Writing on . . . Finding Matthew Dickman in a Wig Shop

One of the things I enjoy about the internet is how it's like walking in a strange town. You intend to walk to the post-office at the end of the street--in fact, you need the post-office and have to be there by four--but you see a wig shop down a side alley and find yourself turning left. You quickly tire of the wig shop but buy a coffee from a kiosk outside and meet a woman who breeds Pomeranians and while you don't like Pomeranians, she's married to a man who carves totem poles and he has a shop front on 7th, so you head over there and put down a payment on a pole celebrating the artist's relationship with alcohol (hacked out glasses, bottles, corks, toilet bowls, etc) and before you know it, it's 4:40pm and even if you knew how to get back there, the post-office is closed.

That's how I found Matthew Dickman. I think I was over at the Poetry Society of Virginia when I clicked a link to something that sparkled and then leaped onto someone's Blogsite and got a link to Narrative Magazine and browsed there on some Dobyn's poetry and joined up and then saw a link with the word "Whiskey" and "Cheating" and had to click...and there was Dickman.

I don't usually like watching video clips but he has this cute floppy hair thing going on and he's wearing a suit, and I always wonder about poets in suits. I'm clicking and twenty minutes later, I have a new Favorite.

He has this way of spinning the line like a fly-fisherman. He is a poet who moves from flippant to light-hearted, then into breathless rifts that slash your wrists in long vertical lines. He makes the word in the line and the word in his mouth come at the same time.

That's rare.
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Writing on . . . stink bugs and horses

It's strange. I walk past two horses every evening on the way to dinner. They're big beasts and look pretty hardy. They're doing horse things: eating hay and crapping. One of them snorts at the other--there's a hierarchy going on. And yet, even though they're so obviously horses, I find myself thinking about them in human terms. I wonder if they're bored...of their field, of eating the same stuff every day. I find myself getting pissed off at their owners for not riding them or talking to them. And yet they're horses and it's more than likely that they aren't thinking about the same kind of crap that I'm thinking about.

It doesn't stop there. My room is full of stink bugs. After ten days, I've decided I rather like them. They don't sting or make annoying buzzing sounds. They do fly, but not very often. And at night, when I'm working at my pc, one of them does circuits of my desk. He even crawls onto my keyboard and I have to be careful not to "type" him as I work. He gets the same treatment as the horses; I wonder if he's bored or if he knows where he's going...or if he ever get there. I wonder what there is to eat in here for him. I never consider that "he" might be a group of stink bugs all visting my desk at random.

For one moment earlier this evening as I watched him fall off the cable from my laptop to the printer and struggle for a second or two to right himself, I even considered taking him home with me.

Attaching human qualities to nonhuman creatures. I do it a lot. I tell myself it's normal.

Two more nights here at VCCA and then back to the real world. I've missed Jeffry, Bubs and the cats, but I haven't missed much else. I've cleaned up around 30 poems, written four new ones that I'm pretty happy with and have ten more at first draft stage. I've read all my notebooks and picked out the pieces that merit more work. I've filed all my MFA correspondence with Ted, Baron and Clint and have read a bundle of Poetry journals and several copies of TWC.

I feel as if the time here has been more than useful. Ten days would have been long enough for the work, but fourteen days has allowed me to open up a little to the other artists who share this space. Given three weeks, who knows? I might have left my corn crib and become a party animal.

On second thoughts, perhaps not. I think I'm a loner who's happy with the stinkbugs.

(photo by Marlin E. Rice at Cornell University)

Writing on . . . Chapbooks and Composers

Busy administrative day today. It takes as long to deal with the submissions and record keeping as it does to write a clutch of new draft poems. But there is an element of satisfaction in a stack of manilla envelopes containing competition entries. The Weather House is now out there at seven chapbook competitions, and I have submissions in at seven literaries. It feels good to be back in the submission saddle (which sounds a little dodgy!)

Today was a visual and audible treat. Four visual artists opened their very different studios for an hour. Megan Marlatt is doing wonderfully round things with Pinocchio and Olive Oil. Her studio was surreal with Mexican cowboys bareback riding dismembered clowns and shooting at Mickey Mouse. Reminds me of Jennifer Balkan's work. Rebecca Allen was zooming the landscape and incorporating cutout cars, Heidwig Brouckaert had some really interesting mixed technology work involving magazine cutouts, a scanner/printer and carbon paper/pens. Some very close parallels in her studio to the editing/revision/revisioning of poetry. And Claire Van der Plas's subjects feels so real because they are; Facebookers meet Canvas and the results are spot on.

And there was more. Three composers--Nolan Stolz, Tom Cipullo and Laura Kaminsky--shared their work. I don't have enough words left to adequately describe their work but again, the parallels to poetry were all there: Tom's ghazalish collage of voices and piano, Nolan's free versish classical fusion with huge amounts of what C.K. was calling lyric art in language, and Laura's environmental orchestral "tiara" of sonnet-movements with their jinkish turns. Much talk about audience and craft which left me astonished at all these links. I left musing about the relationship between the integrity of the line in poetry and the creation of melody.

And maybe that's the main joy of a residence. You can't help but think...about other people's works and your own and all the connections.

Writing on . . . Revision

A great ten days at VCCA...and four more to go. I leave on Sunday. Thank God for the Randolph Visiting Writers Program. Without it, I wouldn't have had a chance to chat to Claudia Emerson who told me about the relationship between sleeping in your studio and high performance. It certainly worked for me. My little space in the corn crib (you can just see the gable roof in the bottom right corner of the photograph) feels like home. Its walls are full of my poems, all coded with post-it notes and scrawled over with edits. And during what must have been the coldest snap at VCCA in years, I have been snug and warm, thanks to a huge duvet, a pile of pillows and long-johns.

I've finished the chapbook manuscript. I had been hoping for a full collection, but the poems just aren't there yet. I have about 40 pages of work I am happy with and need 48 for a full collection submission. So I'm heading down the chapbook route and have six sets ready to go. The other poems will come; all I have to do is be patient and wait.

As I was clearing up my directories and getting all the old drafts zipped and filed, I came across my correspondence with Ted Deppe from the manuscript's early days at the Stonecoast MFA program. I was blessed to have Ted and Baron Wormser as mentors and they both wrote bloody good letters. I'm glad I kept them. My stance on revision remains the same; it's scary and hard. From a letter to Ted:

I’ve revised two poems. They’re both already published and I hate to touch them. Not because I feel they’re finished, but I worry about ruining them. I mean, writing new poems is like birthing babies – you have no idea what they’re going to become but they just have to be got out. And then initial revisions are fine – the patient’s hanging onto life and the revision gives them a chance to breath. But when they’re so nearly finished, it’s like plastic surgery and they could end up with hideous lips.

I still feel that way. But as I compare today's versions of these poems with those from 2007, I'm glad I held off submitting them to journals. They needed work and I hope I've done that during my time at VCCA. Time and rejection notes will tell.

*Image from VCCA web site

Writing on . . . art versus meaning

C.K. Williams interview (Christian Teresi) from the December 2008 edition of The Writer's Chronicle

Teresi (in an indepth yet accessible interview) asks Williams whether he feels that poetry and its particular sub-genres (the pastoral, the epic, the tragic, etc) might be cyclical, or whether they might be "constantly evolving" and therefore prey to extinction. I like the clarity of William's response, his distinction between the two functions of poetry--art and meaning--and his underlining of the overlap.

C.K. Williams: I think that there can be a fundamental misunderstanding of what we mean when we speak of "conventions" in this context. Poetry has always had several dimensions, several purposes, several potentials. First of all, there's what has always been meant as "art," what might be called the song, the singing, of poetry. The first poetic conventions developed with this as an aim: what the audience desired, and expected, was to hear the poet sing, hear how the language was being transfigured and exhilarated and made sublime by the poet's skill. Any information that the poem might impart along with this singing was, is, relatively incidental Those conventions of poetry are closest to pure music in this sense: we don't listen to Mozart or Beethoven, or any composer we love, to "learn" anything; there's nothing to learn from a piano sonata, though we can become almost ecstatic from listening to it. (Neither do we expect an ode by Pindar or a pastoral by Virgil to tell us anything about our lives, other than the most basic emotions of temporality and mortality. Pindar is so untranslatable because all he was really doing was singing, and to imagine that we might experience his work anything like a Greek audience is quite far-fetched.
The other function of poetry has to do with the meanings it brings to us, the insights and revelations we need in order to live our lives to the fullest, and, although the musical element of this tradition of poetry is essential to it—because it's poetry, not philosophy or polemic, and comes to our consciousness in a different way and to a different place—still, the matter, the information it embodies, becomes as important to us as its singing. This is poetry in the tradition of the epic and the tragic. I think this is where the confusions you're talking about in your question arise: because so much of modern poetry, really of much poetry since the Renaissance, has its roots in the tragic, and responds to the tragic elements of human existence, the enactment of conventions like the pastoral have tended to become secondary, or, perhaps more accurately, they've become resources for poetry rather than ends in themselves. Campion and Wyatt and Jonson were well aware of the conventionality of their lyric poems, of the fact that they were essentially creating variations on themes, just as the composer of a sonata or a symphony is quite conscious of contriving a new embodiment of an existing form. I think modernism, and the advent of free-verse, reinforced and accelerated the shifting of the greater part of poetry towards the tragic away from the lyric....

Writing on . . . Wormser and Worry

I came across Renée Olander's interview with Baron (my mentor at Stonecoast) in the March/April edition of The Writer's Chronicle and wanted to pass it on:

Olander: Do you have fallow periods? Do you worry about not writing?

Wormser: No, I don't worry. I really don't believe in worrying, as far as writing is concerned at least, because it really doesn't do any good, does it? You wind up doing what you do, and you don't know where it came from, so it seems like a false sense of control--if you worry, you can somehow will it into being, or if you keep close tabs on it--because you don't know what's going on anyway, in this vast subconscious--who knows? So no, no worry.

Writing on . . . Inducing Poems

Like babies, it's a bad idea. They'll both come when they're ready. Unless, of course, non-delivery threatens the mother. And that's never really a problem for the poet.

Today has been a day when I should have sent the obstetrician packing. My second full day and panic made me decide on a poem before it was written. As I said, Bad idea. I "laboured" until about 4:00 p.m., pushing and pushing and achieving nothing apart from crap on the sheets.

And then I gave up . . . or in. I tried a writing exercise* based on Ken Kercheval's poem "The Hotel Where My Family Used to Stay" and now have an early draft of a new poem on the subject of loss. NOT where I intended to dwell this morning! Then I revised an old poem called "Unbuckled" and found that if I match content to form, things work out.

*"After Kercheval: Write about a place that has been lost to you for some reason. Write about the reason and use several essential, sensory details of the place."