devastated that their beloved husbands have passed. Others rejoice in their new freedom from abuse and adultery. Still others face new complications in their relationships with the families to which they have now become burdensome.

Marriage in India

Indian marriages are still predominantly arranged by the families of the bride and groom. Although there’s an increasing trend toward the couple having a say in the choice, that is not always the case. The result is sometimes a lasting bond where two people come to know and love each other inside a marriage they have been committed to by their families and culture, and sometimes the result is a very unhappy couple who cannot face the shame of divorce (which carries a much deeper burden of stigma than in the US).

Wet Silence explores the aftermath of both types of marriages from the “rum handprints” of “Wet Silence” to the “touch gentle as velvet” of “My Husband is Leaving”. We also meet servant girls others who lost lovers not strictly their husbands.

I water my memory of you—
it is all I have of youalong with your empty words
in the home we never built
where the mosquitoes feast on my skin.
– Sweta Vikram, “I Water My Memory of You”

Indian Widows

Visiting India last fall, it was easy to spot the widows (at least those who adhered to tradition). In a country full of bright colors, they wear white. They no longer wear jewelry or red vermilion (one of the signs of a married woman) in the parts of their hair. And their heads are sometimes shaven. They eat a restricted diet and are considered burdens to their families and bad luck to the world at large.

This removal of all that is feminine says a lot about the status of women in India and Wet Silence takes the reader inside that restricted world on an intimate level. Each poem contains a first person narrative by a widow and the book as a whole is the result of a series of interviews Vikram conducted with Indian widows.

Clarity vs. Abstraction of Language

In Great With Child, Beth Ann Fennelly recounts some writing advice she received where a poet told her about a city that experimented with blue taxis that had a more expensive fare but took you straight to your destination and red taxis with a cheaper fare that meandered. “Take the red taxi” he advised her about her poetry. The degree of directness is a choice every poet, really every writer, must make for themselves. One of my favorite moments of abstraction in Vikram’s poetry is in the poem “Pretense”:

When I hear belts unbuckle,
I say your name to taste you.
The sound cuts
through my brown flesh,
I become wounded again.

The abuse this woman must have suffered is present in the poem, but lingers perfectly in the background where we as readers can fill in our own details. Overall in Wet Silence, Vikram takes a more blue taxi approach—giving us straightforward poems that allow insight into what is for most of us a foreign culture. But I sometimes wish she’d meandered more—found more of a way to reach into the feeling of these widows’ experiences to find the inexpressible. Easy for me to say, I strive to take the red taxi but most of the time feel like a veteran driver of the blue.

If you’re interested to know more about the lives of women in India and like more direct poetry, Wet Silence might be just the book for you. But if you’re looking for a transformative linguistic experience that still explores the Indian experience, I’d recommend Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene instead.

To get your own insight into the experience of widowhood in India, pick up a copy of Wet Silence, from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Spiraling through The Incredible Sestina Anthology

May 31, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

I have a confession to make. I’m only halfway through The Incredible Sestina Anthology so I really shouldn’t be reviewing it here yet, but my brain is so wrapped up in the book and the form that I wanted to share my feelings about it now both so I don’t lose the threads of what’s so exciting and so I can delve deeper into understanding the nature of that excitement. Since it’s a book of poetry, let’s bend the rules a little today, shall we? At least I know the plot won’t shift radically when I turn the next page.

What’s a Sestina?

If you’re like me, you did not get much of an education in the forms of poetry in school so “sestina” aside from being a pretty word, could sound a little like gibberish. I feel that way about a lot of poetic forms—especially the ones I haven’t read many examples of yet. A sestina is based on repetition of the last words of a stanza in a particular order. There are six stanzas in which this occurs and then a final, shorter stanza where those end words are mixed up all over again. Cribbing from Daniel Nester’s intro, that form of repetition looks like this:

Stanza 1: 1 2 3 4 5 6
Stanza 2: 6 1 5 2 4 3
Stanza 3: 3 6 4 1 2 5
Stanza 4: 5 3 2 6 1 4
Stanza 5: 4 5 1 3 6 2
Stanza 6: 2 4 6 5 3 1
Envoi: 2/5 4/3 6/1

But you only really need to know the form in that kind of depth if you’re going to write one. To enjoy sestinas, it’s more essential to understand that the repetition is intentional and that there’s no other set rhyme or rhythm in the form (although most poets find their own rhythm. As with most formal poetry, the fun in being a spectator is seeing what each poet unleashes from within those walls.

Relishing Repetition

Blah blah blah stanzas, right? It’s hard to appreciate the form of a poem without getting inside it so let’s look at the first stanza of “Mother Worries” by Shane Allison:

Lord, how we gon’ pay these bills in this
How we gon’pay these bills,
Lord. How we gon’ pay these bills in
We gon’ pay these
We gon’ pay
Lord how we gon’ pay these bills in this house?

Looking at just the last words of each line, the end words that will repeat (in a different order, of course) in the next stanza are: this, bills, in, these, pay, house. Poets take a lot of leeway in how they repeat their end words and sometimes substitute the noun version for a verb or shift the tense of a word or use a homonym. The lines can be short or long.

What I love about Allison’s piece is that the entire poem is really built on the repetition of the line “How we gon’ pay these bills?” It takes many many forms, but if I counted how many different words he uses in this poem, I wouldn’t guess it’s more than 30, which, in a 39 line poem, is not a lot of words. This total repetition (and the subject matter) lends the most gorgeous lament to this poem.

Variations on a Form

There are poems by sestina purists in this book (Like Ashbery, Auden, and Bishop), and that’s all well and good, but where I started to learn most about the form (and what can be done with language) is from poets like Geoff Bouvier and Casey Camp who redefined the form for themselves. Bouvier’s “Refining Sestina” condenses the entire stanza structure down into six lines where the end words are instead repeated inside the lines. And Camp turns his poem into a graphic sestina where each line of the poem gets its own illustration.

Others, like Denise Duhamel, use a double sestina form where they’re playing with twelve end words. This means they get thirteen stanzas in which to explore their topic. I found, because I’m not the best reader, that I actually lost the end words in these longer sestinas and would sometimes be surprised halfway through with thoughts like “Have I really already read the word ‘seesaw’ six times? How did that fit in.”

There’s also an incredible variation in subject matter in this book. Some poets take their work so seriously as to write ars poeticas – sestinas about writing sestinas. And some, including writers I have admired in other contexts like Steve Almond and Jenny Boully, are obviously playing as they are writing about Elton John and the missed connections part of the newspaper (respectively).

Your Brain on Sestinas

I read about thirty pages of sestinas last night (approximately fifteen separate poems) and another seventy pages this morning. What I can tell you is that those end words, which sometimes feel very random, become embedded in your mind. They suddenly feel very important. And, if you read them before bed, you might compose dreams that pull together all that randomness. It’s a wonderful exercise to shake up those sleeping hours.

In general, reading sestinas is making me pay more attention to the ways language can be worked and how very much can be accomplished within the constraints of form. I suppose that’s why poets across the ages have continued to write in particular forms (at least some of the time).

I don’t know if I’ll be writing a sestina in the near future. But I am carefully thinking about the way I use repetition and enjoying the possibility of writing in a new form. Because The Incredible Sestina Anthology is arranged alphabetically, I’m looking forward to seeing how the rest of the poets can surprise me and stretch my thinking.

I’d love to hear about your investigations into form and repetition. Please tell me more about your projects or what you’re reading in the comments.

If this review made you want to read sestinas, pick up a copy of The Incredible Sestina Anthology from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Spending NaPoWriMo Writing with Stephen Dunn and Kim Addonizio

April 13, 2014 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

I have the incredibly good fortune to be spending a few days in the San Juan Islands for a writing residency. When I arrived, I didn’t know which of three projects I’d be working on: 1. getting a solid draft together for my second novel, 2. writing and revising a book of poetry I’ve been playing with, or 3. whatever random thing struck my fancy along the way. So I packed a large box of books and all of the scraps of paper that comprise those various projects and headed off to devote some time to writing. What I should have realized is that the presence of Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within by Kim Addonizio and Walking Light: Essays and Memoirs by Stephen Dunn in that box, together with the fact that it’s National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) would prove to be an irresistible shove in the direction of the poetry book.

NaPoWriMo

I’d actually been making really good progress on writing a poem a day for NaPoWriMo before I got on the ferry to come here. I think I’d created first drafts of seven or eight poems in eight days. Some of those days I’d written two poems. But throughout the process I’ve become even more keenly aware of my limitations as a poet. Talking with Nicole Hardy and Karen Finneyfrock (both poets who also write prose) last night, I kept saying things like “I haven’t written poetry since high school” and hearing how that sounded. I know that the time I’ve spent improving my fiction has definitely helped my poetry, I can feel that, but it’s far from good yet. I knew I needed help. Admitting that is the first step, right?

Walking Light: Essays and Memoirs

I’d actually placed Stephen Dunn’s Walking Light: Essays and Memoirs on my Christmas list this year and then forgotten about the book. I think I heard about it through ModPo but I can’t even remember the context. My husband scoured the internet for a copy for me and I’m so glad because it’s exactly what I needed right now. Dunn’s essays are about life and poetry in this way that makes them completely wonderful for an aspiring poet. I fell in love with the book on the first page of the introduction when Dunn describes as essayist as “a person who believes there’s value in being overheard clarifying things for himself.” That line was humorous and self-deprecating and true in all the ways that told me I could trust this man to teach me about writing and the world.

The essays in this book are accessible in the best of ways whether he’s discussing the “ambiguities that poets must honor” or how poems “must make available the strangeness that is our lives.” This is not a how-to book, but he does delve into some poems that work and some that don’t, and he writes frankly about both. And the book is filled with useful insights like, “The poem is not written in natural speech. Few successful poems are. But it does give the illusion of natural speech.” I don’t always agree with Dunn’s assessments, but the mere fact that he’s brought me to a level where I feel like I have an educated opinion about poetry is a triumph for me.

“There’s hope for someone who can be embarrassed by poor word choice.” – Stephen Dunn

His essays about life are equally good. I particularly loved “A History of My Silence” which is an essay about Dunn’s shyness. I’ve only recently realized how deeply shy I am and have always been, although I’ve covered it up pretty well at times, and reading lines like, “What a pleasure reading was: the world received in silence, at my own pace” made me feel that my shyness is a trait not a deficit, and I was so glad to know that I’m not the only one with a “history of letting you know only what is useful for me to let you know.” That’s something I fight to get past in my writing, but it feels functional in my day to day life.

Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within

Whereas Dunn’s book is so rich that I could only read a few pages at a time before passing out (seriously, I couldn’t even finish an essay), Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within by Kim Addonizio is so delightful and quick that I couldn’t put it down. This is much more of a how-to book, but it’s written so conversationally and intelligently that she can impart three lessons where you thought you were learning one. I’m savoring both books a bit, but Addonizio has already taught me about the traffic signals of punctuation in a poem and answered a question about word spacing that had bothered me so much I’d actually been running around asking people about it. I’m learning about music and detail and how rhyme is related to echo. She’s opening my work up already.

As I’ve worked my way through the book, I’ve written so many first drafts of poems I didn’t even know I had inside me. I’ll take her advice about revision seriously and take heart that some poems “are supposed to fail, to teach you that you have to keep going and try out new strategies.” I’ll even try plodding through meter, a bit.

“Dare to feel like a beginner–unsure and clumsy at first, but having a good time and doing your best to learn.” – Kim Addonizio

Ordinary Genius is also more than a how-to book–it’s a book where an established artist talks openly with an aspiring one. Addonizio’s advice on publishing is priceless to writers of all genres. And insights like, “While there is a real distinction between art and therapy, the truth is that art is therapeutic. It helps you to take something that is within you and make a place for it outside of yourself” make me want to keep writing forever and ever and ever.

I’m off to make some space outside of myself for these projects. I’d love to hear about how you’re experiencing NaNoWriMo or how you’re challenging yourself in the comments.

If this review made you want to read Walking with Light or Ordinary Genius pick up a copy from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

How Denise Levertov’s Poems 1972-1982 Made Me Stop Judging Myself

March 30, 2014 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

There are many ways I will fall in love with a book. Mysteries like Fletch wrap me up in their comforting blanket of action. Mind-bending fiction like The Trial make me question the world around me and help me learn to see. And then some books unlock the tumblers in my brain and make me want to write. Poems 1972-1982 by Denise Levertovis one of the latter. This book hit me at just the right time and it’s the first thing in a long while that made me put pen to paper on my own behalf.

The Wrong Poetry at the Wrong Time

The book of poetry I read just before Poems 1972-1982, Transfer by Naomi Shihab-Nye did not make me write. Recommended by a friend, I enjoyed some of Shihab-Nye’s language. I even related to the way she looked at the world, but her work was almost too close to me. As I read her poems, I kept wanting to edit them, to give them that last gloss that would make them mine. And as I read about her grief, I wanted it to be more resolved. That’s not to say that I’m a better poet than she–I’m a complete amateur in comparison–but I couldn’t distance myself enough from her work to let it exist on its own. It was almost like that unhealthy relationship you get into with a friend or loved one–the one where you know they could be perfect if they were just a little more like you.

It’s possible that Shihab-Nye’s work would be perfect for me at a later date when I’m more secure in my own writing, but I was not able to enjoy the work the way I hoped I would.

The Rules of Poetry

Levertov, on the other hand, grabbed me immediately. I’ve recently finished reading The Body Electric: 25 Years of America’s Best Poetry from the American Poetry Review to gain a better understanding of poetry, especially what I like, what I don’t, and what I might like to imitate. I annotated the book heavily with little rules about what makes a poem “good” in my eyes. I don’t like poems composed mostly of full sentences. I like language that isn’t too highfaluting. I like poems that are aware of themselves as poems.

In Denise Levertov: Poems 1972-1982, Levertov breaks every single one of those rules and shows me just how silly I was being. In the first poem of the collection, “From a Plane,” she uses the phrase “alluvial silvers” and I wanted to react and say that there’s a simpler word, but it was perfect. It was the perfect word for me. I had created some system for an imagined poetry I would someday write that negated all the things I like about me, and here is Levertov just doing what she’s doing and blowing my mind along the way.

Fanaticism for Beginners

Of course rules are something that many beginners cling to and proselytize–alcoholics, religious converts, and writers alike–but I’m excited to get beyond that “judging myself and others” phase and into the “judging my work for its own effect” phase. I’ll be a little patient for now because poetry is in many ways new for me. I haven’t devoted real time to writing poetry since high school and am still trying to shake some of those teacher-imparted rules (start your line with an active word and be sure to capitalize it) out of my head.

Imitation as Flattery

Levertov gave me a good start to writing my own poems in “Metamorphic Journal.” She writes:

Let me say
it is I who am a river.
Someone is walking along
the shore of me.

And that phrase, “I who am a river” struck me and stuck with me in my twilight sleep. The metaphor and how she develops it in the following lines wouldn’t let me go. Although it was far too late at night, I found a pen and wrote the words, “I who am an ocean” and several lines to follow. My poem–even in its raw state–is and is not like hers, but we are separate enough and close enough that I can see parts of who I might be in her without trying to make her me.

For some lovely synchronicity on this, read Levertov’s “Writing in the Dark” halfway down the page here.

Retreating to Write

I’m going on my first writing retreat in a couple of weeks. I swore to myself that I’d use that time to finally piece together the first draft of my next novel. But poetry is calling me and I have a project that I might be feeling brave enough to finally make some progress on. In this moment, in my writing chair where I’ve spent most of the morning looking for answers in my phone, the idea of delving into any kind of writing for myself seems pretty delicious. Maybe I’ll curl up with the rest of Poems 1972-1982 to get a head start.

Will you be celebrating National Poetry Month in April? Please share your plans–reading, writing, or avoiding–in the comments.

If you want to see if Levertov is the right poet for you, pick up a copy of Poems 1972-1982 from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.