pen ink river

A poem I love by W.S. Merwin, from Flower & Hand published by Copper Canyon Press.

Berryman

I will tell you what he told me
in the years just after the war
as we then called
the second world war

don't lose your arrogance yet he said
you can do that when you're older
lose it too soon and you may
merely replace it with vanity

just one time he suggested
changing the usual order
of the same words in a line of verse
why point out a thing twice

he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally

it was in the days before the beard
and the drink but he was deep
in tides of his own through which he sailed
chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop

he was far older than the dates allowed for
much older than I was he was in his thirties
he snapped down his nose with an accent
I think he had affected in England

as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetry

he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention

I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't

you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write

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From Wendell Berry's Given New Poems:

How To Be a Poet
(to remind myself)

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill-more of each
that you have-inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your work,
doubt their judgment.

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

Posted by peninkriver at 01:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is one of many fun writing exercises from the poet Bernadette Mayer's list of Writing Experiments posted on the St. Mark's (NYC) Poetry Project's web site, www. poetryproject.com:

"Write a series of titles for as yet unwritten poems or proses."

I'd already been keeping a running list when words that sounded, well, titular, came to me. The rest I found as phrases or groups of words in existing journals and other writings. A pleasant way to spend a late May Tuesday evening, watching the daylight fade. It probably would be fun, now, to try and make poetry or some kind of writing generated from these...

1. I Wait Until It Rains to Wash My Hair
2. You Arrive, A Vulture
3. Angel in a Porsche 922
4. All the Accidental Puppies
5. Look for Me in the Middle of a Run-on Sentence
6. With Eucalyptus Fingertips
7. Seduction is a Typeface
8. In Love with the Buddha’s Feet
9. Spiral, Circle, Dot
10. One Bone Snapping
11. Love Masquerades as a Peach Pit
12. Armored by Marching, We March
13. Into the Whip of Dust and Grit
14. On Buzzboy’s Planet
15. My World, Bereft of Handkerchiefs
16. With An Inner Eye to Banishment
17. Refresher Course Kama Sutra
18. Pity the Contravening Winds
19. His Diaspora of Objects
20. Every Gesture Chiaroscuro
21. With the Gift of a Disappearing Sound
22. What’s the Fuss about the 45th Parallel?
23. Still-life with Bacon
24. Dream On, Bingo Boots
25. My Side Pocket of Stones
26. All Those Stars on My Tongue
27. Stayed Tuned, Frisson at 11
28. During Which Time We Start the Conversation
29. Eat Marginalia, Then Bullets
30. I’m Not His Date, I’m His Mother

Posted by peninkriver at 07:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was so hopped up, excited really, about sending off the MFA application to Warren Wilson. Dutifully got my ducks in a row: the requested transcripts, the forms off to the recommenders, the personal essay polished, the portfolio edited and printed in triplicate. Now, facing a two-page "reader's response" to a book I've recently read, I'm freaking out. Every book I pick up seems hackneyed, less-than-stellar, so-what dull—everything from Jane Hirshfield's newest After, The Collected Poems of James Wright, Below Cold Mountain by Joseph Stroud read and loved several months back, and the Essential Haiku edited by Robert Hass.

Is this just hunger and hormones talking? Or has my beloved cat's departure four days ago shaken me up enough that clarity and doubts are doing battle inside my head?

A day of rain, sun, rain, sun, rain, sun, no rainbows. A day of drops of rain shiny on the blades of grass and me looking out windows, peering into thickets of blackberry, into the hold of the fallen log pile, along the sides of the driveway as I head out and down the hill for my 30-minute walk: where is he? why can't I see him? find him? where is he? how can he be gone? Is this simply grief ecllipsing the pitiful inadequacy of words?

Posted by peninkriver at 05:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Theresa Eiben on the Poets & Writerswebsite:

A chapbook is a small, thin booklet, often handmade, but not always. Chapbooks generally run about 16 or 32 pages. Fold 8 sheets of standard 8 1/2 x 11 paper in half, staple at the crease, and you have a rudimentary chapbook. The origin of the word is either "cheap" book, sold at newsstands during the era of Penny Dreadfuls ... or "chapter" book, because of its scant number of pages. There is now a long history of very fine bookmaking attached to (usually) poetry chapbooks, and some people collect the rarer ones.

Posted by peninkriver at 08:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Finally, in the current issue of Poets & Writers, someone takes a stab at telling the truth. Joseph Bednarik, marketing director of Copper Canyon Press, pulls a few maxims from a 2004 NEA report about the state of reading and Gabriel Zaid's book, So Many Books: Reading and PUblishing in an Age of Abundance. The list reads like a blueprint of my own often recurring thoughts—edited below:

1. Production of creative writing exceeds demand.

2. MFA programs proliferate while literary reading steadily declines.

3. Publishers need financial help to get literary titles out there because sales don't support production.

4. Publishers can easily get thousands of manuscripts (with reading fees) if they sponsor a book contest.

He goes on to talk about what is wrong with this picture which is something on my mind as I try to diligently pursue the writing life. How there's a whole self-created, self-perpetuating industry pumping more writers and poets into a system and more and more writing for which there is next to no literary readership. He is appalled that many writrers currently enrolled in these abundant MFA programs don't read. As if it's enough as a writer to simply write. Bednarik's suggestion? Writers have to read, read, read. A lot.

A bloated "writership" for a dying readership. Great. Just when I settle into acceptance of the fact that I am a writer and have been dedicating my time, energy, days to it. How to rise above the discouragement? How to show up at the page and simple write?

Posted by peninkriver at 07:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I start looking through the essay about James Schuyler, reclusive New York School poet—this week's assignment in the prose poem class. It's only ever interesting up to a point to me. So much veers so quickly into the pedantic, the arbitrary, the textual analysis of who really cares. I feel like this is one of those "sit up and pay attention" moments, that yet again, am I kidding myself this literary life is really what I want to do?

I don't doubt I want to write; after this five years of solitude, of hard work, of testing myself, of fairly regularly showing up at the page, I think it's finally edged into a "have-to." But the study of literature, schools and fads and trends and the self-referential preciousness of a bunch of people who deified their creative life in New York City: do I have to care about that? Do I have to go back to school again to get another degree to gain admittance into the leagues of those who teach and thus have time taken away from being one who writes?

Oh, I now know I'll slog through the essay, put my judgments aside and use the poet's actual work as exemplar to edge me into something original of my own. But there is truly so much in this literary life I do not care about, that bores me, that doesn't hold my interest. So much writing that doesn't grab let alone turn me on. I now know I don't have to like all of it. Personal taste is just, personal, and discriminating. But I do wonder, why this reaction to the academic over and over again in my life. It isn't that I'm jealous, that I wish that life had been mine. I think it always comes back to that life outside the ivy walls has forever been more interesting to me. The living of a life, which is what I thought writers and artists were always all about. Could all this banding together in schools, all this industry of analysis and publish-or-perish, of categorization and collection of even one's bad teen poetry, one's every scrap of lists and letters simply be a way for people to break out of the isolation that a truly creative life is? And make some kind of living, fashion some kind of work for oneself (however onerous and boring and time-wasting) in the process?

Posted by peninkriver at 07:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

... my current writing that is, themes, recurring ideas, obsessions, ways I work with words. What I seem drawn to explore, what I return to, over and again. These observations were culled from work done in recently completed Part II Daydreams poetry class I took with Bob Haynes.

-- What I’ve taken to calling “threshold” moments in life—and not just the obvious ones like giving birth or someone’s death but those times when you know you are living through moments that will change you and your life from here on out.

--Eyes and what they see as witness. I try to paint pictures of what I see, what stands out to me. To push beyond the surface or to notice what is on the surface and celebrate that. Part of this is about teaching myself to pay attention.

--“Found texts” including scraps of dialogue and writing, from strangers, from other arenas of life, maybe even from other poems?

--Sound, what I can hear, the rhythmic current that runs through life, the pulse, the backbeat. The sound that’s there even when we believe we’re in silence. The way words crash into one another, making music or noise.

--Dance and movement, and words about dance. To make things move and sway that wouldn’t ordinarily do that in life.

--Textures, words that look as well as sound, that give a three-dimensional thickness to the line, the phrase.

--What’s below the surface. The rough, unpolished, raw. The pith and marrow. What isn’t easily reduced to black and white.

--My journey to where I am now. What I was willing to give up, what I have lost, what I gathered up instead.

Posted by peninkriver at 09:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Back from our trip where poetry was in the stones, the facades, the window shutters and iron grillwork in the calles of Venice, the stradum of Dubrovnik, the white shiny marble streets of medieval towns on the Adriatic islands of Korkula and Hvar. An essay on Muzak, read in the New Yorker while travelling, talked about its enemy being silence. Then, today, stumbled on this Charles Simic (originally from Belgrade, Yugoslavia) quote:

"Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them. We are always at the beginning, eternal apprentices."

After three weeks away, I return to my writing life con spirito, con brio. The world around me, outside this writing room windows, sings of green, of growing, of spring.

Posted by peninkriver at 09:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)