Toni Hanner's Blog, page 2

I have wasted my life.

This week's link will lead you to a great article in The Paris Review's blog about the poem Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.  In the article, Dan Piepenbring provides a number of different possible solutions to the enigmatic last line in James Wright's poem.

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,

Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses

Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/06/23/i-have-wasted-my-life/

What I wonder about is how Wright arrived at that last line. Do you think it is possible to write toward such a surprise? Did the line happen as if by poetry magic? I'm interested in the whole question of writing with intention. Most of the time I try not to do that. But of course, all my prompts and word lists produce their own form of intention.

What do you think?

Radical Revision -- Part 2

Last week we tried "writing it backwards" as a simple and often effective way to revise a stale poem.

This week we offer you 7 more ways to think about re-envisioning a poem that, for whatever reason, just isn't working.

1. Re-write it, taking out all connective tissue, words like and, but, or, yet, for, so, it, after, like, by, around, during, over, under, next, the (Yes, even "the"). You get the picture. Pretty much any word that is neither a noun nor a verb.

2. Re-write your poem in a different tense and voice. Maybe it's in your father's voice, back before you were born. Or the voice of the elevator you take up to your office every day.

3. Re-write your poem in second person (you). Second person always gives an interesting flavor to a poem.

4. Write it with no adjectives or adverbs. 

5. Choose what you think is your strongest line. Make that your first line. Write a new poem in which every line is as strong as this first line.

6. Re-write your poem in direct address to the reader. Make it a set of instructions or a letter.

7. Thoroughly sick of this poem? Cut it up. Cut out each word with scissors. Throw away the weak words, keep the strong. Re-arrange what's left so it looks like a ransom note.

Link of the week: http://www.writersdigest.com/whats-new/5-ways-to-revise-poems

In less than three weeks we'll be heading up to Port Townsend for the Centrum Port Townsend Writers' Conference. We've been going  there every July for many years. If you haven't been there, check it out. http://centrum.org/the-port-townsend-writers-conference/
There may still be a few spaces available in some of the workshops.
 

Radical Revision Part 1 -- Write it Backwards

Here's a simple way to "re-vision" a poem. See what happens if you rewrite it from the last line to the first. Tinker with sentence structure and line breaks as necessary, but not too much. Don't worry about making sense. 

Try this with a poem that has elements you like, but just doesn't quite work. You may be surprised! 

http://www.pw.org/content/the_man_with_the_beautiful_eyes

So Many Ways to Make

Our friend Sam Roxas-Chua has been making asemic writing lately. The link below will tell you what that is better than I could, but, in a nutshell, it's writing that is what most of our teachers would have called "scribbling." It's not quite writing, not quite drawing, but something in between. He has also been carving paper to create beautiful images of swans, falling water, and other, visceral images. The paper is usually not quite pierced, but the top layer of it is raised by Sam's knife to form fascinating shapes. http://www.asymptotejournal.com/article.php?cat=Visual&id=24

Another creative explosion is IUOMA, a mail-art movement. I haven't read their manifesto, if they have one, but the point here seems to be to create a postcard or envelope, using collage, painting, drawing, rubber stamps, postage stamps, and send it along to someone in the group -- one of the points of what they're doing seems to be that the art is ephemeral and once it's made, it leaves your hands and goes elsewhere, sometimes passing through ungentle post office handlers, sometimes being opened by the Security Agents of the receiving country.

Sometimes these are "add and pass" postcards, where the recipient is expected to add their own art or poetry to the mix and send it on until the whole surface is full. Then it goes back to the original maker.  http://iuoma-network.ning.com/group/starthereatiuoma

I am fascinated by these ways of making poetry and art. They can give your brain a new path, away from words. Don't you sometimes feel like Eliza Doolittle: "words, words, words, I'm so sick of words...."?

Quiet Poems

Many poets have written effectively about war. Randall Jarrell's best known poem is his Death of the Ball Turret Gunner with its horrifying last line.

http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/death-ball-turret-gunner

Here is a quieter Jarrell poem, The Breath of Night. 

The moon rises. The red cubs rolling
In the ferns by the rotten oak
Stare over a marsh and a meadow
To the farm's white wisp of smoke.
A spark burns, high in heaven.
Deer thread the blossoming rows
Of the old orchard, rabbits
Hop by the well-curb. The cock crows
From the tree by the widow's walk;
Two stars in the trees to the west,
Are snared, and an owl's soft cry
Runs like a breath through the forest.
Here too, though death is hushed, though joy
Obscures, like night, their wars,
The beings of this world are swept
By the Strife that moves the stars.

In this lovely lyric, war steals in at the end, quietly. The poem is almost a lullaby up until the 13th line where it turns to a statement. There is foreshadowing all through the poem: "rotten oak," "wisp of smoke," "cock crows," "widow's walk," stars... / are snared."


See if you can write a quiet anti-war (or anti-racism, anti-climate change, anti-?) poem that takes us by the hand and leads us gently to the edge of the abyss.



Not a link of the week, but a poetry give-away. A copy of the chapbook Dona Nobis Pacem: Grant Us Peace, published in 2006 by the Lane Literary Guild, will be sent (for $3 s&h) to the first ten people who ask by emailing me. You can contact me by clicking anywhere you see "tonipoet".

Narrative or Lyric? You Pick!

Story and music. That's pretty much what poetry is about, I think. Formal structure, syntax, tone, and other poetic elements all seem to serve either story or music, or both. Narrative or lyric.

I thought it might be fun and instructive to attempt to re-write a couple of well-known poems. One of the greatest American narrative poems is Richard Hugo's "Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg." Story-telling at its absolute highest peak.

My favorite lyric poet, Li-Young Lee, wrote "I Ask My Mother to Sing," which is music from the title on through to the lovely last line.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171835

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/246596

What if we try to re-write Hugo's poem as a lyric, and Li-Young Lee's poem as a narrative?


The link of the week is, of course, www.poetryfoundation.org. Thanks to them for their great work.

Canzone Please, Hold the Mayo

Shelly Krehbiel sent us this challenge -- the canzone. She says "it is not an Italian pastry filled with cheese and met. It is like a sestina on steroids." Five 12-line stanzas, plus an envoy. Five words in a changing pattern end all the lines. For the stanzas the end-word patterns are:

121131144155

5115525533544

454414422433

343353311322

232243355211

envoy (last stanza) 12345

Here's an absolutely crazy example by Caroline Knox --
Canzone Delle Preposizioni

Caroline Knox
I packed up the books: Under
Milk Wood, Of
Mice and Men, Under
the Window, Under
the Volcano, Up
from Slavery, The Thunder-
ing Herd, Under
the Greenwood Tree, The Over-
Coat, The Changing Light at Sandover,
Under-
world, Out
of Africa, Paris Trout;

and I went over
to the Under-
woods’ house over
on River Road. Over-
head the blackness of
clouds out-
paced a fleeing sun. Out
and up
the clouds rolled, roiled up,
wrung out
in horrendous rain over
and over.

I had agreed over
coffee one day to farm out
lots of books people were giving over
to the library book sale over
at the high school. Under
the agreement, volunteers took books over
to the Underwoods’ over
spring break. I was up
for this, and signed up.
Over
I drove, up
the Cross Road, and turned up

River Road. I walked up
the Underwoods’ driveway and over
the lawn. The voice of Dawn Up-
shaw drifted up
from a CD player, and out
on the screen porch was John Up-
dike’s new book of essays, next to the Up-
anishads. Under
the lilacs, under
the clematis, climbing up
trellises of
lath, of

ironwork, of
wicker, blossoms hardly held up
their heads. Of
course, of
course; but the storm that had crushed them was over.
Pools of
water, of
mud were all around. The Underwoods’ cookout
was a washout,
but the sun of
a glowing afternoon under-
cut the thunder.

The Under-
woods took all the discarded books out
of the trunk of my car, and then dove them (with lots of other books) over
to the high school, where these books were put up
for sale for the benefit of the Westport Free Public Library, a generous act
which the Underwoods should be proud of. (From www.poets.org, which is the link of the week!) Crab Creek Review's poetry contest deadline is May 15! Get busy!http://crabcreekreview.org/submissions.html  

Poetry by the Numbers

Our friend Thomas Aslin (A Moon Over Wings, Tebot Bach) told us about the Fibonacci Sonnet. It's a beast of a writing exercise in which you write a 1 word sentence, another 1 word sentence, followed by a 2 word sentence, a 3 word sentence, a 5 word sentence, an 8 word sentence, a 13 word sentence, a 21 word sentence, and so on. Add the number of words in the previous two sentences to get the number of words in the current sentence. The sentence after the 21 word sentence would have 34 words and the one after that would have 55. 

You can stop at whatever number you want, of course, and then start going the other direction, ending up with two 1 word sentences. The link to Austin Kleon's website (below) has a wonderful cartoon depiction of the creation of a Fibonacci Sonnet. Here is my very imperfect effort.


City.
Rain.Dog shit.Buenos Aires, November.You forget that it’s spring.You forget, home is ice on the roads. Home is frozen pipes, bare black limbs against a silver sky, constant threat. Here at the edge of the sea, jacaranda cascades over peeling stucco walls, trumpet vine rains pollen down on café umbrellas. Maricela says we must stay up all night, just once, dinner at midnight, breakfast at 4 in the morning, sleep til noon, it’s the culture, she says, so we dance all night, just once. When we emerge, blinking and sore-footed, the sun is already steaming the streets, the cartoneros have picked through the bins and hauled the still useful away, the blood of yesterday’s thief has been hosed into the gutter—there is no forgetting in Buenos Aires, the all-night milonga is a fuck you to the death squads. 


 

Another game to play with numbers I stole from www.languageisavirus.com
It's called "doubling."  Starting with one sentence, write a series of paragraphs, each doubling the number of sentences in the previous paragraph and including all the words used previously. For example:




Woman with a Blue Jar

A woman holds a blue jar.
Jar blue as her eyes. A woman holds a meteor.
Meteoric falling into blue. The jar fills with ash. The woman places her eyes on the mantle. She pretends she holds the ashes of a lover in the jar.
At night the woman lies down in a field. She watches dark blue holding back. Blue letting black spread its ink across her eyes.The jar is the blue of a meteor when it falls and fills with light. The ashes are scooped from the remains of a burning house. Her lover places himself on the mantle. He is pretending to be her dream. When she returns to the house in the morning.
When morning returns night lies down in a dark blue field. Meteors fall, filling the burning house with light. The woman scoops ashes and pretends to spread them across her eyes. She holds her lover's dreams in the jar on the mantle.

 

Link of the week: http://austinkleon.com/

Lost in Translation -- the Translitic

Steve Kowit, who wrote the lovely practice book, In the Palm of Your Hand, says:

"a translitic is a poem 'translated' from a foreign language by paying attention not to the meaning of the word but to their sounds. The poet uses as a guide whatever homonymic associations come to mind."

I would add that, in the case of a language not based on a western alphabet (such as Japanese), the poet might look at the shape of the words, what they appear to be "doing" in relation to each other.

Look at this poem by Carsten René Nielsen http://www.fishousepoems.org/?p=5334. See what the language suggests to you and write your own poem from these associations. Reading the poem aloud to yourself (don't worry about pronouncing it correctly!) helps.

It's easy to find poems in French and Spanish, of course, but the less familiar you are with a language, the more free your mind will be in translating. Try a poem written in Chinese or the Hebraic alphabet or Farsi.  Google the name of any language followed by "poetry" and you'll find dozens of images.

Link of the week: https://www.visualthesaurus.com. It's so much fun just to type in a word and watch a little galaxy form around it.

The Liberating Tyranny of the Writing Exercise

People ask me how I get past the logical gatekeeper in my brain--the part that insists on making sense and following a narrative. I really don't know how this works but I find that creating a set of formal constraints sometimes liberates me. Writing that uses a lot of repetition, for example, or not allowing yourself to write in complete sentences. Here's an exercise I used last weekend to torture myself and some friends. Pick a letter, any letter of the alphabet, but for your own sanity pick one that is used in lots of words: a vowel, an S, T, H, C, L, for example. 

Now write a poem in which EVERY WORD contains the letter you've chosen. Remember, you don't have to make sense. You will, whether you realize it or not, make a certain kind of sense, the story will lie beneath your words, the connections are in your wiring, like it or not.

Here's the one I wrote last weekend--unretouched. I know you can do better than this!

M

Mother maintains multitudes imminent immanent
meager my ambling morose
amphora, amber, monkey temple
plum flaming lamp perfume
mention my name
margaret's home Monday, monstrous mating
mother's meat, mother manages time, recommending
camera becoming, mauve helmeted women
mud matters, something named
screaming. More mentioning my name, marine
maneuvers.

And here's the link of the week: www.languageisavirus.com