Poetics (76 Only)

The Silversmith, Room 404, Chicago, Illinois

76. How

I hope these words help you a little. It's good you're a poet because it's good to have poets around us, so I'll suggest below a few things you can work on in your poetry.

That last poem you sent me is definitely your best. I've read through the others, and they do have a bit of a dated feel, though that seems intentional to me (so an artistic decision), and some people say poetry becomes dated quickly. (For instance, your poems don't seem to play much with line breaks but break lines only at natural pauses in syntax. You need to break at unexpected places, to make the poem's meanings multiply, to make the poem more indirect in the way it makes its points.) What I see as the weakness of these poems is what was weakest about your other poem: that they tell us what they're going to say. It's usually best for a poem to show rather than say—for it to be.

So here's my crazy writing advice: Read and write a lot. That's it. Read a lot of contemporary poetry, find something you like, and keep reading poetry like that. And write as you do all of this reading. You'll be influenced by what you write, and the process of writing will cause you to think of new ways to do things, things only you can do.

If I were going to give you another piece of advice, I'd say, allow your mind to wander as you write a poem. Your poems are so centrally about making one specific point, but it's better if they're more expansive, which makes them more surprising and alluring. I see that you like description, which is fine, but don't focus so much on producing a poem about something; allow the poem to become something unexpected. I think a recent poem of mine has a few overlaps with poems of yours: it focuses on my perception and records those perceptions, and it focuses on the natural world. So take a look at it here:

http://365ltrs.blogspot.com/2011/02/275-notes-before-sleep.html

Note that it's not of a piece, not a single thing, but the accumulation of perceptions into an experience. A poem should be an experience more than it is the replication of an experience, and I think this poem can give you some hints on how to do this. Still, this poem of mine is not particularly strong itself, and only a first draft, but I think you need to create a freer way to work, one that will allow you to wander. You've proved in that last poem of yours that you do have an ear that you can use and an imagination you can put to work, but you need to free both of them.

As for the other two poems I'd suggest you'd submit, I'd go with "1" and "2," but I'd suggest you spend a night (or a day) working on these, freeing them from the strictures of their didacticism (which is another fault or feature of many of my own poems) and their replication of experience. I think you can do this. And I'd suggest that the change include changing the titles which tell us too much too directly.

And think of fragmentary ways of writing your poems, which is something I see you're working on in some of your recent poems. Here's, for instance, a possible rewriting I did of your poem "2." Note that it's so different that it probably isn't recognizable to you, but revisions like this can free the mind.

Stoned

the perfect flat
smooth and round
stone standing
on my foot on
the shore leaning
from slipping from
my palm across
the palms of
each wave and
denting water
its prints fading
and stone rocking
down into that

I cannot find it

I have just dashed this off using images from your poem, paring everything back beyond the essentials, removing punctuation so that linebreaks are the only punctuation but they punctuate against the syntax of the poem. Also the poem is fragmented so that one concept (which may've been a sentence) flows into the next in media res, so that the "story" of the poem is unclear, so that the stone and the person thinking of the stone are merged grammatically, so the story is not a water running narrative but a series of almost unrelated drops. The last line, which is really part of the major point of your poem, is one that makes me a little uncomfortable, because it's so direct, but I've made it a bit more ambiguous, by doubling its meaning.

Note that this revised poem is filled with me and my ways. It depends on a kind of wordplay: renaming things ("palms" of waves), using words in unexpected ways ("denting"), and punning ("stone rocking"). This kind of verbal playfulness is just my way, so I don't think this revision is anything for you, but you need to practice enough to know, naturally, even unconsciously (as if breathing), how you must write, and how it is that your poems must say. Not "what" they must say. "What" is unimportant. "What" is about recreating experiences of yours. "How" is important. "How" is about creating experiences through your poems, about making your poems into experiences. It is better to be something than to replicate something.

Note that my poem is about sound. Listen to it. And make sure you listen to your poems too. Your ear will do wonders for you once you focus on it instead of on the "what" of your poem.

And please note that I'm not claiming this poem of mine is a good poem. It's just a teaching aid.

I hope these thoughts of mine help you. And thanks for being a poet, for being a person of words. So please be the poet you are, not me, not anyone else. But teach yourself how to be the best poet you are.

ecr. l'inf.