Another poet here and I have been trying to make a writing workshop of sorts happen here, inspired by Spicer's Poetry as Magic thing; so far, attendance at ours has been really spotty, but it has me writing poems again, and I think the time is mostly coming out of my pace/fret/play computer games time rather than job-search or dissertation-writing time. This week, we were supposed to write poems for rejection by some publication(s) or institution(s), coming off Spicer's Book of Magazine Verse, and I did one not for Fence and one not for the AWP Writers' Chronicle. Fence is just always rejecting my poems, despite friends' well-intentioned insistence that they ought to love them and I ought to try again, and I'm pretty sure what they (she, Rebecca Wolff, I think) don't like is the lyricism & lush/sensual language I like, so I drew back and just wrote a lovely, even plaintive, little lyric about boats, and that was wonderful. For AWP, I took the opportunity to voice my dislike of publishing in the form of a love poem to the muse, figured as the fresh, youthful girl writer whose portrait appears on the cover of at least 3 out of every 4 issues, and to critique there the notion of writing in order to get published. I doubt I'll ever do anything else with it, so I might as well put it up here for whatever snickers it might garner:
Ode On the Made: a poem not for the AWP Writers' Chronicle
Cash me in, my love,
let me die again into the words
that light up your bordello eyes, let me sing only
to the time of your tenure on this page.
I will appear on the subway reading your book.
I will laugh like my life is relieved
of the clandestine, the dealmaking
that keeps us all incised, of hangers-on
for blood and glory:
and this will be no task at all.
My cover girl, my reputational angel.
The narrow country we call fame
near to hand.
The title & use of "bordello" are Spicer references (to "Lament for the Makers," a much better poem); the bit about reading her book in public and laughing is from a sordid story I ran across last summer of some novelist who'd supposedly hired actresses to read her book in public and laugh; the last fragment is a dreadful twisting of the ending of Rilke's beautiful poem beginning "God speaks to each of us as he makes us." In Rilke's, God tells the soul about the joy and pain of life & encourages it to meet the whole mess of things, keeping its relationship to the divine very close & therefore sustaining; mine of course inverts that whole set of priorities. It was pretty enjoyable to write, too, for other reasons than the boats one was. Initially, it was going to be much more overtly nasty, but by the time I sat down to do it, I don't know, I suppose I felt less threatened > hostile, for whatever reason, and I like the irony much better. If I were to read it, I'd totally do it completely straight as though I was reading a real poem of devotion to my art. Possuming.
This workshop started me on another poem that's maybe somewhat more significant. Years and years ago, in I think my last semester as an MFA student, I started to think about what poetry book #2 would be, which indicated to me that I had solved the main problems of poetry book #1. (And I had, although following through on the implications of those solutions to turn it from a student manuscript to a book worth reading was still a long process.) Someone asked me if I ever wrote about my family, and I said, no, you know, I don't, even as much as the culture and landscape of my childhood get drawn into my poems -- so, in the spirit of Elizabeth Bishop's incitement that "you must write the thing you cannot write," I decided that book #2 would be about my family. It never really went there; I've ended up writing about circus freaks, psychosis, and genetic diseases, though, so Freud is probably right about sublimation. Poems about circus people and lunatics are much more interesting than poems about my family members, though. And I'd rather write interesting poems than pretty much anything else.
Anyway, as part of an exercise I brought to the workshop, a revamped version of Spicer's 1957 questionnaire, I started a poem and some of the phrases I thought were going somewhere, so I worked on it a while last night. I kind of thought it was somehow about my mother, but it wasn't quite that, although there are elements in it that seem to have to do with my (domestic, as distinguished from cultural) childhood. In line with another Elizabeth B's thoughts on writing, this one Bowen, I thought I'd try to look into the shadowy space this figure was starting to fill, as though we were sitting across from one another in a dim train carriage (her image), and get to know her that way. There's a house that's up above the landscape, which is sort of like the house where I grew up, but not really, as it's by a lot of water, and much higher up/remoter; there's a sense of some dynamic, magnetic, appealing but intimidating woman who has a lot of power over her surroundings & the poem's persona, which is sort of maternal, maybe, but not like my particular mother. I think it's Elizabeth Bishop, of all people, and the poem has me grappling with her presence in my life? writing? -- which I never even thought of as very great. Stylistically, we're worlds apart; tonally and thematically, too. Or so I had imagined -- now that I look at it, she's probably the most interesting writer on family relationships I know of, and her poems have a level of command I admire just abjectly. Command of diction, of a very precisely-controlled way of making emotion happen, & of using her personal material really to make poems, & only that, getting it away from being personal material at all. I don't even know how she does it -- she's merciless without being violent at all. As much as I'd usually situate myself in a showier, more grandiose poetics, she's actually quite a model for me, one I think of as unattainable in maybe a more humbling way than how I think of most other members of my constellation.
And then there's this moment, where she's sinking in the first shovel and turning it over at the unassuming groundbreaking, years ago, that initiated this book project. I hadn't even thought of that in a long, long time. It seems like this must be a landmark to have reached (reached back to), at any rate. The house is her upmountain house in Brazil; the third rail that I felt had to go in it even in the first scribbled draft is her third rail which then reaches back to Crane's subway; Elizabeth Bishop slips into St. Elizabeths, which explains why I felt it had to do with my madness poems. I don't know what I'll do if Magpie takes off while I'm trying to finish my dissertation & apply to all these jobs, but hopefully if that's how things go, the poetry-writing will intrude on more aimless fretting time, to which it's very welcome.
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