Ekphrasis: Exercises in Ecstasy

I’m not the biggest fan of “poetry prompts,” little exercises meant to stretch your poetic muscles, such as writing down random words and making a poem out of them on an equally random topic. Some people respond to these really well, and some people just don’t, and I’m one of the latter (it might have something to do with my overall allergy to exercise of any sort). Occasionally, a prompt will move me to write something funky I would not have thought of before, but more often my attempts at writing from prompts only result in contrived lines that show the prompt from a mile away. For this reason, I don’t often use them, but I am very intrigued by them, and there have been many great prompts collected this month. Some of my favorites this year are at Kelly Russell Agodon’s Book of Kells and Big Tent Poetry.

Ekphrasis is not really a “prompt,” but it’s a tradition that can work as such. From the Greek ek and phrasis, out and speak, “ekphrasis” basically refers to any type of art based on another medium. (For a more complete definition, including an excellent bibliography, read here.) Ekphrastic poetry, then, is poetry that is based on other works of art, such as a painting, a sculpture, or a song. What I love about ekphrasis is that, unlike a random prompt not based on an existing work of art, ekphrasis can help you connect to another artist’s vision, and is thus by definition an act of inspiration, a mooching, if you will, off another artist’s creation. If you’ve ever stood transfixed in front of a painting or a statue, you have experienced the moment that can begin an ekphrastic creation, a kind of ecstasy, also from the Greek ek (out) and histanai (to stand, as in place or set). The work of art takes you outside yourself to a new place.

Perhaps one of the most famous works of ekphrasis is Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in which the static figures on the ancient piece of art inspire him to contemplate the timelessness of beauty:

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearièd,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;

One of the best results of the ekphrastic effort is that it’s an excellent antidote to abstraction, the vilest enemy of good poetry. Moved, as Keats was, by the passage of time, the figures on the urn ground his feelings in the material and produce one of the most treasured English poems of all time.

J. P. Dancing Bear, who writes beautiful ekphrastic poems (see his “New Age,” based on the painting Promise by Yu Sugawara), puts it thus: “I tend to get inside the picture and look around. Sometimes I see things outside the frame and I'm not afraid to explore that. After a while, I either become one of the beings in the painting or I become an observer (first person, second person, third person). I note all phrases that come into my mind. Words too. Then I begin to construct the narrative of the painting. I pay little attention to titles, I care very little for what the artist says about the work, or the artist's techniques. The artist has provided a window, and I climb through it.”

Thanks to the Internet, climbing through windows has never been so easy. Right here and now, on whichever device you are using to read this blog, you can contemplate at length and absolutely free the greatest works of art humanity has produced from ancient times to the present. Of course, there is something to be lost, some aura, as Walter Benjamin would have it, in the transaction. Should you have access to a museum, a gallery, an opera house—use it. But the trick is not so much to have that coveted access to the work of art itself, but rather the ability to find art that moves you, that jars you, that takes you outside yourself and slams you down on the other side: ek histanai.

No pictures of sunsets, no puppy portraits. Cliché images make cliché poetry.

I prefer images that freak me out a little. I’m mesmerized, for example, by this series of portraits from artist Julie Blackmon called Domestic Vacations. Note how she is able to evoke emotions and ideas simply with pictures. Try to reproduce this effect in words. Choose one of the portraits in the collection and describe the scene it depicts. Attempt to convey whatever it is you felt when looking at the portrait simply through the selection and placement of detail. Do not reveal the emotion you are attempting to convey. Avoid using abstract adjectives, like “freaky” umbrellas.

Or try focusing on a work of art that speaks to some issue that is already on your mind. For example, I’ve been thinking a lot about street harassment lately, ever since I read this excellent post by Louise Melling on the ACLU blog. Immediately I thought of the famous photograph by Ruth Orkin, “American Girl in Italy,” which I first saw some years ago in an Italian restaurant. I’m still working on it, but I think this is going to be a good poem, the mixture of the issue, the old photo, my memory of first having seen it, my own experiences of street harassment. You’re welcome to beat me to the punch, but what I want you to get from this romp through my head is the way a poem can come together. You can rely on your own experiences, your own notes, or you can research. You might think poetry and research are at odds, but the academic in me thrives on the accumulation of tidbits. An experience here, a blog post there, a famous photograph, and boom! A poem springs from the rock.

Sometimes ekphrastic inspiration springs from the unlikeliest of places. One of my favorite poetry collections is Christine Stewart-Nuñez’s Unbound & Branded (Finishing Line Press, 2006), which I reviewed for Prairie Schooner in 2008. The collection is about supermodel Kate Moss, but the poems are based on a photo spread of Moss for a 2003 issue of W magazine. Each photo in the spread inspires a poem, and the collection as a whole, as the title implies, explores Moss’s career as a vessel for other artists and advertisers. Stewart-Nuñez could have written about Moss without the W spread, but the photos are intrinsic to her exploration of Moss’s role in the creation of this phenomenon we call beauty.

Another unlikely place to find poetry is Facebook or whatever social medium you prefer. One of the good things about being a writer and a teacher is that you quickly accumulate many FBFs, only a small percentage with whom you would normally share pictures. On any given day on Facebook I see pictures of people’s trips to Italy, of their children eating ice cream at Disney World, or their own versions of themselves as supermodels posing for their friends. Unlike professional photographs, these images are raw, unmediated. They are an excellent source of stories, attitudes, and the daily dilemmas that make great poetry. Oh, and don’t worry. Not all ekphrastic poetry is so enmeshed in the original work of art that it requires disclosure. Sometimes a poem begins as ekphrasis and ends just as a poem, so far away from its source as to be virtually unrelated to it. Some ekphrastic poetry—the truest ekphrasis, one could argue—cannot be fully appreciated or even understood without its source. But some can stand alone, and the reader can experience it with or without its source. Should your source be a picture of someone you barely know on Facebook, perhaps it would be best to leave the source behind as much as possible. All kidding aside, however, do be aware of copyright issues, and acknowledge them appropriately.

Be open to pretty much anything as a source for ekphrasis. One of my favorite Anne Sexton poems is “Some Foreign Letters,” in which she attempts to reconstruct the early life of her beloved great-aunt Elizabeth. The poem is so rich in images it may have well have been based on photographs, and says much about the lost art of letter-writing in that Sexton was able to so vividly picture her aunt’s life through her letters. Old letters can be difficult to work with, in that they already come to you in words, thus stealing something from the process of transmogrification that defines the essence of ekphrasis. Nevertheless, the conversation can be gratifying. Some of my favorite poems are based on other poems, like Anthony Hecht’s “The Dover Bitch,” which is based on Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” Hecht’s poem is arguably parody, or satire, but ultimately ekphrasis. Call it what you will—it’s freaking great.

Here’s the final trick, whatever source you riff off of: make it yours. Ekphrasis can be many things, but never imitation. The source is the point of departure, but the destination must be yours.

Advice to a Young Poet from a Not-So-Young-Anymore Poet

There’s been a rash of advice given the month. Jeannine Hall Gailey has an excellent post at her blog, with links to a few more. Here is mine. It’s not intended for poets who are mainly thinking of poetry as a hobby, although you might get something out of it if so. Mostly, I’m thinking of the YP (Young Poet) who wants more—a “career.”

1.       Overcome the amateur circuit.

For some, cutting your teeth at the local open mic event is a catalyst. You wrote a few poems you were unsure anyone would like, you took a deep breath, read them to strangers, and yay! They loved them. They clapped for you. You got a high. You might get the same experience from posting your poem online somewhere, some site that has no editorial process. Anyone can post. Thousands—thousands—of people have clicked and rated your poem as wonderful. This gave you confidence, and you went on from there to pursue your poetry elsewhere.

For others, the amateur circuit of endless open mics and countless open sites is the death of their growth as a YP. You get hooked on the guaranteed praise, and you can’t give it up. You’re like that teacher’s pet at the end of kindergarten who pitched a fit because he wasn’t sure the first grade teacher would let him be the one who banged the erasers. Don’t stick around the amateur circuit too long. Get what you can from it as quickly as possible and get out, or bypass it altogether. Remember that the only place where everyone always does a good job and gets a cookie is kindergarten.

2.       Beware of sharks.

Your next logical step is seeking publication, and here is where there are millions of poetic equivalents to ambulance chasers waiting to pounce on your wallet. Beware of contests where everybody wins, or where there are many winners or too much prize money or washed-up, non-poetic celebrities involved. Investigate. Who is judging the contest, and what is his or her publishing pedigree? Is the contest affiliated with a reputable publisher or institution, such as a college or university? Fishing out a bogus contest can be very tricky. For one thing, none of them are actually illegal. There is indeed always a winner or winners, and these do get the promised prizes. But so do the people who win Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes, and you don’t fall for that, do you?

Similarly, there are many publishers who are eager to publish your manuscript, for a fee. In the past, this used to be called “vanity publishing,” and carried a heavy stigma. Nobody wanted to publish your poetry but you. Who was the fool? The editor who didn’t recognize your talent, or you, who didn’t recognize your lack of it? Now, that attitude is shifting. More people refer to this practice as “self-publishing,” and many fine writers in all genres are making it work for them. But they’ll be the first to tell you that it’s hard. You have to know about as much about business as you do about poetry to make it work, to get your book into the hands of readers and critics who will look beyond the self-published label and give you credit on par with that automatically conferred on writers who are published traditionally. Anyone who tells you different is trying to sell you something. I do not recommend self-publishing to the YP.

And no, you don’t need an agent. Most poets don’t have one, including fairly well-established poets with many publications. Only a tiny handful of poets already at the very top have agents.

Two organizations that can help you sift through the sharks are Poets & Writers and the CLMP, Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. They both keep directories of magazines, journals, publishers, and presses guaranteed to be the real thing. Frankly, however, you should not seek publication too early. It’s difficult to determine when your poetry is ready for publication, especially if you’re truly young, meaning still in high school or even earlier. You have no access to professional opinions. How far can you trust mom, the boyfriend, the BFF, or the teacher who is overjoyed by the mere fact that you wrote something that actually made sense? That’s how you wind up at an open mic, searching for that confirmation. Sometimes, you have to give it to yourself. When you can look at one of your poems side by side with one published in a book, journal, or magazine you know to be reputable and say, “by golly, that’s just as good!” you might be ready to send work out. But, in order to be able to make that judgment, you need to take another crucial step.

3.       Study.

What I mean by study is more than just reading for pleasure. You have to seek out good poetry—it won’t come to you. It’s not taught enough in the schools, and you’re not going to find it on the magazine rack at the dentist’s, or even at most book stores. Go to Poets and Writers, the CLMP, to poets.org or Poetry Daily. Write down names, hunt down books and similar writers. Make a point of learning about different styles and schools, read criticism. Subscribe to a few journals. Make sure your reading list is over 75% current, living authors. Go to readings (not open mics), take a class. Ideally, go to college and major in English, but pick a school large enough to offer at least a few classes exclusively on current poetry. Many English departments are watered down to survey courses, or courses in the novel, or the Romantic poets, who are all long dead. I don’t like creative writing programs that are mostly workshops and require little literary study. Writing is both an art and a craft. You learn the craft part by practicing it in workshop, but you learn the art part by studying it in class.

Model the work of poets you admire. Don’t worry about originality, or losing your voice. That’s literally impossible. Eventually, all your mimicking will mesh and evolve into something uniquely your own. That’s how you learned to talk, remember? You listened to your parents, to the television, and suddenly you spoke, and sounded like no one but yourself.

4.       Cultivate both confidence and humility.

The whole point of overcoming the amateur circuit is to find feedback you can trust, and now that you are studying, whether on your own, through a group, or in a class, you are going to get some, maybe even in the form of a rejection from an editor. How do you process rejection?

There is no such thing as a writer who is immune to rejection. The trick is to get past the initial moment where you crumple up the slip and throw it at the wall (or print the rejection, and then crumple it up and throw it at the wall). To respond to it professionally, intellectually, critically. You must always ask yourself what the rejection or criticism means. Say you sent the poem to a journal and it got rejected. Maybe the poem sucks. That’s okay. Just because one—or ten, or twenty—of your poems suck doesn’t mean all your poems suck or will suck. But that’s not the only reason why a poem might get rejected. Maybe it doesn’t fit the style of that journal, or that issue. Maybe there was already a poem about French toast they had agreed to publish. Have the confidence to believe not in your writing, but in your critical judgment, which you have struggled to cultivate. You once honestly believed the poem was good enough to send out. You are a well-educated critic. Why should someone else’s opinion—even an equally cultivated opinion—change your mind?

But you must also have humility, especially as a YP. Say you are in workshop, and someone says your poem is full of clichés. You didn’t think so. Well, who does? Has that person said intelligent things about other workshopped pieces? Have you agreed with his or her criticisms in the past? If the critic is just some schmuck who pooh-poohs everything, who cares? But if it’s someone who is a good critic—now that you’ve studied you know who is and who isn’t—you should have the humility to at least reevaluate your work. Perhaps there is something you missed. If all you will accept from others is praise, you might as well go back to kindergarten.

5.       Work for money.

This one’s tough. You need money. Duh. Don’t expect to make it writing poems. There is hardly a poet in the US (and I bet we’re not alone) who lives exclusively off book royalties. Heck, there are hardly any writers at all who do. But at least there are some, popular novelists who get their books turned into movies (when was the last time you saw a poem get turned into a movie?), or genre novelists, scriptwriters. Not poets. Go ahead, I dare you. Pick random poets off the poets.org database and see how many you can find whose bios don’t include some other job. Most are academics, professors here or there whose teaching pays the bills. They got the teaching job because of being poets, but they could not be poets without the teaching job. Some have any other job—they are lawyers, politicians, pool sharks, whatever. The more successful ones have grants and awards that pay the bills, not royalties. The even more successful ones make money giving speeches and whatnot.

So you need a job. What kind? You can be an academic. With a BA, you can teach school, or you can teach at a college or university with a graduate degree. For some, this is perfect, because the teaching feeds into the writing. For some, however, this is a bad idea. Teaching is hard work, and teaching writing or literature—the obvious choice—can backfire. It can be sort of like taking someone who loves animals and making her work at a slaughterhouse. How excited will you be to teach poetry when the mere mention of it draws groans from a class full of students who don’t want to be there and hate poetry and writing, and, by extension, you? If this thought makes you love poetry more—“I will fight to make them love it!” you think—go into teaching, at whatever level you prefer. But if you’re the type who gets spitting mad when you see a typo in a headline and thinks anyone who doesn’t know who Milton is should be exiled from the planet, look into that pool shark option. You want a job that will give you the money you need and, if not feed your creativity, at least not drain you of it.

People worry too much about the “should I get an MFA?” question. The value of an MFA in creative writing only comes into question comparatively, and the correct answer is always personal. Should I get an MFA, or an MBA? Should I get an MFA, or backpack through Europe? Should I get an MFA, or a husband? The answers to these questions have nothing to do with an MFA. These are personal happiness questions. Do you want money? Well, no teaching job is going to make you rich, MFA-related or otherwise. Do you want experience? An MFA will get you that, but so will backpacking nowhere and buckling down to read some good stuff on your own. I met my husband when I was getting my MFA, but I don’t know if this happens at all MFA programs.

The truth is an MFA is a fine degree. You will learn. I’ve heard some people claim that MFA programs teach everyone to write the same way. I think that has more to do with you and your propensity to be a lump of clay than it does with any program, however. But does it pay off, people ask. Sure. With an MFA—and at least one book-length publication—you can get a job at a college or university. Unlike the MA, which is really just a stop on the road to a PhD, an MFA is a terminal degree. If that is what you mean by whether it pays, the answer is yes. If what you want is some sort of comparison between an MFA and a law or medical degree, that’s pretty silly. No degree “pays,” in a sense. There is always a certain amount of luck involved in turning a piece of paper into a job, and huge discrepancies in wages not just between fields but within them. For every rich lawyer in a mansion there’s at least 100 traffic ticket lawyers living in a tiny apartment with a poet for a roommate. There are many schools now offering PhD’s in creative writing as well. These are great. You study more theory, usually, are more poet-critic than poet-writer. Get that too if you can swing it. Get it into your head that there is no such thing as useless studying.

6.       Work for poetry.

At the same time, do not allow your poetry to take a back seat to your work. Whether you choose to be an academic or an accountant, don’t forget the poetry. Know a distraction when you see one. You’re offered a great promotion, for example, but it’s one of those work-all-day-and-then-some-more-at-night-and-every-weekend promotions. Do you really need it? What will you do with the extra money? If it’s feed and clothe your five hungry, naked children, go ahead and take it, please. But if it’s get a better car, better clothes, or a bigger apartment, realize that you’re paying for it with poetry. Poets don’t drive nice cars, wear fancy clothes, or live in big apartments. That doesn’t mean you have to be a Starving Artist. It simply means you have other priorities. Most people won’t understand why you don’t have an iPhone, iPad, or iAnything. There is no iPoetry.

7.       Pursue publication diligently and meticulously.

Once you are ready to start publishing, always have something out. Don’t leave it for later, don’t wait until you have a full or a better manuscript, and don’t expect anyone else to do it for you. When the rejected stuff comes back, send it right back out again the very next week. Find a system that works and keep it. Send things out the minute they are done, once a day, week, or month. But do it regularly—this is what makes you a poet more so than any degree or even the writing itself. Get it out.

Target your publishing efforts, especially if you have your eye on your academic résumé. Don’t just send your work willy-nilly anywhere. Send to places you respect, and read. Match your poems to the target’s “voice.” Don’t just enter contests. A certain amount of these is fine for your best work, but you should also send poems and manuscripts during regular reading periods.

Keep good records. Find a way. There’s software for this, but you don’t really need it. You can devise your own system. You don’t want to send the same poem or manuscript to several places at once unless they strictly say that simultaneous submissions are okay. If they don’t say so, write, email, or call to ask. Don’t sweat the cover letter. Many places are using submission software now, and you submit your work online with hardly any space for extra comment (some have none at all). I don’t think a cover letter will make an editor look at your work any differently. What matters is the poetry. The cover letter is a business letter, not some cockamamie attempt to showcase your talent. That’s what the poetry is for. Tell them what you’re sending them in the first paragraph (just titles, not lengthy explanations), and who you are in the second: where you’re from, your last three publications if you have them, or where you’ve studied if you don’t, or nothing more if neither. Say thank you and give your contact information clearly. Anything else is unnecessary. Follow any rules they give you to the letter. If they want you to submit your work as a .txt file, don’t send them a .doc. If they want you to include a 50-word bio with your submission, don’t send them a 500-word opus.

Hmm. That seems like an odd last word, but it isn’t. At the end of the day, what YPs need is demystification. The truth about poetry is that it comes down to the mundane, as all things do. Nothing is exempt from the basics of life: work and pay the bills. Not even poetry. Perhaps a better final thought might be this: don’t romanticize the thing. If I tell you poetry is a matter of correctly formatted submissions and it makes you cringe, you might have too hard a road ahead. But if you read that and love the thing anyway, looked out the window at the cherry bush and thought, “I can turn that into a .txt file,” you might be a poet already.

How to Meet Your Muse

“I meet the muse in the poems of others and invite her to my poems. I see over and over again, in different ways, what is possible, how the perimeters of poetry are expanding and making way for new forms.”

—Denise Duhamel, from CHIMERA: an interview with Denise Duhamel by Karla Huston

The Shadow of Sirius,
the latest book from
current US Poet Laureate
W. S. Merwin

Do you know who the current US Poet Laureate is? Of your state? (Or, if you are one of my mysterious Denmark readers, the analogous position for you?) Can you name any poets who live in your city? Most people who live near celebrities (here in Miami, we have more than a few) know about them and find it a point of pride, but poets live in relative obscurity. Yet, there’s something about knowing your local poets that’s . . . alive. There’s a reason why Plato expelled poets in The Republic. Your local poets are tapped into your hometown in a way no one else is. They know things!

As we enter the second week of National Poetry Month, take the time to find out whom your local poets are. During this month, there’s more going on than usual, and you may get the chance to attend readings and events not available later. There’s something about hearing and seeing poetry read right in front of you that’s impossible to grasp on your own. Poetry is more of a performing art than prose is—to hear the way a poet delivers a poem is always interesting. Most readings also have Q&A sessions afterward where you can actually talk to the poet, ask her or him anything you want. How cool is that? If you’re unsure where live events are taking place, poets.org has a calendar searchable by state here. You can also check your local newspaper, your local bookstore (especially independent ones), libraries, and surrounding universities. If all else fails, try Google.



Kinky (Orchises, 1997)

One of my favorite locals is Denise Duhamel. She teaches at Florida International University and lives in Hollywood (Florida, not Cali). I met her once at the Miami Book Fair. Made a complete ass of myself. Went up to her after the reading, offered her my sweaty palm, and said, “You read my favorite poem of yours!” (which is “Kinky”). Then I laughed and scuttled away before she could reply. But it was so cool to hear her read. Her poetry is very messy on the page, hard to hear without her breathy delivery. There are a few YouTube videos of her reading, but they are mostly all very bad quality, seemingly recorded by someone in the audience with some kind of unsatisfying gadget. Hearing her read made me appreciate her poems better. Since then, I’ve made her a staple of my creative writing classes. Young students like her organic meditations on pop culture, and, since most of my students are locals, they stand a good chance to catch her live at a local event.

Duhamel’s poetry is often described as “ultra-talk.” To learn more about ultra-talk poetry, you should read David Graham’s excellent article at Valparaiso Poetry Review. The way I try to make it simple for beginning students, however, is to describe it as deceptively chatty. It seems like the poet is just rambling, but that’s an illusion. Behind the chatty presentation is accumulated significant detail that culminates in a surprising, serious message. Graham also discusses the following qualities: highly discursive, or “hyperjunctive”; garrulous; self-reflexive, associative, humorous; concerned with pop culture; accessible; workaday; expository; having an “anti-leap aesthetic.”

Perhaps the best way to grasp the style is to look at one of Duhamel’s poems. Here are the opening lines from “Sex with a Famous Poet” (you can read the whole poem here):

I had sex with a famous poet last night

and when I rolled over and found myself beside him I shuddered

because I was married to someone else,

because I wasn't supposed to have been drinking,

because I was in fancy hotel room

I didn't recognize. I would have told you

right off this was a dream, but recently

a friend told me, write about a dream,

lose a reader and I didn't want to lose you

You can see how she appears to be just chatting, just thinking of these lines as they come to her, almost like she’s writing about writing instead of writing, a kind of meta-poetry. She addresses you, the reader, directly, telling you of her desire to keep you. The lines are ragged, with no meter or rhyme, and this and many of her poems have no stanza breaks. The poem continues meditating on the guilt over the dream given the fact that she is happily married, and given also that she did not particularly approve of this famous poet the one time they met:

 . . . He disgusted me

with his disparaging remarks about women.

He even used the word "Jap"

which I took as a direct insult to my husband who's Asian.

After a series of seemingly rambling memories concerning her husband’s dreams and her suspicion that we are trying to guess the identity of the famous poet, she culminates in the following:

but how much fame can an American poet

really have, let's say, compared to a rock star

or film director of equal talent? Not that much,

and the famous poet knows it, knows that he's not

truly given his due. Knows that many

of these young poets tugging on his sleeve

are only pretending to have read all his books.

But he smiles anyway, tries to be helpful.

I mean, this poet has to have some redeeming qualities, right?

For instance, he writes a mean iambic.

Otherwise, what was I doing in his arms.

Unexpectedly, the poem has taken a serious turn, even within the humorous content of dream interpretation in which she places it—this seemingly quirky “chat” is really a meditation on the state of American poetry, on her unrealistic desire to be famous despite her own disdain for the wish.

It’s a particularly satisfying kind of poetry, especially for the reader who prefers poems and poets who do not take themselves too seriously or pretend to deliver The Great Truths in their poems. Duhamel’s poetry has somewhat of the same appeal as Billy Collins’s, in that respect, minus the osso bucco and French wine trappings that can be a turnoff to the pop culture crowd. In the everyday moments, in Barbie, Snow White, and Sean Penn, Duhamel finds revealing and often poignant messages that spring from the self but speak to all of us.

It’s no wonder she’s a cult favorite. You can read more about her at poets.org, and join her fan club on Facebook, Fans of Denise Duhamel OR A Group of Duhamalites. Meantime, I have an exercise for you. Read Duhamel’s poem, “On Being Born The Same Exact Day Of The Same Exact Year As Boy George,” which you can find here.

Then, write a poem called "I Google My Birthday and Find Out _____" (you fill in the blank with whatever it is you have found out; it could be a fact about something or about yourself). Actually do this. Carefully, meticulously record your thoughts and feelings and any actions that you take (including clicking, reading, or answering the phone) while you are doing this. Focus on detail. In your poem, narrate these details as if they were happening as the poem unfolds. Use natural line breaks that emphasize where you would pause while reading. End your poem by arriving at an oblique revelation or epiphany. Take care not to abandon the "ultra-talk" mode by becoming too abstract or philosophical. Use an action, like Duhamel does by writing to Boy George at the end of her poem, to reveal this final thought.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and one of the best ways to expand your poetry repertoire. One of the great things about sampling a wide variety of styles in your reading is that it helps you grow, to try new things. As you continue your poetry quest this month, try to read as many different styles of poetry as you can. They will stay with you, and eventually help you shape your own. And don’t forget to sign up for the Big Poetry Giveaway—there’s still plenty of time to enter to win, and, who knows, maybe meet a new muse.

The 2011 Big Poetry Giveaway

Thanks to Kelli Russell Agodon at The Book of Kells, poets everywhere are giving poetry books away for free!

Yep: FREE!

In this exciting campaign, meant to promote the poetry we love during National Poetry Month, participating poets are giving away a book of their own and one of a poet they admire. All you have to do is leave a comment below by midnight, April 30, with your name and contact information (at least an email address), and I will choose two winners at the end of the month to receive the free books via random number generator. That's it! I will send the book to you absolutely free, including shipping, anywhere in the world you may be.

Here are the books I'm giving away:

Shapeshifting (Spire Press, 2006)

This is my debut collection of poetry. It won the Spire Press award in 2005, and contains poems, as the title implies, that address the shifting aspects of my identity. Poems from this collection have appeared in the Iodine Poetry Journal, Tar Wolf Review, and The Powhatan Review.

The Capable Heart by Ann E. Michael (Foothills, 2011)

I pretty much owe my poetry career to Ann E. Michael, who chose Shapeshifting as the winner of the Spire contest. Imagine my delight when I discovered her to be a hauntingly beautiful poet. Since that fateful event, I have become a Michael groupie. This latest collection is a tight exploration of female identity centered on the symbolism of horses, on their--and our--"capable hearts."

Good luck, people! I will announce the winners of the giveaway on May 1. If you would like to see other poets who are participating in this event and learn more about it, please visit Agodon's blog, The Book of Kells.

The Coolest Month

In honor of the beginning of April, National Poetry Month, I’ve decided to shelve the sequence of posts on dialogue for the moment and get you started on poetry. You wouldn’t want to feel left out.

You know something’s in trouble when it gets a month. National Poetry Month started in 1996, and, like all one-month dedications, it’s simultaneously a celebration and an awareness campaign. It’s no secret that people read less poetry than prose here in the US and in many other places, that, in fact, many people openly hate it. The reasons for this aversion are many and not really what I want to focus on in this post. Suffice it to say that one thing a poetry month can do for you is get you acquainted with poetry, so that, should your distaste come from unfamiliarity, you can discover a whole new kind of writing you can enjoy.

Sadly, most people know very little about poetry. As a kid, someone read you Mother Goose and Dr. Seuss, and maybe some light funny or uplifting verse. You might have read “Jabberwocky” or maybe something by Ogden Nash. It was enjoyable, and as an adult you find yourself jamming to Lenny Kravitz, but you’ve never even thought of poetry since then, or only long enough to laugh at a dirty limerick your college roommate recited one drunken night. If so, you associate poetry with children and humor, and feel you’ve outgrown it. You turn to it only in the form of greeting cards on Valentine’s and Mother’s Day.

Perhaps you were lucky enough to get a second round at school. Your education began with Shakespeare’s sonnets (you read a play or two, but you didn’t think of them as poetry) and went on to the Romantics. You read Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge (maybe). The Brownings. You found “How Do I Love Thee?” You heard a fly buzz when you died. Poetry ended with Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes. The last poem you ever read was probably by Maya Angelou. If so, you associate poetry with rhyme, love, pain, and the past. You rather like it, but in a remote way, the way one likes hoopskirts and powdered wigs or any sort of costume that transports one to a different era. You are probably of the opinion that “no one writes good poetry anymore.” You might have taken a class in college where they made you read The Wasteland, and that did you in. You found it abstruse, distasteful, a chore to plod through. You didn’t “get it.” You would no more take another class on modern poetry than you would sign up for spa treatments at Guantánamo.

Poor you! You are, like, totally missing out. Poetry—just like prose—is a vast smorgasbord of styles and topics only a tiny corner of which gets taught in schools. Most of it is geared toward adults, and there is just as much or more poetry written now than ever before, and in different styles. Contemporary poets continue to write in rhyme, or don’t; they write about love and pain, but also about pop culture and joy and the full gamut of human, animal, and cyborg emotion. There are poems about what happened yesterday, today, and tomorrow. There are easy poems that read almost like prose, and funky ones that challenge the way words can signify. There are short poems and long poems. There are poems you will love, and poems you will hate. You can’t really say you “hate poetry.” It’s sort of like saying you “hate food.” You may hate pickles, or melons, or squid, but certainly you love many more foods, pizza and pineapple and fluffy white rice.

So, now that everyone’s talking about poetry, do yourself a favor and figure out what’s going on. The good news is that things have changed—you’re already where you need to be, the Internet. There’s a lot of wonderful, free poetry to be read online, if you know where to look. Do stay away from amateur sites like poetry.com, which will only confirm your worst suspicions about poetry by avalanching you with the unfiltered aches of every twelve-year-old girl with a keyboard and a router. Go to professional, controlled sites that upload via editorial review. Two excellent sites are poets.org and poems.com. Poets.org is great. It’s run by the Academy of American Poets, and it’s a comprehensive site where you can spend hours—hell, years—clicking from one poet/poem to another and another. They provide you with bios and other supplemental/explanatory material to enhance your reading of individual poems and help acquaint you not just with the poets but with schools, movements, and other matters concerning poetry. Of course you know they are running special Poetry Month events, so perhaps a good place to start would be here. Poems.com is also awesome. It’s more direct, if you’re intimidated by the volume of a site like poets.org. Poems.com features a new poem every day, with information on the poet and the publisher. It’s a great way to figure out what hot new books you might like, or what journals publish the kind of poetry you enjoy. If you don’t like the poem one day, return the next and find a whole new one. If you like it, get the book or the journal, and find more.

Sadly, I don’t recommend a trip to your local library or bookstore as a first step. In my hood, what’s there is more of the same stuff you got in school, and little of it. You’ll find a collection of children’s verse, a collected verse of someone really, really dead (I often wonder why people seem to think being dead is a prerequisite to being a poet), and a book on friendship poems à la Hallmark all on the same tiny shelf covered with dust in the back of the store, and likely at “gift book” prices. Better to figure out what you like first online, and then go to a physical store if you prefer, although you’ll likely have to get a special order anyway once you’re there.

Then what?

Learn to read poetry. Most people don’t realize that reading poetry is different from reading prose, that even an avid prose reader needs to make certain adjustments. If you’re of the “I just don’t get it” school of thought, you probably read a poem just once. While it’s possible to “get the gist” of some poems on a first read, one does not read poetry for the gist! The joy, the art of poetry lies in its layers of meaning. One doesn’t simply read a poem, one experiences it. You’re supposed to mull it over, like an experience or memory. Think of it, if you prefer, like eating a piece of delicious cake. A first read is sort of like just having one bite; to truly savor your piece of cake, you’re going to want to eat the whole thing, from the tip to the frosting. Never scarf down a poem. It will cause indigestion.

How to Read a Poem, in 5 easy steps:

1. Read it for the topic. Who is speaking? What is this poem about? What happens in it?

Not all poems have a “topic.” Narrative poems tell a story, and are therefore a bit easier to figure out at this level. But most poems have stuff in them, people and things engaged in actions. Identifying the basics—who, what, when, where—is a good beginning.

For the sake of elucidation, let’s use Anthony Hecht’s “A Hill,” published a couple of days ago at Poetry Daily. As you can see on a first read, this is a narrative poem. It tells a clear story: the speaker, whom we assume is Hecht, is in Italy walking with some friends when he has what he describes as a “vision.” Suddenly, all the clutter of the market scene in which he is currently located fades to a stark, empty hill. That’s enough for a first read.

2. “Unpack” it. Take it bit by bit and understand how it means what it means. What is its meaning, its theme?

This is where most people give up. The second reading should be much slower than the first. You should go stanza by stanza, line by line, even word by word if necessary. I had the rare pleasure of being in a workshop with Maxine Kumin. It was she who taught me the idea of “unpacking.” A poem is like a suitcase; it has everything you need inside, but you must open it, unfold the things inside it, and hang them up before you can use them.

In Hecht’s poem, the first stanza is very cluttered, full of things to look at. In particular, these lines create a vivid picture of movement and confusion:

A small navy of carts. Books, coins, old maps,
Cheap landscapes and ugly religious prints
Were all on sale. The colors and noise
Like the flying hands were gestures of exultation,
So that even the bargaining
Rose to the ear like a voluble godliness.

                       

                        In sharp contrast, the lines describing his “vision” are stark, empty, and very quiet:

The trees were like old ironwork gathered for scrap
Outside a factory wall. There was no wind,
And the only sound for a while was the little click
Of ice as it broke in the mud under my feet.

                        

In the last stanza, he is relieved when the “vision” breaks and he is “restored / To the sunlight and [his] friends.” He reveals that, although he did not recognize it at the time, the hill of his vision is a memory of a hill in Poughkeepsie where he used to stand alone as a boy in winter. We can surmise, then, that the adult Hecht has largely forgotten the loneliness and fear, the emptiness of this childhood moment, symbolized—very traditionally—by winter. In the midst of the color and confusion of his new life abroad, in sunlight, surrounded by friends, the forgotten loneliness of his past makes a sudden appearance, and it is so painful that he doesn’t even pause to think about it, until ten years later, when—both moments over—he realizes the meaning of his vision. The poem, therefore, is a kind of meditation on fate—how could that boy, alone and afraid on that hill in winter, have ever guessed that one day he’d be in Italy, surrounded by friends, and light, and noise? What fear and sorrow could he have avoided had he known? The poem also questions the nature of happiness, how even in the midst of it the painful past can intrude, how, in a way, we never leave our lonely hills behind no matter how far we travel. Both sorrow and happiness are transitory in this poem—one day you’re a lonely boy on a hill in Poughkeepsie, and another you’re a famous poet in Italy. There’s more going on here—the fact that what triggers the vision are “books, coins, old maps, / Cheap landscapes and ugly religious prints” also speaks to the theme of time and value, but I think I’ve made my point about what more you can get from a second reading.

3. Look for form. How many stanzas? How many lines per stanza? What kind of lines does the poem have (short, long, end-stopped, enjambed)? Is there a rhyme scheme? Read the poem aloud to better hear its sound effects.

This poem has three stanzas, dictated by content. The first contains the cluttered scene in Italy and the description of the vision; the last the revelation that the vision is a childhood memory. The lines are regular but not metered, and there’s no rhyme or fancy linguistic acrobatics.

4. What is the function of the form? Does it make you read the poem in a particular way? What is the relationship of the form to the content?

The poem’s form is conversational and content-driven, which kind of suits the mood—“hey, I was walking, and this funny thing happened.” The one strong use of form is the short middle stanza—it makes you pause and think, stay on the lonely, cold hill for a little while. That pause is crucial to feeling the same way Hecht does—alone, kind of afraid, unable, for a moment, to figure out what’s going on.

5. React to it. How does it make you feel? What does it make you think? What parts of it elicit such responses from you?

This last part of reading a poem is highly personal, but I’ll give it a shot. For one thing, it makes me feel rather sad and afraid, while at the same time hopeful, in a way. It’s not a love poem, which a lot of people have trouble with. So used to Mother Goose and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the strictly casual reader of poetry is often turned off by a poem that neither makes you laugh nor sigh romantically. Most poetry is pretty serious, however, and this is a pretty serious poem. I don’t really want to think about my cold hills, or have them come up on me suddenly in the middle of shopping, but there’s a value to this confrontation with life’s instability, and I sure appreciate being able to experience it vicariously through Hecht instead of in the middle of Dadeland Mall. I’m particularly chilled by how the vision starts, the “clear fretwork of shadows / From huge umbrellas [that] littered the pavement” like the beginning of Creature Feature or something. The possible gunshot the boy Hecht hears is also more than scary, and I can “totally relate,” as my students would say, to that feeling of two moments collapsing into each other like this. Maybe next time I’m on a cold hill feeling lonely, I’ll think of shopping in Italy.

By far the saddest of the uninitiated has to be she or he who would like to write poetry, but yet is little acquainted with it, who thinks that poetry is poetry simply because it rhymes, or who thinks that poetry can only be about love or passionate emotions. For some reason, although there are few readers of poetry, there are many, many people who want to write it. If you’re one of them, your first step has to be to stop playing around and get serious—study living poets who are publishing now, and learn to appreciate poetry on an adult, well-read level. Ironically, poetry is extremely suited to today’s culture. It doesn’t require the hours to read a novel does, or even the near two you devote to a film. It’s instant gratification, and we love that. This silly way of thinking of poetry as child’s play or as something only few people can do, like touching the tip of your nose with your tongue, is ridiculous. This month, while you’re stuck inside waiting for the Easter Bunny, take out your old copy of The Wasteland and figure out what all the fuss about April is about.