Okey-dokey

In silly celebration of a National Poetry Day in New Zealand...28th Aug, 2015

Okey-dokey

Okey-dokey, I don’t know whether

argy-bargy between us (or maybe

argle-bargle) will bring on a display of

hari-kari. That’s hardly super-duper

suitable for a namby-pamby,

wishy-washy, dilly-dallying,

shilly-shallying sort of

person who can never make up their

mind – I’m assuming the

indefinite gender here (unrelated to

my indefinite mind).

Indefinite, in itself, is a clear case of

zig-zaggying around a mumbo-jumbo

subject, the kind of subject only

some hoity-toity riff-raff,

some arty-farty ping-pong,

(or whiff-waff)-playing person,

heading helter-skelter,

higgeldy-piggedly into the

nitty-gritty hokey-pokey

hodge-podge, will manage to

make sense of. 

Jeepers-creepers, all you

lardy-dardy raggle-taggle,

you topsy-turvy-thinking

flim-flam fiddle-faddling

harum-scarums, you

fuzzy-wuzzy hobson-jobsons,

you hugger-muggers, you

see-sawing mish-mash of

pell-mells rushing nitty-

grittied into a chock-a-block

heebie-jeebied hocus-pocus

hubble-bubble willy-nilly:

why don’t you get up early?

Just a teensie-weensie, itsy-

bitsy little bit early?

That’d stop the hurly-burly. 

Mysteries of poems

I don't normally comment on other people's poems on this blog, and I doubt that this post will be the beginning of a trend....  However, I came across a poem the other day by a poet previously unknown to me, Joan Naviyuk Kane, and I made some notes on Evernote about it. The poem appealed in some way I couldn't put my finger on initially, and yet strictly speaking I couldn't make much sense of it.  I've written a few poems of my own that didn't make much 'sense' either, because basically they were collage poems, or 'found' poems (words taken from somewhere else and 'formed' into a poem) - examples: Twitter Collage Poem, Zen Poem, and Evernote Collage 2.  So I can't in any way criticize other poets who write in a surreal sort of way. However, I thought I'd review the notes I wrote and add them here, as a way of reflecting further on the poem. 

Here's the poem, which Ms Kane has very kindly given me permission to reproduce. 

Mysteries of Light

Joan Naviyuk Kane
       

Loosen the ropes.
Seven lances in her heart put forth blossoms.

Beneath a torrent, refuge—
As a little child with a medallion of chased gold

Aboard a ship, with birds
About her shoulder and a magpie on her hand.

An axe lodged in the roof,
A wolf whose mouth will proclaim.

One breast on a plate. Stone in hand.
Red egg, wool, sometimes a wound in her forehead.

Called to the ditches alongside the mine roads,
A continuation of things we do wrong.

Already, coming back to it, I see I've misread something in it. This is the advantage of taking time over a poem. You begin to see what the writer actually said rather than what you think they said. This is why it's good to memorize poems: you get behind the apparent facade and discover more of the house inside.

Nevertheless, be aware that these notes are fairly bitsy, hardly what you'd call a concerted critical opinion. 

Firstly, a poem like this leaves the readers to do most of the work, leaves them to find meanings and connections. This isn't to say there isn't any meaning intended by the author, just that the author hasn't plainly set the meaning out for the reader to see. It's a bit like a cryptic crossword: you have to learn to read the clues the way the compiler intended them before you can begin to work out the answer.

So what do readers do with a poem like this? If they're already of a poetic bent, I guess they get on and try to discover the meaning(s), or, maybe more likely, find the meaning slipping away from them just when they think they've grasped it!  If the reader is a person struggling with poetry, then this sort of poem may put them off...unless they happen to 'get' something about it. I guess this is part of what happens when we collide with a poem, especially a poem like this where everything seems to be set in place for a reason yet the reason isn't obvious. Even the title appears to have no connection to the rest of the poem. 

The first stanza has a kind of sense, but apart from the assonance of 'loosen' and 'blossoms' what do the two lines have to do with each other? Does the reader decide? Are there clues from the author?  Is the woman with the heart someone who appears elsewhere in the poem?

The second stanza starts with a seeming paradox, a kind of variation on the calm inside the storm. But while that latter phrase speaks of a real thing, this torrent/refuge idea takes a bit of thinking about. Under what torrent could you find a refuge? I guess a refuge from other circumstances, or other troubles. 

When I re-read the poem again just now, I realised the fourth line moves on into the fifth and sixth. I don't know that I'd ever heard the expression 'chased gold' until now. Seemingly it means this: Chased gold is a sheet of gold on which patterns have been cut. If artistic and beautiful designs are cut or indented on metals like gold or silver, they are chased.

Okay, that's a clearer picture, though how does the child with the medallion aboard ship, amongst birds, connect to the refuge beneath the torrent?  This is where a proper critic would probably bring up all sorts of references that I'm missing, and I would go, Oh. That's what that phrase refers to. The proper critic, however, is apparently on annual leave, and hasn't taken his cellphone or laptop, so I'll have to rely on my own limited thoughts here.

Apart from the meaning of the third stanza, there's a nice assonance between the phrases 'aboard the ship' and 'about her shoulder.'  There's a surreal feel to this picture, as though suddenly Salvador Dali or Magritte had climbed up the rope ladder into the poem and hung up some of their typical surrealist props. Birds about the shoulders almost brings in a Madonna-like picture, but who does the magpie belong to?

Initially, in relation to the next stanza, I wrote: an axe lodged in a roof is a phrase that has a sense of violence about it, a contrast to the previous birds imagery. But why does the wolf have a mouth that will proclaim, and anyway, who invited him in?  Could the axe and the wolf be indicative in any way of the 'torrent' that the woman needs to take refuge from?  

Okay, the one breast on a plate in the fifth stanza is an interesting image; if a reality, then where's the other breast? (Forgive me if this sounds facetious.) Is the woman leaning on the table, one breast on the plate, one on something else? Is she so bound up in her thoughts she doesn't realise quite where she's placed herself?

Again these next lines are what I wrote as my first impressions....you can see I'm not quite drowning, but the life jacket doesn't seem to be properly in place either. Stone in hand? This is the first of several concrete images that seem not to have any connection - 'red egg?' - what's a red egg? - red inside an egg might signify something to do with insemination, conception, etc, but 'wool?' - that seems very random, except for the way it's echoed by 'wound.' Stone, hand, wound, forehead, all have connecting consonants, but...what's their connecting meaning? 

And lastly: who's called? To do what? And how is this a continuation of anything, let alone what we do wrong?  

You can see that I'm plainly no literary/poetic critic.  I'm plugging along here pretending that I'm getting somewhere but feeling more than a little lost.  This isn't Ms Kane's fault in the slightest. While I've quibbled in the past about poems such as this that seem random (to me), I've slowly, over the years, mostly found ways to get to grips with them. That doesn't mean to say I've got to grips with them in the same way the poet intended (!) but perhaps that isn't the point. An abstract painting may speak differently to different people, and it's unlikely the artist is going to complain. An art critic may find all sorts of things in that painting that the average Joe won't necessarily see - or maybe even want to see. As long as the work speaks in some measure to them, that should be enough for the artist. For composers it's even worse/better: the majority of serious compositions have no programme, no intention except to be music. I guess there are some composers who set out to write something that says this at this point and that at that. My suspicion is that many composers 'merely' write, and let the music do its own thing with its audience. Which it will.

One last thought. It sometimes helps to know something about the author of a poem, about their circumstances, what their passions are. The link under Ms Kane's name leads to an interview with her. It may well help in the reading of this poem.

The reading of poetry begets more poetry

The reading of poetry begets more poetry – Billy Collins

When I write poetry the words tumble out at a rate of knots,
bumbling over each other, each keen to be stepping into place,
and I tell them it's not a race, that there's no prize for being first,
because anyway, the first word is always first and the later words are
later, unless of course I jumble them into some different order, like
words on a refrigerator door sitting waiting to be sorted into
something that makes some sort of sense, though often humorists
will come by and replace the sensible with the surreal, like
aimless iPods sitting by dancing kisses, instead of man photographs
woman screaming. As poetry it's not ideal though it has a kind of
counterintuitive subconscious feel.

                                                            When Richard Wilbur writes,
I read, he writes one apt line at a time, each one polished before the
next steps into line. Billy Collins tells me that typing a few words at a
time is the best way to work anyway. I apply this regime with great
vigour, except that when it comes to the point of writing a poem, the
shuffling words don't stand waiting in a queue, like derelict street
people at a soup kitchen, passive, subdued by the pressure of just
making it through the day; rather they surround the helicopter of the
poem like men and women fresh from the terrors of the latest
tornado, people so cut off from the rest of the world that a box
tossed from the sky is literal manna from Heaven, and all good
manners and polite behaviours are pushed aside in the
jostle for something from the providers, the once-a-day
deliverers, the sun-shaded sun-screened Red Cross or
UNICEF or World Vision aid workers, who, hearts afire,
struggle to see these faces individually.

                                                                        See, this is what
happens. The poem was never supposed to bring in people
sleeping on the street, or struggling to feed themselves, or
helicopters flushing out a space in the bush, threshing the
grasses and swishing up leaves and pushing the trees out in a
wider circle. The poem was supposed to mention a little about
words rushing rather than me shushing them, it was supposed to
show that good ideas need space and pressing them down at a
ridiculous pace on the face of an iPad is counterproductive to
properly-formed poems. Yes, I'd agree, but the words in my head
don't heed and come like a young husband on his honeymoon night. 

A poet's life

An interesting quote from Matsuo Bashō, on the life of a poet:

In this mortal frame of mine, which is made of a hundred bones and nine orifices, there is something, and this something is called a wind-swept spirit, for lack of a better name, for it is much like a thin drapery that is torn and swept away at the slightest stir of the wind. This something in me took to writing poetry years ago, merely to amuse itself at first, but finally making it its lifelong business. It must be admitted, however, that there were times when it sank into such dejection that it was almost ready to drop its pursuit, or again times when it was so puffed up with pride that it exulted in vain victories over others. Indeed, ever since it began to write poetry, it has never found peace with itself, always wavering between doubts of one kind and another. At one time it wanted to gain security by entering the service of a court, and at another it wished to measure the depth of its ignorance by trying to be a scholar, but it was prevented from either because of its unquenchable love of poetry. The fact is, it knows no other art than the art of writing poetry, and therefore, it hangs on to it more or less blindly.

The extract comes from Journal of a Travel-Worn Satchel (translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa) and quoted in the opening of Jane Hirschfield's book, The Heart of Haiku. 

I perhaps should be grateful that I don't feel that writing poetry is my 'lifelong business', nevertheless I understand Bashō's comments. 

Not avoiding the I

The following poem (which may yet go through some further revisions) is based around the idea of starting each line with the letter that the previous line ended with...I've only cheated once, I think, in the second half. (To my surprise, the poem neatly sorted itself out into two halves of twenty lines each.) 

It also alludes to the idea of limiting yourself to a single vowel, but that's beyond me at this stage of my career. However, two writers who've done work in this way, Georges Perec, and Christian Bök, both get a look in [that's Bök in the photo].  Christian Bök was apparently named, as a newborn, 'Christian Book,' but altered the spelling of his surname to avoid 'unseemly confusion with the Bible.' 

Not avoiding the I

‘You forbid yourself use of a vowel,

legislatively avoiding every I -

if possible.’ However, this poem

makes no attempt to avoid that letter,

rapidly realising that too many words

solidly take their place only because

each one has an I in it.  And

don’t let it imply that I’m referring

generatively to the first person pronoun;

no, I definitely mean the letter itself,

furnishing space for definitely or

realising, words that without those

eyes (as they sound) would come straight

to a halt. Definitely would sound

dismal as though missing the

echoing roof of the mouth, or

realising would struggle to be

even a fragment of itself, the mutter of

fatheads incapable of voicing the

exalted English language. 

Such restriction inhibits stiffly;

you amplify, in individual lines, utility,

intensifying I increasingly until as

sky far as the I can see a diatribe of that

third vowel swimmingly impinges, and

dismisses different vowels, so that

the I who’s hardly there in ‘in’ sees

some of what you’re up to, grows boastful,

latterly insists on an univocalic spirit.

This is soon declined by vowels impartial,

leniently none reminding I of Perec’s

singular E-voided novel,

La Disparition, or the Perec

counterparting work Les revenentes where

E appears alone.  And lonely.

Yet think, too, you vowels, of Christian

- nee Book (too close to biblical) - Bök

kindly offering his univocalic

cinque-chaptered Eunoia, where

each holy vowel receives pre-eminent place.

Note, though Eunoia is supposedly the shortest word in the language containing all the vowels, (it means beautiful thinking), it's (possibly) been superseded by Iouea, not only a shorter word, but one that still manages to have four syllables.  There's a delightful article about the word, which relates to a fossil sponge, and has a New Zealand connection.  The word was invented by M. W. de Laubenfels, but the name for the particular sponge may have been replaced by a newer name.  

More on Villanelles

I've talked about Villanelles on this blog before, and included at least one example that I haven't written myself. 


I've just come across another, this time by Theodore Roethke.  I was reading this poem, courtesy of the daily Writer's Almanac email, and realised within a stanza or so that it was a Villanelle.   The title is The Waking, and you can read it here - where they have permission to reproduce it.   Here are the first three lines:

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

The first and last line reappear (not always exactly, which is common in this form) throughout the poem.   Note the paradoxical theme as well - waking to sleep, learning by going where he has to go.  That second idea is something poets often pursue in the course of their writing: writing in order to find out what it is you want to say. 

After reading The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker

Working with rhyme again, and trying to find a way that makes sense as I go along.  In his book, The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker makes a strong case for poems that rhyme.  


After reading The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker

Your challenge, Nick, is to write a poem

in which the lines have rhymes;

I now invite King Jeroboam –

a man whose various crimes

brought Israel to idolatrous knees –

to help me with this verse.

I wouldn’t have brought in such a sleeze

if ‘poem’ wasn’t such a curse

to rhyme with, as you no doubt know,

having struggled with the form;

but sans a lesser-known John Doe

I’m having to perform

with a King whose name just fits the bill –

the only one I’ve found –

and hopefully he’s taken his pill

and doesn’t want to expound

the reason why he led poor Israel off

its proper course of action;

otherwise I’ll have to scoff

to stop him gaining traction

regarding idols, groves and bulls

where worship goes awry,

and a self-centred king who pulls

the wool over everyone’s eye.

The Heaven-born Ploughman

The results of the 2012 Robert Burns Poetry Competition have just been announced, and since I didn't make the cut, I may as well include my entry here.....

The Heaven-born Ploughman

Remembered in life for his gallavanting,

his getting-with- child of too many women,

he’s remembered in death as a saint of the

people, this impoverished farmer of land

and wealthy farmer of words.

Dubbed the “people’s poet” in Russia:

his Scottish face reproduced on a

Russian postage stamp ten years

before the production of two commemorative

British ones: fourpence & one and threepence. 

Further portraiture fame came from the

Clydesdale Bank, on a five-pound note

(the reverse a field mouse and a rose):

the once impoverished poet

more profitable in death than life.

Remembered in places far-flung,                                                                

his antipodean statue  - seagulls seated on his

head – commands by place its status as

centrepiece to the Writers’ Walk

circumferencing Dunedin’s Octagon.

Like Mozart, like Schubert, like Chopin –

short-lived Masters of musical sound,

Burns was short-lived Master of the verbal:

rhythmic and wry, rustic, sincere, and

spontaneous heaven-born ploughman.

Villanelle

Reading Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled at the moment, and in particular the chapter on Villanelles. 

The Villanelle is a bit akin to a Sudoku, or a Cryptic Crossword: everything has to fit or it falls apart.  It's a form, and a quite specific one at that.  There are five stanzas of three lines each, and the sixth stanza has an extra line. 

The first and third lines of the first stanza get repeated alternately at the end of the subsequent stanzas and then both appear in the last stanza.  They have to rhyme.  The end word of the middle line in each stanza rhymes (with a different rhyme sound).   In the last stanza the first line rhymes with the very first line of the poem, the second line rhymes with the second line of the poem, and then we have the two repeated lines.   It sounds more complicated than it is.   Dylan Thomas' Do not go gentle into that good night is a well-known poem than many people don't realise is a fine example of a Villanelle. 

This wonderful poem by Elizabeth Bishop is also a Villanelle, though by running over the second line in some cases she takes slight liberties with the form.    The poem becomes increasingly moving as it goes on; the last line is exceptionally so.

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster, Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three beloved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. -- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.

From Bishop’s last book of poems, Geography III 

I've just had a play with the form, and produced the following bit of nonsense....which I'm sure can be improved.   It's a start, however!  I also play a little with the second repeat line; using rhymes that are similar in sound may not be the wisest move, although it was interesting to do.

Perhaps it’s not the prime of every poet’s dream,

Though I myself am fairly keen

To aspire to a villanellic scheme.

So I won’t wait for the Muse’s beam

But try somehow the rhymes to glean;

Perhaps it’s not the prime of every poet’s dream.

I thought at first that I might seem

To be a Villanelle machine;

As I aspired to a villanelley scheme.

I’d vie with the Cream of the Poetic Team,

Sharpen my tools to the finest sheen;

Perhaps it’s not the prime of every poet’s dream.

Of Villanelles I’d write a ream,

Of Villanelles become the Dean -

Still aspiring to a villanelleful scheme.

While fame and fortune wildly gleam

Villanellistically I’m still green;

Perhaps it’s not the prime of every poet’s dream,

Aspiring to a villanellistic scheme. 

Mike Crowl Nov 2011