Today's Quote
Life is nice but it lacks form. It’s the aim of art to give it some.
—Jean Anouilh
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June 23, 2006
June 22, 2006
A Useful Checklist
Here's something valuable from Bob Haynes, teacher of the Daydreams poetry class through Writers on the Net -- a checklist to use in evaluating poems you write as well as read:
1. Why should the reader move from the first into the second line?
2. Is the language fresh, does the piece create mood, tone, image, a sense of journey and provocation?
3. Who are you? Who are they, the things?
4. Is it your own voice in the poem, or one of them, is it original to your own imagination?
5. Watch for stereotyping, easy emotion, sentimentality, clichéd phrases. Get to the gut of it. Cut the rest—the trick is significant details. Emphasis on the Significant, i.e., why does this poem matter?
6. Where are we? What time is it?
7. Are you working with literal or figurative images? What is the central metaphor if you are working with tropes? Do you stay inside the language of the similes, metaphors, metonyms?
8. What’s the weather? Are the verbs moving, kinetic or clichéd, overused, bought up?
9. Is it self-conscious? Faulkner put it this way: “Kill your darlings.” Yes, darling. Don’t get carried away with the lines, images or the music.
10. Observe. Participate—stay inside the work. Let us feel your own sense of surprise, longing, grief, joy.
11. Trust your own voices. Discover new ways of saying it.
12. Where is it too drawn out?
13. Suggest rather than explain your meanings.
14. Don’t rationalize every nuance or aspect of the voice, the image, the action—the meditation for that matter.
15. More than what is necessary is too much. Every word, line, image, stanza should contribute to moving the poem’s underlying imagination into its vision.
16. Where is it undeveloped? What facts/feelings are missing? What particulars and gestures are incomplete, metaphors obscure, images off the mark?
17. Was it too painful, a certain memory, the first time you wrote about a painful moment? Where does the poem become too abrupt, where does it lose its momentum?
18. Keep that element of discovery, your own discovery, working in every word. You can start all over when you revise. You may end up with two poems to revise.
19. Where is it too abstract? Strive to recognize your vague passes. Particular things, sizes, degrees, objects, suns, moons, sons…
20. Let each thing have its own expression, place, being in the writing. This requires great observational skills: listening, seeing, touching, tasting.
Courting Confidence
The continuing mystery that this writing and this writing life are...
After having yet another crisis of confidence earlier this week, I found lecture notes from an on-line poetry class that concluded in April in which the instructor reminds us that confidence is the one thing that cannot be taught to anyone and that it comes ONLY by degrees. He also says not to forget that doubt in one's work can be a sign of growth and to try to have trust that doubt is stretching your skills in new, perhaps yet undefined ways.
I know this past year I have bravely been testing new things. And trying to take to heart the advice to trust in the line, trust in revision, and trust in my own intuition, too. Easier to do on a long day of summer sunshine than when the clouds gather and sock me in.
June 10, 2006
Desperately Seeking...
...words to read at a memorial gathering for a writer, many writers present, not that that matters.
I am favoring Theodore Roethke, an excerpt from "The Lost Son" -- now I have to track down the entire poem:
"Light traveled over the wide field:
Stayed.
The weeds stopped swinging.
The mind moved, not alone.
Throught the clear air, in the silence.
Was it light?
Was it light within?
Was it light within light?
Stillness becoming alive.
Yet still?
A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait.