At the Colony (And Draft of a New Poem)

This month of July is one of solitude and writing for me. I am in Ciudad Colon, Costa Rica, which is home to the David and Julia White artist colony. Here, we are a forty-five minute bus ride away from the capitol in a little town tucked into the jungly mountains. Since the birds and sun are both so loud, I can’t sleep past 6:00. After a bit of resistance to this fact, I gave in, and now will often pack a picnic-breakfast and walk up to the highest point at the colony that overlooks the town. (Picture above.) There, I begin my writing and watch the world, and my poems, slowly stretch and awake into being.

Like the birds and sun, the solitude is both sought and at times resisted. After about four to five hours of writing, it is only eleven, yet I still have a lot of work to do with a mind starting to go cross-eyed. Where is the interruption? The annoying neighbor? The student email? Not here. So, walks are key, building ant trail diversions are key, swimming is key—as is participating in one of my favorite traditions at colonies: the sharing of work. This is when one gets to finally peek into the artists’ studios and look at what they have been doing. And for us type and publish sort of artists, we have readings. Yesterday, Holly Woodward and I read some of our work to the other folks here while looking out at the beautiful tropical gardens of Pat and Willy Piessens, who live here year-round. (There's a photo of all of us here, too.) I am the kind of writer who needs a lot of time to finish a poem, and by time, I mean both time working on the poem and time away from it. To share a new piece of writing with a group is outside of my comfort zone to be sure. Yet, as we all know, going into new territories is not only the point of travel, but of writing. (“Traverse the Earth, Fool,” Mr. T says.)

To push me just a bit more outside of my typical process, I thought I would do something a little different on this blog and post a new poem here. Granted, this is NOT a finished poem. In fact, it is only a week old, entirely conceived and drafted here. I might have to take it down later as I actually finish it and start sending it out, but for now, I’ll test its wobbly legs with you, Gentle Reader.

The Architecture of the Veil

Islamic architecture often adorns the interior spaces as opposed to the exterior, commonly known as the architecture of the veil, to represent the nature of the infinite. –Dr. R. E. Souser

All afternoon, the hotel roof went on being a windowsill

as if the city below could be understood by echo, by leaning out

over prayer calls, car horns, hot spoons scraping woks of nasi goreng,

by looking down on pishtaqs, minarets, canons fashioned into water fountains.

All through the afternoon, the faithful went on being faithful.

The faithless, faithless. Each chasing piety with sticks and sugar,

even when piety tripped the running feet with a simple man’s

crutch, and the crippled devil kicked his child’s gut until

green-flanked smog shifted directions, sweated the clouds

into crumbs, into evening, into this thing called hidden or infinite.

The architecture here secludes its beauty

to the inner spaces, to what cannot be seen from the street

where a costumed macaque flees under a soup stall,

his frustration blooming into sequined soapsuds rushing the gutter,

where a woman from the roof above irritates her palm’s sweat into stone,

while a walker below, worries his molar’s crown into a sip of mercury,

all of which chemically occur whenever the adulterous, man

or moon, vow themselves to just one bed. No one’s fate is determined,

despite how sometimes it is. The mosaics repeat and spin their cobalt

patterns until the moon quivers one day to the left—and no one notices,

except two mangoes rot hanging green on the tree. All the while,

the prophets’ daughters strut in their highest heels, busy

poking the sun back into the pieces it really is. This brokenness,

we suspect, is true about our own selves, despite the fluid strides

we make from city block to city block. We walk among sweet-smelling

sulfur, wondering what we cannot see, wondering which feast or fast

is behind which house’s wall. In each of us, a stray dog forgets to ask

for home; a pack of roving hounds guards the door.

Review of "Levi Johnston's Blues" by Ben Folds and Nick Hornby

Last week, I assigned writing a persona poem to my beginning poetry class, which is always an interesting way to explore new material. To help give them a sense of a persona poem, I assigned the classic Browning poem, “My Last Duchess,” a few by Ai, Eminem’s “Without Me,” and a couple of songs off of Ben Folds and Nick Hornby’s latest album, Lonely Avenue, that is all persona songs. We looked at “Levi Johnston’s Blues” in particularly, which is one of my favorites.

Here’s a link where you can listen to the song and read the lyrics:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/09/ben-folds-nick-hornby-pre_n_315950.html

One of the many aspects about this song that interests me is how the media in the song serve as a modern version of those ancient Greek choruses that warn characters what will be their fates. Famous Briston-Palin-ex-fiancé walks out of his house one morning and is surprised to find “three thousand cameras” pointing at him. The media then explain their presence and say, “Well, you’ve knocked up the VP nominee’s daughter.” And this is when Levi begins his lesson—which begins with a feeble attempt to take control: “So, I tell him, No, you got it wrong, Mister. / Already got a girl and her name’s Bristol. / They all laugh and say, where you been, Sonny. / Your mother-in-law’s a heartbeat from the presidency.”

Right after this verse the music becomes a bit more melancholy as Levi then attempts feeble assertion number two: “I say, Mother-in-law? No. We ain’t getting married. / They say, you will be soon, Boy, she just announced it.” The music at this section is a little quiet, almost elegiac as it’s clear this “Boy” is getting schooled—and fast. Here the media are aware of their power; if something is announced, even if untrue, it can be the truth. And in Levi’s case, his actions are no longer simply his. So, when we come to the chorus with a bleacher foot-stop beat, it sounds assertive, but it’s actually a feeble attempt to take control and sounds like what it is: a teenager telling an adult who he is and the adult shrugging it off, knowing that’s more wishful thinking than reality. I think this is why I don’t find the chorus mocking Levi, but asserting a dream of an independent, can-make-his-own-choices sort of guy: “I’m a fucking redneck, I live to hang out with the boys / Play some hockey, do some fishing, kill some moose. / I like to shoot the shit and do some chillin’, I guess / you fuck with me and I’ll kick your ass.” The last two lines are especially all bluff and bravado, especially considering what comes later: “And when I try to tell them I’m eighteen years old / they say, Levi, it’s too late. You gotta do as you’re told.”

Some New Stuff

Here are links to some new work of mine if you're interested. In Kenyon Review Online, I have an essay/poem in syllabics on collective paranoia. The poem talks about the American tendency toward hyper-fear—and the excessive attempts to counteract any harm be it on a political scale down to a small scale such as knowing exactly what to eat to prevent cancer, exactly how to prune one’s hedges to thwart thieves, etc. And the footnotes almost serve as a paranoid voice commenting on the poem. Also, I have a new poem in Waccamaw that is a short character poem. And fellow poet-pal Stephanie Kartalopoulos has a poem in there, too, that’s a great read. And here’s an interview I conducted with novelist, poet, and memoirist Marge Piercy in Chapter 16. There's also a new interview with Loretta Lynn by Margaret Renkl up there now--and who can pass up hearing from Loretta?

Review of Frederick Seidel’s poems in latest issue of Paris Review

The five poems by Frederick Seidel in the latest issue of Paris Review were a bit of a disappointment. Perhaps I should say that in a punnier, over-the-top rhyming sort of way which would be more like his poems. I’m an admirer of his work in Ooga-Booga, and because of that, I was expecting a lot. The rhymes in the new poems such as “Store Windows” seldom move the poem in a new direction—or—and this is something that Seidel manages to succeed in and I’m not sure why—resist the new direction to the point the line warps into something else entirely, similar to a support bar buckling into odd shapes from too much pressure. For the most part, however, the new poems didn’t present much that was fresh to me. Here are two stanzas from the poem “Store Windows” which is a lyrical meditation on what he humorously calls “citywide narcissism”:

I’m so proud!

It’s so ridiculous I have to laugh.

The technician is very well-endowed.

I’m a collapsible top hat—a chapeau claque—that half

The time struts around at Ascot but can be collapsed flat just like that. Baff!

Till it pops back. Paff! Oh yes,

I find myself superb

When I undress.

A lovely lightbulb is my suburb,

And my flower, and my verb.

Seidel’s unabashed penchant for writing about conspicuous consumption, narcissism, lust, greed, and good-ol’-in-general-nastiness makes him a poet many can, ironically, stand behind. But in this example the rhymes are expected within this narcissistic persona. We go from “proud” to “endowed.” The “laugh” to top “hat” that then collapses “flat.” “Baff” is right. And “paff” is right behind it. Seidel is at his best when his rhymes create what my husband, Adam Prince, describes as a “new sense from the nonsense.” He pointed out this poem, “Mother Nature,” as an example of what Seidel does so well:

Mother Nature went to China,

China the vagina.

Wet dreams conceive there,

Where no one wants a daughter.

The perfect rhyme with “China” and “vagina” highlights that there is not any relationship between these words other than sonically. (Insert any other body part and you can hear how the couplet dies.) Yet, the stanza moves on to the last statement about daughters (the “there/where” rhyme also forcing a syntactical as well as sonic connection), and suddenly one sees a stanza that takes shape, that through force has found some semblance of sense. And it’s surprising. There is little surprise in the five poems that Seidel has now in Paris Review. But I do mean “little” as there is some freshness as one can see with the end to the stanza I quoted earlier: “A lovely lightbulb is my suburb, /And my flower, and my verb.” And my verb? I wasn’t expecting that—and I like it.

Review of One of My Own Poems for a Change

I rarely post any of my own poems on this blog, but I thought I would make an exception because of the poetry class am I teaching right now. They all just turned in poems to workshop for the first time this past week. So, I feel like they should get a sense of what I’m writing, too. The following poem was published about six months ago in Denver Quarterly Review and begins the collection that I am working on titled Spike.

ARGUMENT FOR WONDER

By: Charlotte Pence

The wind bending a thin-trunked

Pine, butterscotch-scented,

Sounds like the opening of a door.

And so, I think of my father,

How through him—

His Oreo-fat,

His hardening cock,

His damp, long-curled lashes

I stutter-stepped into myself.

Why do you say that stuff? my father interrupts as I write.

What do you mean? About your cock?

No. That right there, he says and lifts up his arms, glass of OJ in one hand, Little Debbie oatmeal cream pie in the other, so he stands like a Lady of the Scales statue. Chewing a wad of snack cake.

What are you talking about? What’s in my poems? How I see the world?

All of this, he says and circles his drink in the air like a drunk. This house. Our family. You and me. You think it’s everything. Then he nods toward the window. And what’s out there doesn’t even begin it.

I answer: Yesterday I saw something I’ve never seen before: A canary-yellow web that only one spider in the world can weave. What do you think about that?

He shrugs. That’s yesterday.

I wanted to write a poem that questioned the poet as speaker, specifically a poet in love with poetry. It is quite tempting to write about the world in terms of dewy spider webs, deserted parking lots, and butterscotch-scented trees with the poet looking outward and turning these observations into moments of wisdom, meaning, and/or beauty. While this is very much the lyrical impulse, and something that I revere, the method is too often similar from poet to poet. It feels a bit easy. Sentimental. Manufactured. Too many poems feature a poet in love with the powers of poetry—and the reader’s entrance is limited to sharing that love for the genre rather than the particular poem.

Frankly, a poet is another person, no better, no less than others. And this Romantic sense that we are wiser than other people (Wordsworth said that poets are “possessed” with “more than usual organic sensibility”*) is not only a generalization, but a cherished generalization that deserves some questioning. And that is the role of the father in this poem: the questioner.

So, I begin with a very poet-y quatrain. The poet is reaching out first for natural imagery with the butterscotch pine and wind blowing through the trees as is so often the go-to (which also stems from Wordsworth’s beliefs that: “low and rustic life was generally chosen because in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity”). But then the father interrupts, calling the poet out on her sentimentalisms, and then the poem’s form changes to that of a prose poem. And who wins this argument about the wonders of the natural world, the subjects of poetry? Well, the dad does have the last word. But the poet did write that last word.

*All quotes by William Wordsworth are from the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, the 1800, 1802 version.

Review of “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” by Wilco

I thought I would follow-up my last blog post on songs and the ghost of the sonnet structure that I sometimes hear. The following song by Wilco is not a sonnet, but it’s a song that I could imagine someone calling a sonnet. We have the Shakespearean rhyme scheme of abab, cdcd, efef, and so on (although the song continues on and on with it). And the rhyme scheme is sophisticated using slant rhymes and assonance to downplay the rhyme. Also, many of these lines are iambic pentameter with the substitutions that Wilco uses being standard ones: inversion of the first foot to trochaic, the middle foot also switching to trochaic, and the feminine ending. Still, that first verse employs too many substitutions for me to say that iambic pentameter was the goal. But more than all of that, this song doesn’t move like a sonnet. It lacks the rhetorical structure, change within the speaker, and the lack of exploitation between problem and conclusion. (For more details on that, you can take a look at my last post.) All of this is in no way me implying that this is not a good song. I’m just pointing out how having certain features of a Shakespearean sonnet does not make for a sonnet unless many of them are used.

I Am Trying To Break Your Heart

By: Wilco

I am an American aquarium drinker

I assassin down the avenue

I'm hiding out in the big city blinking

What was I thinking when I let go of you?

Let's forget about the tongue-tied lightning

Let's undress just like cross-eyed strangers

This is not a joke, so please stop smiling

What was I thinking when I said it didn't hurt?

I want to glide through those brown eyes dreaming

Take it from the inside, baby hold on tight

You were so right when you said that I've been drinking

What was I thinking when I said good night?

I want to hold you in the Bible-black predawn

You're quite a quiet domino, bury me now

Take off your Band-Aid ‘cause I don't believe in touchdowns

What was I thinking when we said hello?

I'd always thought that if I held you tightly

You'd always love me like you did back then

Then I fell asleep and the city kept blinking

What was I thinking when I let you back in?

I am trying to break your heart

I am trying to break your heart

But still I'd be lying if I said it wasn't easy

I am trying to break your heart

Disposable Dixie-cup drinking

I assassin down the avenue

I'm hiding out in the big city blinking

What was I thinking when I let go of you?

Loves you

I'm the man who loves you

Review of “On the Other Hand” by Randy Travis

I was flipping through a poetry anthology and came upon this definition for a sonnet: “a form every poet will try.” While the definition may not help a beginning poet understand how to write a sonnet, it felt like an inside joke from lexicographer to reader—similar to Samuel Johnson’s hidden gems in A Dictionary of the English Language such as his definition of Monsieur: “a term of reproach for a Frenchman.” What I enjoy about the sonnet being defined as a form every poet will try is how it is correct even while it errs. A sonnet is, of course, a lot more than a form every poet will try—but every poet will try it. And every poet will also tell us how “sonnet” means little song (or little sound), implying some marriage between the two genres.

While sonnet does literally mean “little song,” there is no evidence that the first sonnets were ever accompanied to music. Giacomo da Lentino did adapt the eight-line strambotto, a type of thirteenth-century Sicilian peasant song to provide the sonnet’s base, but otherwise the sonnet represents a shift in poetry away from music. While this break occurred, a few songs I hear on the radio today still have the ghost of the sonnet in them. So, I’ve lately been working on an essay about that. Forgive the un-blog-like length with this post, but I thought it would be interesting to excerpt a part of my essay on songs and sonnets.

Randy Travis’s song “On the Other Hand” reveals how a Shakespearean sonnet form can function within a song. Considering that the rhetorical mode is most critical to the sonnet’s success, I’ll begin analyzing in terms of this feature. The sonnet’s rhetorical mode demands progression of thought and resolution within its three quatrains, turn, and concluding couplet. The first quatrain introduces the issue, the next two quatrains add complications, and the final couplet reaches a hard-fought conclusion. “On the Other Hand” by Randy Travis organizes itself rhetorically the same way a sonnet does.

This song is written in second form (verse, chorus, verse, chorus). In the first verse (composed of four lines), the issue is introduced when the speaker tells a woman who is present that he would like to spend the night with her: “On one hand I count the reasons, I could stay with you / And hold you close to me, all night long.” As this verse ends, the speaker reiterates that he wants to play “lover’s games” and that “there’s no reason why it’s wrong.” But the speaker is married, as revealed in the next four lines which is the chorus: “But on the other hand, is a golden band / To remind me of someone who wouldn’t understand.” Here we have the complication: he is married. We also have a further complication: his wife would not understand nor forgive this act. The second verse, lines nine through twelve, provide more complication as it explains why the speaker would cheat—which is a difficult position to defend and a risky stance for a first-person song. The speaker explains that he has felt dead before this other woman came into his life, and suddenly the adulterer is presented in a more complicated way: “In your arms I feel the passion, I thought had died. / When I looked into your eyes, I found myself” (lines 9-10). Part of the attraction then, and another element to the complication, is that the speaker needs the affair. “I found myself” is not a throw-away line, but a line that emphasizes why this is not simply cheating out of a loss of self-control; this is cheating due to a sense of self-realization. The rhetorical mode of introduction of issue, followed by complication, another contradiction, then resolution is clear. “On the Other Hand” echoes other features of the sonnet as well.

The proportion of argument to conclusion is similar in both Travis’s song and the Shakespearean sonnet. For example, typically twelve out of fourteen lines in a sonnet will lead to the conclusion. In Travis’s song, eleven of the twelve lines debate what to do until the decision is stated in the last line of the chorus. As Paul Fussell wrote in Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, “A poet who understands the sonnet form is the one who has developed an instinct for exploiting the principle of imbalance.” Why this “principle of imbalance” is so important relates to the origin of the sonnet; Giacomo da Lentino shaped the sonnet form to aid in the analysis of personal problems. For a sonnet to present a true conundrum, a number of complications need to be present. Therefore, most of the poem will analyze the problem rather than emphasize the conclusion.

This song also features a turn, which helps one to reach the conclusion. The turn in the sonnet is often considered to be the moment where a shift of thinking, a change in perspective, or a movement toward a new direction occurs. Sometimes the turn is implicit in the white space on the page around line twelve in a sonnet or sometimes it is more explicit. (Granted, the sonnet may feature two turns and the turn does not necessarily have to come between lines twelve and thirteen, but it will come near the end of the sonnet.) To understand how the turn works in the Travis song, we have to first look at the conclusion because the turn often leads to the conclusion. The conclusion to Travis’s song is: “But the reason I must go is on the other hand” (line 8). Here the speaker concludes that he must leave this other woman because of his wedding vows. This conclusion, however, is partly determined by the lines that occur right before it: the turn of the song which is between lines four and five. Line four tells the listener that the speaker sees no reason why the affair is wrong. But the next lines says otherwise: “But on the other hand, there’s a golden band/ to remind of someone who would not understand” (5-6). The speaker knew all along that the affair was wrong, but the turn is that he determines to privilege the spouse’s perspective above his own.

Another distinction between a country song and a Shakespearean sonnet is that country lyricists do not wait until the song’s end to conclude. Often, the conclusion occurs at the end of the chorus. But the song will continue on after that chorus, presenting another complication in a new verse or bridge so that when the listener hears the chorus a second (or third) time, the chorus takes on another layer of development. The placement of the conclusion within the chorus reflects the songwriting tradition, but the added development after the conclusion nods toward the sonnet tradition that insists on continual complications.