In this work, I engage with notions of form and beauty that I, as an artist and a social being, have inherited and tacitly acknowledge or actively work against.
Read more at Essay Press
Shira Dentz's "Flounders" from Essay Press
In this work, I engage with notions of form and beauty that I, as an artist and a social being, have inherited and tacitly acknowledge or actively work against.
Read more at Essay Press
Nin Andrews: Poet Behind the Poetry
Poet Behind the Poetry, CKP’s special blog series in honor of National Poetry Month, looks behind the scenes of a writer’s creative life.
My Next Small Thing
There’s a meme going around writer’s blogs in which writers talk about their next big thing. I have been asked a few times to post about my next big thing, and I cringe each time. How can I explain?
I never talk about my next big thing. It’s bad luck to do so. It’s like talking about your wishes or dreams. Or hopes. I like to tuck those inside, a drawer or a safe place where no one will find them. Because they lose something if they see the light or enter someone else’s mind. They’re like photos in a dark room. They have to develop in their own sweet time.
Am I superstitious? you might ask.
You bet I am.
I don’t step on the cracks in sidewalks if I can help it. I hold my breath when I pass graveyards. (I don’t want the dead to listen in on my thoughts or borrow my soul for a day or a night.) And I duck when I go under a bridge. And if there’s a silence at a cocktail party or in a crowded room, I know the dead are trading place with the living. They do that all the time. They have to. They have to hang around for our last breath when they will carry us to the other side. And who knows when that will be?
That’s just the beginning of my list of superstitions. But I don’t want you to think I’m crazy, even if I am. A little.
To be fair, I was raised on superstitions, so they’re a habit. A way of thinking or being in the world, which is a hard place to be if you think about it too much. So I try not to think about it too much. Some days I think I will drown in worry when I think too much the way things really are on earth.
I try to think good thoughts then.
Of course, that’s a superstition as well. Usually it’s told in the negative. If you think bad thoughts, bad things will follow.
I remember my grade school teacher, Mrs. Ward, said once that bad thoughts are birds. The bad thoughts will pick your soul apart one piece at a time. Each time you think a bad thing, it takes a bit of you with it. No matter how hard you try, you can’t call it back. It’s out there, building its nest in the world.
I remember watching robins building nests outside the classroom window with twigs and pieces of colored string and threads of a dress they must have picked off a playground. They worked fast. Even when the wind blew the nest down, they built another the next day.
I worried about my mean thoughts. Back then I despised the most popular girl in the class. She was so blond and silky and mean. I remember her yellow pony tail bouncing when she shook her head from side to side and smirked. She was always butting in line and whispering behind my back and pinching other girls.
Don’t think about her, Mrs. Ward said. Think good thoughts instead. Mrs. Ward had orange hair and lips and shoes.
But how do you think good thoughts? I wanted to know.
My father used to say: If you have something nice to say, don’t bore me. Nice, I think, he equated with lies.
Think of three small good thoughts each day, Mrs. Ward suggested.
So I did. I began to collect them. Making myself think up three at a time.
Good things come in threes, as do bad. (That’s another superstition, of course)
So one list read like this:
1. I have 3 new pencils today. Dixon Ticonderogas. I love Dixon Ticonderogas.
2. I have the best best friend. Anne Marie. She’s the only girl who will come for a sleep-over because Dad makes my friends eat whatever we have for dinner, even if it’s liver and turnips.
3. I scored 2 goals in soccer today!!!! 2 is lucky and 2=blue.
(Back then I liked to think of numbers as colors.)
Years later, I still keep a list at the top of my page. I start by writing three good things. And then I keep adding to the list.
That’s how I begin poems. In order to write, I must have a list.
My next small thing? A list. A list that begins with 3 good thoughts. Because thoughts are like birds, and I try to catch them on the page, one by one.
On days when I don’t write at all, when I don’t even begin a list, I think of all those birds that flew away.
Kenneth Rosen: Poet Behind the Poetry
Poet Behind the Poetry, CKP’s special blog series in honor of National Poetry Month, looks behind the scenes of a writer’s creative life.
I know a poem is finished when…I wake up the next morning and the sky is blue, no clouds, and the sun is its unabashed, golden, heart-stopping, but exhilarating, utterly wise, utterly ignorant self. Then the nightlong, compulsive, discouraging battle between permission and distrust goes away and becomes improbable memory.
My goal is the thing of a poem. There are always social needs to be met, expectations to be teased and surprised, challenged, respected, marked by willingness to share the entangled struggle with experience and motive. Still I want the arbitrary, oddly un-summoned ectoplasm of poem to be something like Earth feels seen photographed from outer space, a tiny ball, a scoop of sweet dessert, restless, resolutely blue-green, ice white, and implicitly teeming, or conversely, an earnest version of the chaste, candlelit Moon, for when the poem speaks from its arrogated darkness, hangs imperiously or with haunted, alienated majesty, over our pathetic, trembling little tables, I want it to bring something to the table almost tangible, something that justifies its claim on our uncertain, defective attention, that breaks the seas and lakes frozen within us, or the mind-forged manacles and leg shackles with which we stumble and stagger day after day.
Many a promising dawn turns into celestial muck. One dinosaur battling with tar after another, over-excited monsters, predecessors of us poets, gets lost foraging for light and water, clarity and simplicity, life’s necessities, and that includes me. My lifelong notion regarding Maine’s crystal-bright atmosphere is that its light is magnified by salt precipitated by the sun from the sea into the air, that its clarity is bold and tangy because glistening with brine. But it’s restraint that makes the desire implicit in people dancing delicate and rewarding. My lifelong favorite poem is Neruda’s “Melancholy inside Families,” translated by James Wright and Robert Bly. It begins mysteriously, I keep a blue bottle./Inside it, an ear and a portrait. But there’s a terrible storm in a dining room which the poem again and again tries to make sense of, and it concludes, roughly, maybe conclusively,
and around us there are expanses,
sunken factories, pieces of timer,
which I alone know
because I am sad, and because I travel,
and I know the earth, and I am sad.
Perhaps our aptitude for sorrow is pervasive because of its evolutionary advantages, though dogs, cats, and probably all domestic animals, share our personal and human, imagined monopoly on sadness, and our desire to avoid death. Maybe asteroids crash into Earth from intolerable loneliness. I don’t know when a poem is finished. Only that Believe would be a brother full/Of love, believe would be a friend, and that sometimes the sky is blue, and the sun shines. Today I woke up wondering if Hephaestus, blacksmith of the gods and long-suffering husband of Aphrodite, was lame because when young he had stumbled into one of his fires, seized with his bare hands a red-hot horseshoe intended for Pegasus, so his hooves were protected, so they could strike sparks and set off stars, but Hephaestus burned himself badly, withered a leg. Later I took a look at the CavanKerry blog, and noted with pleasure Wanda S. Praisner’s invocation of Thomas Hardy, that Hephaestus of English poets, likewise long-suffering, “that a poet takes heed of nothing he does no feel.” What courage that gave me! I can’t write anyone else’s poems, only what I alone think and feel.
Kenneth Rosen
Portland, Maine
April 3, 2013
Jack Ridl: Poet Behind the Poetry
Poet Behind the Poetry, CKP’s special blog series in honor of National Poetry Month, looks behind the scenes of a writer’s creative life.
I wish the world knew this about poets…..
That we don’t hide meanings.
In order to write, I must have…
collections by my poet/friends around me. They say to
me, “Go ahead, Jack. You aren’t as alone as you feel.
We’re out here feeling the same way.”
Being a poet is like…
Being a plumber in a desert
I know a poem is finished when…
I’m sure it’s not finished but it’s the best I can do
The first time I saw a poem of mine in print…
Julie and I went out to dinner with friends, ordered champagne, and
server said, “Major occasion?” One of the friends said, “Jack here
just published a poem.” The server’s eyebrows went up and she
said, “Uh. Oh.”
Why don’t poets talk more about…
how lucky we are.
Teresa Carson: Poet Behind the Poetry
Poet Behind the Poetry, CKP’s special blog series in honor of National Poetry Month, looks behind the scenes of a writer’s creative life.
A few questions on my mind
Why don’t poets talk more about the art of poetry, less about the business of poetry?
Why don’t poets talk more about creating, less about what journal accepted their poems?
Why don’t poets talk more about whose work excites/intrigues/inspires, less about who won what award/contest/prize?
Why don’t poets talk more about possibility, less about why they hate the Language poets?
Why don’t poets talk more about the Muse, less about the prompt?
Why don’t poets talk more about why it took fifty drafts to write a specific poem, less about how they rarely revise because “first word, best word”?
Why don’t poets talk more about the Hudson River, or any river for that matter, less about academia?
Why don’t poets talk more about pause, less about hurry?
Why don’t poets talk more about Donne/Milton/Keats, less about the ever changing, usually forgettable, newly anointed poet-star?
Why don’t poets talk more about the joy of writing or reading a poem, less about a panel topic for next year’s AWP?
Why don’t poets talk more about mystery and awe, less about formal or free?
Andrea Carter Brown: Poet Behind the Poetry
Poet Behind the Poetry, CKP’s special blog series in honor of National Poetry Month, looks behind the scenes of a writer’s creative life.
The Many Lives of a Poem
I know a poem is finished when . . . well, let me count the ways. When I no longer feel the impulse to tinker with it. When I wake in the middle of the night with the right word or phrase to solve a problem that’s been nagging me. When, after a draft has sat for a long time – years maybe – in its manila envelope in a file cabinet, almost finished, I pull it out, make one small change and suddenly I’m happy with it.
That’s the key for me: to be happy with a poem. What I mean by that is complicated. It could be a satisfying degree of compression or density of internal rhyme. It could mean solving a metrical issue within a phrase or across the poem as a whole. I might need to shift line breaks until the poem reads out loud as I hear it in my head. It often involves experimenting with stanzas and forms until I find or invent the one which best embodies the poem. More broadly it could mean finding the right tone to do justice to a difficult subject. Or it might require writing many versions (and I mean dozens) of the last line or last sentence until it lands with power, hits home, until it surprises me.
For surprise is essential. It isn’t enough for me that the poem ends as I originally intended. When that happens, the poem is claustrophobic. I like poems that are not predictable, that open up at the end, teach me something, that take me to an unexpected place or conclusion, that surprise me, their writer, even as the elements of the poem come together in a way that feels inevitable. For me, a poem is about discovery.
Sometimes I think a poem is finished, only to realize it isn’t. This can happen during a reading. In the middle of a poem, I might stumble over a line and realize it isn’t quite right. Or I might suddenly be bored and understand only then I didn’t push the poem hard enough, that I let it go too early. This might be in a poem that’s already been published. It’s happened occasionally even in poems that others love, or admire. The question then is whether to leave it as is, to respect the writer of that poem, for better and worse.
Fortunately, poems have many lives, so there are opportunities to fix these glitches. During the original drafting, after friends, peers, and teachers have weighed in with feedback about what is and, more often, isn’t working, a poem eventually feels finished enough to send out. With luck, that poem will be published. After it appears in print, it might appear online, or vice versa. It might appear later in an anthology, either as is or slightly revised. When a poem is about to appear in a collection is a wonderful time to revisit it. By then, it’s possible to see any flaws more clearly. Before The Disheveled Bed was published, I decided to revise some of the poems. Most of the changes were small, others less so, but I was grateful for the chance to improve them, even poems that had previously seemed fine. Once those changes were made, I have never had regrets, a sure sign it was the right thing to do. Finally these poems were “finished.”
Most of us would rather move on after a collection is finished, believing that each new body of work provides opportunities for growth. I recently finished a book-length narrative poem written in heroic double sonnet crowns titled September 12. Although I had fallen in love with the sonnet and written many of them for my first book, this extended form was a huge stretch for me. But it seemed so perfect for the subject matter that I couldn’t imagine the collection in any other form. Little did I realize when I started that the discipline of this form together with its capacious nature would allow me to have fun while writing about an extremely difficult subject. I came to enjoy writing, finding, choosing, or varying the repeated lines that would end one sonnet and begin another.
This long poem has taken me almost ten years to write. Many times I thought I would never be done. Many times I thought it was done, only to realize I had missed something essential. For a long time I didn’t know how to end it. Perhaps it was a question of enough time passing, the perspective distance gives. Not until the 10th anniversary of 9/11 did I discover the conclusion that felt right to me – an ending which is satisfying without being simplistic, that brings together the many elements of the poem, some of them at odds with each other, an ending which is inclusive and comprehensive without being conclusive. This ending surprised me. It makes me happy. September 12, the work of a decade, is finished.
Even as I write that, I know that to say a poem is “finished” is provisional. It’s true that “gift” poems occasionally come to us complete; they never ask for revision, and we are grateful for them. Most of the time, though, we work on a poem until we are satisfied we have done our best with the material. When we have, these poems take us back to the place, the feeling that first prompted the poem every time we read then. When a poem does that for me I know it is done. Then, and only then, is the poem truly finished.
Susan Jackson: Poet Behind the Poetry
Poet Behind the Poetry, CKP’s special blog series in honor of National Poetry Month, looks behind the scenes of a writer’s creative life.
Being a poet is like talking to the world, like listening deeply, a continuous conversation with what is. Perhaps the only difference between a poet and someone else is that a poet writes it all down. A poet sees a flock of birds overhead or hears a clever phrase, then uses them as a springboard, a portal into existence.
The Tao Te Ching says “…This is practicing eternity.” Writing may be on the grand scale of love and death or simply noticing the color of a wheelbarrow:
So much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
William Carlos Williams says what cannot be said. How much depends? Dr. Williams says “So much” – here the little word “so” hits a chord that takes the reader to another realm. Anyone might rush by such a mundane sight as left over rainwater on a gardening tool in the chicken yard… and yet this moment of seeing has intrigued readers for decades. Being a poet is like living in the immediacy where everything and nothing join, then somehow using words to create an offering.
Dawn Potter: Poet Behind the Poetry
Poet Behind the Poetry, CKP’s special blog series in honor of National Poetry Month, looks behind the scenes of a writer’s creative life.
Still Inside Me or Gone?
I know a poem is finished when each of the words I have chosen is exactly right in the context of all the other words that surround it. I picture a wall in which each stone is essential to holding every other stone in place. Exactly right takes many, many elements into account: definition, connotation, sound, cadence, visual appearance, even the poet’s private associations with the word. For instance, if you were to note the words dawn or sunrise or rosy-fingered in my poems, you would not be wrong to suspect a personal resonance, any more than I am wrong to suspect a parallel resonance in Robert Frost’s many references to snow and ice. Our names, after all, are among the oldest echoes in our own minds. “Where was the child I was, / still inside me or gone?” asked Pablo Neruda. The words that call forth these deep reverberations are the conversation of poetry and of the poem itself.
[from The Conversation: Learning to Be a Poet (Autumn House Press, 2014).]
Poet Behind the Poetry: our Poetry Month blog series
In honor of National Poetry Month, we always want to do something a little different to celebrate.
Last year, it was Poem in Your Pocket. This year, we wanted to look behind the poetry and hear from poets on the realities of what a creative life really means.
So we reached out to our community of writers and asked them to write something answering one of the following prompts:
- I wish the world knew this about poets…
- In order to write, I must have…
- Being a poet is like…
- I know a poem is finished when…
- The first time I saw a poem of mine in print…
- Why don’t poets talk more about…
The results will be shared in our new blog series, The Poet Behind the Poetry, throughout the month.
So stay tuned. And Happy Poetry Month!
