Sherry Chandler

Journal mining

On this anniversary of passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,* I turn the page of my old journal to January 23, 1993, and find that I have made notes about Ursula K. Le Guin’s long essay called “The Fisherman’s Daughter,” in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (Grove Press, 1982). [Link is to a re-issue.]

I don’t remember reading this essay and yet, when I see the quotes I’ve written down, I think it must have had a considerable influence on my thinking. It’s the way we assimilate things I guess.

Take for example, this statement from Le Guin:

This sort of many namedness doesn’t happen to men; it’s inconvenient, and yet its very cumbersomeness reveals, perhaps, the being of a woman writer as not one simple thing — the author — but a multiple, complex process of being, with varous responsibilities, one of which is her writing. [p. 231]

And also this quote from Alicia Ostriker from Writing Like a Woman (Univ Michigan, 1983) as quoted by Le Guin:

“We think back through our mothers if we are women,” declares Virginia Woolf, but through whom can those who are themselves mothers . . . do their thinking?

Last year, I was moved to write a cycle of 17 acrostic poems based on the “maiden” names of my grandmothers, insofar as I could establish them, back to the eighteenth century. I thought at the time this was happenstance. I was looking to form to help me write voice poems (persona poems, dramatic monologues) about women who were part of Kentucky’s colonial, agrarian culture. I needed some way to find individual “voices” for these women about whom I knew very little. I tried one acrostic and I like the outcome, so I tried another, and then another.

Friends have asked me why I couldn’t just tell the stories. I gave reasons similar to those discussed by Ellen Bryant Voigt. But these names were important to me and I wonder whether my great desire to write poems based on the very names of my grandmothers may have been influenced by reading this essay sixteen years ago (sort of the amount of time it takes to raise a child, huh?

Speaking of which, Le Guin discusses the ideas of Carol Gilligan (In a Different Voice, Cambridge, 1982) that I know have influenced my thinking. It begins with this statement from Le Guin:

No book by a woman who had children has ever been included in that august list [i.e., the Canon of English literature]. [p. 222]

This may be in part because, according to Gilligan, men are brought up to think in terms of their rights, women in terms of their responsibilities. Men think hierarchically and women do not. Therefore, “Great Artist,” being a hierarchical concept, is not a feminine concept.

Then there is this fragment, taken a bit out of context, that expresses what you might call a female writer’s ethic:

Nobody lives in great isolation, nobody sacrifices human claims, nobody even scolds the baby. Nobody is going to put their head, or anybody else’s head, into an oven: not the mother, not the writer, not the daughter—these three and one who, being women do not separate creation and destruction into I create/you are destroyed, or vice versa. Who are responsible, take responsibility, for both the baby and the book. [p.231]

To which, in 1993, I have written this response:

If Ursula Le Guin doesn’t think this is artist as hero, what does she think a hero is? To take responsibility for anything is hard. To take responsibility for the baby is the most heroic act of all. To take responsibility for anybody else, even my own babies who I made, even my parents who made me, is the hardest thing I can do. It is nearly impossible. To take responsibility for the baby and the book, too — shit, that is superwoman.

I wish I were superwoman. But I am not.

To which Le Guin may have answered:

To have and bring up kids is to be about as immersed in life as one can be, but it does not follow that one drowns. A lot of us can swim. [p. 235]

So could I swim? Yes and no.

At the time I wrote this, my sons were about to turn 14. They were starting a high school career and needed a lot of attention. I also had a somewhat demanding full-time job. I had lost my father about 18 months before.

I was writing. I see poem drafts in this journal. But I wasn’t publishing much, and I didn’t produce anything that could be called a book until my children were nearly finished with college, more than ten years after this journal entry was written. Even now, I haven’t published a full-length book of poems.

So I don’t know. I’d say I didn’t so much swim as tread water.**

But I didn’t drown.
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By the way, considering my previous journal mining about Joan Didion, I was amused to find that I had written down a comment that Le Guin had made about The Book of the Dun Cow (which I never managed to finish):

Almost worse than Joan Didion. (I said almost.) [p. 254]

I also like and can identify with this line:

I did not know how to write about women because I thought what men had written about women was the truth. [p 234]

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*That odd word suffrage, is from the Latin suffragium meaning “support, vote, or right to vote.” It may look like suffer, as in “to tolerate or allow,” but it has a different root.

**I wonder whether one great argument in favor of academic careers for poets is that such careers allow women their best chance to have both the book and the baby.

More on narrative and lyric

From Helen Vendler (that “over-rated” writer), Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology (Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1997):

It is always useful to look for the narrative in all poems and to decide how much of the poem is narrative versus how much “stays the same” as it meditates for a while without changing its stance. [p. 104]

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P.S. I just noticed that that Anis Shivani article is headlined The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers (PHOTOS). What’s with the PHOTOS? So we can be assured we won’t have to read too much text?

P.P.S. I invite you to read as much heavy sarcasm as necessary into my use of the adjective “over-rated” to describe Helen Vendler. See previous post on this subject.

then . . . something eats the sun

I have been reading Kyrie, Ellen Bryant Voigt’s collection of dramatic monologue unrhymed sonnets about the flu epidemic of 1918. Published in 1996, this volume has become a modern classic, and I don’t think I have anything important to add to what’s been said about it. Except that it lives up to its reputation.

I did wonder why Voigt chose to use the sonnet form. Traditional sonnets are a form of argument, an if . . . then, a question and answer. It is the tension between the problem set up on the octave and the resolution set up in the sestet that gives a sonnet its energy. See for example, this famous sonnet by Milton on the subject of his blindness. Here is the question set out in the octave:

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodg’d with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent

and here is the resolution set out in the sestet:

That murmur, soon replies: “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts: who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.

It overlaps a little but you see what I mean.

So why turn to a sonnet to tell a story?

One answer, of course, is that use of the sonnet form allows her not to tell the story. At least not in a full narrative sense, but rather to come at the story of this stricken community in small, intensely emotional bites.

In an interview with Steven Cramer, originally published in The Atlantic November 24, 1999, Voigt said:

The problem for the poet, I think, is to determine what structure is available to accommodate the materials the poem is going to need. I came to see a huge difference between a narrative structure and a lyric structure. The lyric, of course, has always included various parts of what we think of as story. They’re sort of “back story.” They lie behind every lyric: that sense of an utterance, a character, a voice in a particular circumstance. But with the lyric structure, the arrangement of the materials is very different.

. . . Narrative isn’t the structure I see when I look at the world.

. . . A lyric is entirely about intensity. It’s about all of it spiraling in, and holding that intensity, and not relenting.

. . . I came to suspect the orderly structure of narrative — beginning, middle, and end.

. . . In the lyric you can stop time; you pick that moment of intensity and hold it. The narrative moves through time.

So what we have in Kyrieis a medley of “voice[s] in a particular circumstance” that do not, in fact, tell the story, but rather leave the reader to experience the emotions of a story already known, at least in its broad outlines. The matrix out of which Voigt writes is formed on the tension between the necessities of narrative and the necessities of lyric.

In the interview, Voigt speaks of setting herself challenges. I rather suspect it was the challenge of Kyrie that both kept her interested and drove her craft to a higher level.

I have friends who implore me to explain why I insist on working in form, especially when writing persona poems. There is an old dictum in poetry — you should always be writing the poem you aren’t quite good enough to write. Form challenges me to find that poem, to get better at my craft.

An “inconsequential” thread

It began at Huffington Post with Anis Shivani’s The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers, which I confess I did not read — well, not all of it, though I did page through to see who he’d pilloried.

I’ll confess to a bit of schadenfreude when I spotted some names on the list. And I was reconciled to seeing Louise Glück’s name there. She’s a writer I like but she’s become, it seems to me, just about every critic’s whipping boy [woman? but that has way too much connotation]. As has Billy Collins.

But still I didn’t read it because I avoid Huffington Post whenever possible, mostly because I find most of the stuff there as inconsequential as Timothy Shaeffert finds Mr. Shivani’s post. It was immediately obvious that this article was intended to be outrageous, to be, to use Mr. Shaeffert’s word, “theater.”

Then yesterday, there was Jezebel’s rebuttal, Literary Critic Hates Vaginas, “Ghetto Volume”. I’m going to begin by saying that I find that site mind-bogglingly over-designed. But I agreed with Jezebel’s assessment that Shivani’s list “was meant to offend, and it succeeds.” Jezebel mostly points out the anti-feminist bias, not so much of the list, as of the so-called reasoning behind the choices: Sharon Olds writes too much and too shamanistically about the female body, Louise Glück is too domestic, etc.

I do notice a bit of a generational thing here. Olds and Glück are now older women, as are Mary Oliver and Helen Vendler.

Today there is the aforementioned Timothy Shaeffert at the Prairie Schooner blog:

It’s a scrumptious set-up, and if the whole subject weren’t so inconsequential, one would be tempted to call it incendiary. (Would anyone approach such a list expecting to see the literary scene coddled and celebrated, with logic, reason, and sportsmanlike conduct?) It’s theater, if not full-on vaudeville, and has been accused of everything from poor taste to political incorrectness to anti-woman bias, all playing nicely into Mr. Shivani’s interactive performance. (I do think the blogger Jezebel does Shivani a disservice by casting him as merely misogynist, when he has labored so to appear misanthropic.)

Ouches all round.

Including me, because I did comment on the Prairie Schooner Facebook post that I would like Mr. Shivani to be logical if he was going to say anything that would be helpful to me.

But, in the end, Mr. Shaeffert comes around to some so Jezebel’s points:

And his distinction between good and bad writing seems fatuous (why does such a distinction need to be defined? Doesn’t the very notion of such a definition contradict his argument? And whose morality dictates a “lack of a moral core,” whatever that is?).

And concludes in a place that makes his post relevant to the conversation I’ve been trying to stir up here:

So . . . all those critics ever in protest of “the prevailing balderdash of the day” . . . seem to call for the return of old-school editorial instinct, a commitment to the task of discovery, rather than to the hem-lines of literary fashion. So while the current electronic fluency seems to suggest the much missed (or much over-celebrated) loss of the gatekeeper, such rants remind us that the gate-keepers make us cranky too.

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By the way, today is Erwin Shrödinger’s birthday, which reminds me to remind you that my good friend Alan MacKellar has published a wonderful chapbook through Finishing Line. It is called Chasing Shroedinger’s Cat. Like me, Alan is too low on the totem pole even to be under-rated, but this is an excellent collection. I recommend it to you.

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And speaking of gatekeepers, or a lack thereof, how about this: Poetry Drop Boxes Set Up In Long Beach

LONG BEACH, Calif. (CBS) ― One community in Long Beach is turning to poetry as a way to tell a story of the area, and to boost business.

The Bixby Knolls Business Improvement Association in Long Beach has partnered with two coffee shops on Atlantic Avenue and affixed poetry drop-boxes outside each in hopes of collecting poetic submissions from the community to ultimately publish as a book.

The boxes went up last week, and today was the first day of collection.

Link thanks to Joanie DiMartino, who also has an excellent poetry collection out there entitled Strange Girls.

Patience

From Helen Vendler, Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology (Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1997):

Wordsworth said that the poet must create the taste by which he is enjoyed, that is, the poet trains the audience to like a new sort of art. The training takes time, and each new poety you read is training you to like a new personal shorthand of images and a systematically original language. If a poet does not appeal to you now, look again at the work in ten years . . . Each person’s taste hovers at a different evolutionary moment. [p. 88]

And the other side of the coin:

The strangest experience in reading poetry, as in writing it, is to find yourself in it, to be yourself in it. We sometimes speak of this as finding a “favorite poet.” This is a poets whose writing is so close to your own way of seeing and thinking that there seems no barrier at all between you and the poet. Such a poet is a powerful reflecting mirror of your own sensibility and creativity. In that poet’s work, you find yourself “more truly and more strange” (as Wallace Stevens puts it in “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”). Sometimes poets are mirrors for a whole generation, and become bestsellers on that account — as T. S. Eliot and Robert Frost and Adrienne Rich and Allen Ginsberg have been in the United States in the twentieth century. Other American poets, just as good, remain known to relatively few readers (who nonetheless claim them as intensely as the country at large claimes the bestsellers). [p. 88]

This last statement sounds familiar. It seems to me to speak to the question of audience for poetry that I’ve discussed here before. It is not necessary to tap into the zeitgeist in order to be a worthwhile poet.

Confessions

Upon the occasion of W. S. Merwin’s being appointed U.S. Poet Laureate, the NY Review of Books posted a link to this article by Charles Simic, Confessions of a Poet Laurate. It was published in April of this year. He had some surprising things to say:

Over the years, I had read too many essays by literary critics and even poets, which proclaimed confidently that poetry is universally despised and read by practically no one in United States. I recall my literature students rolling their eyes when I asked them if they liked poetry, or my old high school friends becoming genuinely alarmed upon learning that I still did. Patriotic, sentimental and greeting card verse has always been tolerated, but the kind of stuff modern poets write allegedly offends every one of those “real Americans” Sarah Palin kept praising in the last election.

During the time I served as the poet laureate, however, I found this not to be true. In a country in which schools seem to teach less literature every year, where fewer people read books and ignorance reigns supreme regarding most issues, poetry is read and written more than ever. Anyone who doesn’t believe me ought to take a peek at what’s available on the web. Who are these people who seem determined to copy almost every poem ever written in the language? Where do they find the time to do it? No wonder we have such a large divorce rate in this country. I won’t even describe the thousands of blogs, the on-line poetry magazines, both serious ones and the ones where anyone can post a poem their eight-year daughter wrote about the death of her goldfish. People who kept after me with their constant emails and letters were part of that world. They wanted me to announce what I propose to do to make poetry even more popular in United States. Unlike my predecessors who had a lot of clever ideas, like having a poetry anthology next to the Gideon Bible in every motel room in America (Joseph Brodsky), or urging daily newspapers to print poems (Robert Pinsky), I felt things were just fine. As far as I could see, there was more poetry being read and written than at any time in our history.

The obvious next question is how much of it is any good? More than one would ever imagine

By the way, you’ll find a podcast of Katerina Stoykova-Klemer’s interview with Charles Simic and Leatha Kendrick here.

On a related note, Nic Sebastian has been doing a fine series of interviews with the leading lights in poetry blogging on the subject of Poets & Technology. I’ve quoted some of these interviews here previously.

This week is Dave Bonta’s turn. Dave is strongly in favor of poets posting poems to blogs. He has published his Personal Blogging for Writers: A Manifesto, which begins:

Thanks to weblogs and other modern content management systems, a poem, essay or story can now be written in the morning and published the same afternoon. Does this spell the end of polished writing? Not judging by some of the highly polished books I’ve read by active bloggers, many of them derived in whole or in part from blogged material.(1) On the contrary, I have seen people become better writers as a result of blogging, myself probably included. Writers have always done some of their best writing in a white heat of inspiration, and blogging can either aid or hinder this depending on the personality of the writer and his or her approach to blogging: it can just as easily be a tool for artistic exploration as an agent of distraction.

Many writers prefer to use blogs merely to share news of their publishing success elsewhere, and that’s fine. But I think those with a more exhibitionist streak are missing out on a great deal of fun, and poets in particular — who are almost invariably exhibitionists, let’s face it — are missing an unparalleled opportunity to connect with audiences they might never otherwise reach. But there’s a risk, too: that they will be so seduced by this new medium that they won’t want to go back to jostling for publication in snooty print magazines no one reads, and their professional reputations will suffer as a result.

In answer to Nic’s question, What do you dislike most about how other poets use technology?, Dave says:

I get frustrated with some poets’ reluctance to post drafts of their work to their blogs because they don’t want to ruin their chances of getting published elsewhere, but I can understand why they do so. My frustration is directed more toward the literary magazine editors who refuse to consider previously blogged work.

I don’t publish drafts and I have been reluctant to join some of the excellent online critiquing groups, such as The Waters, just because I don’t really want my drafts out there. (Added: This isn’t so much because of publication — though that’s part of it — but also because I am sometimes embarassingly bad. I think slowly, and it takes me a while sometimes to see the most egregious blunders.) But I’m old and conservative and I probably am missing out on an opportunity.

Added: Take the micropoetry, for example (see Twitter feed above). I started doing that in blatant imitation of Dave’s Morning Porch. But as I’ve done it over the last year or so, I find the discipline of putting something out there every day challenging. It makes me look around me. Some days I feel that it is as flatfooted as an elephant, but that will be the day somebody responds with cheers. So, I think, maybe I’m not always the best judge of my own work. There’s something to be learned from immediate feedback from a reader base. But a little 140-character taradiddle is non-threatening. Putting a whole poem out there is something different.

But you should read Dave’s postings of poetry at Via Negativa. His work is an argument for posting poetry. Also read the rest of this fine interview and take a look at the whole series.

Rhythm

From Helen Vendler, Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology (Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1997):

The first and most elementary pleasure in all poetry is rhythm. Poetry is far more visibly rhythmic than most prose, and its rhythms are recurrent. Even in free verse, where lines are of unpredictably different lengths and may not rhyme, we often hear the same rhythms recurring. . . . Good free verse always matches its rhythms to the emotional content of its utterance . . .