550 Poetry Seminar

Lucie Brock-Broido Inspired Poetry

2007-05-01T12:05:00.000-07:00

Disease

What is this? An alternative?
A sudden transition compelling me to stop.
I am not responsible.
There are those whom will be upset,
angry even.
They don’t feel as I do.
They got out of bed this morning, started their day as usual.
Let them have it out with disease itself.
Please leave me out of it.

Before I fell down I fed my dogs.
My wife suspects bacteria,
an unclean blender,
blames herself.

She looks so sexy emerging from the covers
and I tell her so,
then that’s it until 4 o’clock when, feeling better,
I can eat, drink, think, and fuck again.

Baghdad

“Democrats seized on the anniversary of President Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech to formally send the bill.”–NYT Headlines, May 1, 2007

And what of “going home?” Just where is that, exactly?
Why now? What about the Iraqi family on 34th and 11th? They told Jerome just before the car bomb went off to “please stay.”
What are we supposed to do, anyway? At home that is?
Four fucking years of Baghdad just so some bastard can make Baghdad out to beVietnam.

So why don’t we just leave now? What have we done here?
Lot’s of killing going on. That’s for sure.
How the hell do I make sense out of Baghdad?
What do I tell people in Nebraska?
What if Bush doesn’t pull out?
It scares me what the world might do.

Man, I’m just getting the hang of it.
Just dialing in who’s who.
It takes time ya’ know? Got to kill a while to figure it out.
If they do pull us out of here, how about a lifetime supply of free gas for our ATVs?

The veteran sits in my class learning “critical thinking skills.”
Sitting next to the biology major bound for graduate school.
It’s banal and cliche, but no less painlful for being so.
Why this difficulty in returning home? Do we really feel differently about men in uniform since WW II? I am aware of the gender distinction here.

Flying over Baghdad, not in an F-16 Tomcat, but in my imagination,
I see the 18-year-old American soldier shrouded in technology and weaponry,
seemingly invincible until a singular piece of shrapnel penetrates his skin,
above his flak-jacket and just below his adam’s apple.

He’s dead on the street,
somebody’s boy back in Pennsylvania, I think,
and I see the 6-year-old Iraqi child watching the G.I.’s death in disbelief .
A moment ago, he thought the G.I. was a spaceman.

No one sees me while I sit in my diaphonuous lace atop a pylon,
a nymph on the streets of Baghdad.
This is all very poetic in the twenty-first century.
What would Keats think?

Harrison Influenced Poetry

2007-04-24T08:33:00.000-07:00

On Theory

Nothing here is real:
house, yard, street, landscaped trees.

Frost on the windshield of my pick-up though;
that’s real, notwithstanding poststructural theorists.

My birddog, upset at being cast out of the house for the baby,
craps loosely in his kennel
–Also real.

7:30 a.m. and my daughter needs her diapers changed.
My wife’s back is out-of-alignment, and she’s off to see the chiropractor.

I have this poem to write–whether I want to or not.

I realized last night that the “Blue Angel” pilot, now pronounced dead in South Carolina, was thirty-two-years-old.
Despite my teenage dreams,
I will never be a “Blue Angel,”
will never be an N.F.L. linebacker,
will never be the president, maybe, no president,
will never be a “special-forces” soldier.

I am called “Daddy” ;
it is biological.
Becoming a husband was easy,
so was becoming a Daddy.

The sun will be warm today;
I’m looking forward to my next cup of coffee,
and this knot in my gut, telling me to get my daughter up at 7:30 a.m.,
to stop drinking coffee in the morning after on cup of 8 fluid ouces,
to get to work, to “get’r done,” get’r done,” get’r done,”
is far from theoretical.

Dwelling Place

I read yesterday in Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything
that, statistically speaking, extra-terrestrial life is highly likely,
and that there are like billions–maybe trillions–of universes.

Why have I been so embarrassed everytime I’ve speculated,
with my bite-sized knowledge of astronomy,
that the possibility of extra-terrestrial life is very likely?

My thesis is a clash between theoretical ideas that ring true to my intellect
and essentialist perceptions that I feel in my gut.
Maybe someday I’ll understand.

For now, my friend tells me he is going to “intervene” in his daughter-in-law’s alcoholism,
filing for custody of his five-year-old neice to force the daughter-in-law into rehab.
Somewhere inside me there is probably an ulcer;
Like many of my neuroses, I will be “made aware” of this too.

I was lying in bed, exploring my imagination by imagining myself propelling outward to the edges of the universe,
anxious about it–not the space journey part–but using my imagination.
Then I found out today that Bryson gets paid for taking himself and others on such a journey.

“Poor little blind boy, lost in the storm
where should he go to be without harm?
For starters, the dickhead should get a life.”

Thank you, Jim.

Essay: Jim Harrison

2007-04-17T10:39:00.000-07:00

The Theory and Practice of Rivers and a Poet’s Plea for an End to an Empirically Constructed Economically Motivated Orthodoxy

Written at a time of great despair following the tragic death of his young niece (fifteen years old), Harrison’s The Theory and Practice of Rivers does not unmask, but rather exudes the poet’s anti-empirical sentiments. Manifest in Theory and Practice is Harrison’s attempt to cope with this recent and unexpected tragedy, an event that has “blurred” (5) the poet’s vision to a degree in which the world has become unrecognizable. For Harrison, existence has become emotionally unbearable, and the thought of perceiving the world strictly through an empirical lens is grossly inadequate: “On the bank by the spring creek/my shadow seemed to leap up to gather me,/or it leapt up to gather me, not seeming so/but as a natural fact” (19). You might even say that Harrison’s Theory and Practice, like much of his work, possesses an air of magical realism, as Harrison’s worldview and notion of reality represented in the poem privilege the human imagination and subconsciously engendered symbols over “facts” and the construct of life borne by empiricism and science:

“On waking after the accident/I was presented with the ‘whole picture’/as they say, magnificently detailed,/a child’s diorama of what life appears to be:/staring at the picture I became drowsy/with relief when I noticed a yellow/dot of light in the lower right-hand corner./I unhooked the machines and tubes and crawled/to the picture, with an eyeball to the dot/of light which turned out to be a miniature/tunnel at the end of which I could see/mountains and stars whirling and tumbling,/sheets of emotions, vertical rivers, upside/down lakes….” (28)

It is not that Harrison rejects science so much as he rejects the domination of our psyche and understood existence by the empirical episteme, especially the appropriation of empirically shaped reality in the name of economic gain and competition. Through his poetry, Harrison implies and, at times, explicitly states, that we are more than scientifically understood economic beings, the corollary being that life, itself, is far more than an economic competition employing the empirical episteme as its tool. To complicate Harrison’s intention (Roland Barthes notwithstanding), perhaps Harrison is suggesting that it is human beings, rather than animals and other lifeforms, that are capable of more than economic necessity, mere survival, by means of their capacity for imagination. And/or, maybe, a necessary function for human survival is the engagement and validation of the human imagination (an activity fostered by myth-making), the idea being that it is through our imagination and subconsciously engendered dream-world that human beings have access to powerfully liberating, broadening views of life (Harrison might say “real” life) that are at once regenerative and sustaining, allowing us, ultimately, to experience our sensibilities and to live with them. It seems that by connecting with and validating his imagination and subconscious, Harrison, with the “overly-developed” sensibilities of a poet has managed to survive.
Is Harrison trying to evangelize in The Theory and Practice of Rivers? Maybe: “‘Why do you write/poems?’ the stewardess asked. ‘I guess/it’s because every angel is terrible/still though, alas, I invoke these almost deadly birds of the soul,’” (11). Reading these lines, however, I get the sense that by writing poems Harrison is attempting, first-and-foremost, to invoke his own “deadly birds”; what we do with his poetry is our business.
At any rate, Harrison’s position is clear: there is more to life than science in the service of economics, and, it seems, many of our contemporary illnesses of mind, body, and spirit stem from a failure to grasp this tenet and a concurrent lack of awareness to anything in existence beyond that which is posited by the empi-economic paradigm. “Life,” she says, “this vastly mysterious process to which our culture inures us lest we become useless citizens!” I am not sure whom the speaker is here; however, the statement speaks to the essence of Harrison’s theme: to open ourselves up to something other than the delimited view of an empirically-based, economically-motivated existence into that of the imaginative and restorative realm of mind and myth: “What is it to actually go outside the nest we have built for ourselves,/…: to go into a forest alone with our eyes open? It’s different/when you don’t know what’s over the hill–….” To use our minds for something other than science, something other than economic productivity, to use our minds for imagination to create and connect with a world in which we can survive.

University System

2007-04-09T08:04:00.000-07:00

University System

Where power flows at cheap rates;
Where chemistry combusts into variable traits;
Where the young, the brilliant, the old,
The mother, the father, the child and grandparent
Moving together in a hurried pace.

The recycling and invention of knowledge;
breathing, thinking, reading, sitting;
Rooms, halls, structures made of brick and sand melted hot,
with grass growing between walkways of mixed rock,
poured by men sweating under the sun.
And talking and listening, and flirting and kissing, and sickness and health.
Insomnia–a fusion of intellect and passion,
no more unnatural than night, itself.

Two Nature Poems

2007-04-07T20:59:00.001-07:00

James F. Lewis
ENGL 550
April 10th, 2007
Deconstructing Nature Through Poetry: Two Poems

Metrosystem

Stepping onto the subway, the exhalation of smokestacks;
the railcar jarring underneath your feet.

Lights illuminating skyscrapers;
the flow of vehicles at rush hour;
traffic waking in the morning.

In the corner of the harbor,
by the dock amidst Styrofoam cups,
bass rising to the surface.

A yellow sweatshirt;
a bobbing Nike basketball shoe beside the wood piling;
gas trickling out of a motor;
an oily iridescent surface and water spouting from a bilge.

Night, and the aroma of steak and browned potatoes,
wafting into the alleys, into the streets.
Behind dumpsters, rats, and men huddled by the fire.

The 767 on the runway;
the freighter to sea.
At dawn, I am fishing.

Trying to Define Contemporary Poetry

2007-03-31T14:23:00.001-07:00

James F. Lewis IV
ENGL 550
April 1st, 2007
Essay: What is Contemporary Poetry?/Nature in Poetry: A Reconstituting of the Term

“The Newest of the New”: Trying to Define “Contemporary” Poetry

When, exactly, does it begin? The shift in an artistic period? In fact, though dates are determined and assigned for textbooks, there are no distinct “lines in the sand,” no division drawn capable of being delineated by dates; similar to shifts in other artistic forms of expression, what can be defined as “contemporary poetry” has gradually emerged, establishing its identity though the voice of a broad range of poets throughout the later half of the twentieth century. Familiar voices, such as those of Theodore Roethke, Silvia Plath, Jim Harrison and Mary Oliver, occupy an esteemed position of notoriety within the milieu of contemporary poetry, their names conjuring up literary remembrances of confession, depression, and redemption through a reconstituted understanding of nature, and sensibilities that shatter the banality of our overly-codified contemporary existence, revealing to us a life mysterious and, in this understanding of mystery, a sense of healing, an exhalation to arrive at an essential connection with our own existence. Therefore, implicit in contemporary poetry is a letting go of, even a rebellion to, abstract theoretical constructs of postmodernism which leave us groundless and disconnected from a complex and profound existence.
It is in arriving at this sense of being that contemporary poets deconstruct previously held positions on Nature, jettisoning romantic ideas perceiving “Nature” as a sacred and exotic “Other” into which we travel for redemption, escape, and purification and reconstituting the concept as a dynamic and essential manifestation of existence of which human beings are–intrinsically and inescapably–a part.
Along with freshly conceived understandings of nature, contemporary poetry seems to establish and, correspondingly, define itself by means of that by which contemporary poets struggle in a healing process which is, itself, unstructured, more of an adjustment and a coming to terms with what is rather than an idealization and subsequent attainment of what should be. It is this transformation (which really isn’t a transformation so much as a coming into awareness of what already is), that is, essentially, natural.
Nature, therefore, and what we experience as human beings is not transcendent, as in the notion of the term established by the American transcendentalists of the 19th century (e.g. Thoreau and Emerson), rather it is who and what we are. In fact, there really is no “essential” component to it, as for there to be something essential there must be that which is artificial or superfluous. In other words, our “essential” self, it seems to be suggested in much of the work of contemporary poets, is just our complete self, us as we exist. It may even be argued that our abstract and theoretical notions of reality, though overly intellectualized and alienating, are natural in and of themselves (the act of thinking being as natural to a human being as swimming is to an amoeba).
And, so, you might say that a hallmark of contemporary poetry is a moving away from am emphasis upon highly glossed alienating structural forms familiar to the high-brow work of a modernist poet like T.S. Eliot towards a heightened importance placed upon the experiential element of life manifesting itself in both joy and depression, understanding and confusion, mystery and profundity, feeling and sensation.

Mugs

2007-03-24T18:18:00.001-07:00

mugs

The coffee pot
arranged last night
brews below me,
and I open the cabinet door.

Tentatively,
I begin my selection,
the first decision of the day.
It’s 7:38 a.m. What mug is the right one?
Is there any logic to this decision at all?

Too big, too plain, too uninspiring, too colorful, too small, natural, unnatural...
fearing myself neurotic and defying my idiosyncratic sensibilities,
reaching directly for a mug,
“I–heartshape–NY staring back at me.

Why is this the one? Do I love NY?
Does this mug rings true with my identity?
Filling the chosen one with steaming hot water (no cold mugs need apply for morning coffee)
I am...content with my choice?

Quirks and quirkiness.
My wife enters the kitchen,
yawning,
I am distracted with the feeding ritual of dogs.

Oblivious to my eccentricities or neuroses,
she has filled a mug with hot water,
emptied it,
and now both are filled with coffee.

One mug–not mine–is filled to the top,
for me.
I–heartshape–NY in my hand anyway,
and my wife with no room for cream, no idea why.

To her, just a mug,
something you pour coffee into
early.
To her, always just a mug.

Two different people.
Coffee mugs, sensibilities, neuroses, characteristics, traits, behaviors,
–stupefied.

All this at 7:38 in the morning.

Meditations

2007-03-24T18:06:00.000-07:00

Meditations

Springtime and today,
for me, an inspiration.
Red-Winged Blackbird chirps

and radio on.
Lawnmower is loud outside;
breaks the peaceful sky.

Type, Type, Type, and a
monitor with dust no seen
staring back at me.

Sun seeping in seems
permanent; yet, soon gone down.
All will change and so

will I. Not seeing,
remembering. No, not just
remembering, but

sensing. No dust now.
Sky, tree, air, scent, sound, breeze, sense,
all around me here,

always. So where am
I? Macbook Pro, walls, door, screen,
poetry, bird, scent

of dinner. Kitchen
toddler, stairs, lamp, house, carpet,
Body a surface.

Physiology,
and psychological, mind,
substance. My beard, nails,

hair, growing. Alive.
Consciousness passing
by. Observed. Right now.

Paper #4: Alcosser Review

2007-03-20T09:27:00.000-07:00

Sandra Alcosser and Women beyond Constructs

What is it to be a woman? A female and, particularly, a human female within a hungry universe? And why these cultural falsities adorning women? In Alcosser is a female poet who relishes her own essence, the same essence that draws a mountain lion toward her as well as her hungry husband. Alcosser, neurotically, wishes to feel the breath of the lion on her face, his intense desire for her living flesh, even if the end result of this passion is death. Along with exploring her female essence, what makes Alcosser’s poetry more widely accessible is her corresponding exploration of human essence. Whether female or simply human, both are intrinsically linked to what Alcosser defines as “nature” ; and, the reader gets the feeling that Alcosser is struggling, like the rest of us, to feel herself part of something beyond the mechanization of Western culture and the economic and social dictates which our culture imbues us with. Possibly, it is a sense of desperation that emerges from this struggle which engenders Alcosser’s neuroticism.
Alcosser states vehemently that “Except by nature–as a woman, I will be ungovernable.” The question raised by this statement–and by Alcosser’s collection of poetry under review–is what is this concept of “nature,” exactly, and why is Alcosser so drawn to it? Indeed, willing to be governed by it? In an ironic twist, “nature” a Western concept identifying the universe and our life in it as a dualistic and separate construct, acts to still govern the govern less poet by use of the very term. Perhaps, Alcosser, to make her point, should focus more upon creating a feeling of epiphany in the reader through a contextualization of “nature” that serves to deconstruct the term as a defining and isolating concept, thereby, making communicating to her readers through epiphany rather that the rationality and explicitness of text. It seems this approach of connection through insight and epiphany is the only way a poet can operate within a limited and confining language which possesses no words or terms for what is at the heart of the poet’s expression.
Despite the few startling lines in which Alcosser connects with the reader and reveals for her or him a universe and existential experience transcendent or, maybe not “transcendent,” but grounded in something more profound that our current cultural construct, Alcosser’s collection, in its entirety, fails to achieve this necessary experience. It is difficult to put my finger upon it, but I found Alcosser’s work too dreamy, too distant. It was almost as if the poet was making a hyper-conscious effort to express a detached and transcendental state rather than being in that state and simply writing it out. Alcosser’s overly-conscious effort just gives an air of artificiality to it, leaving this reader, anyway, with a sense of a woman who is so far removed from a grounding reality that her voice carries no sway. Really, it strikes me here that her poetry (what I dislike about it) corresponds with how the poet seems to live her life. That is, Alcosser makes a overly-conscious attempt to live her life in a transcendental poetic state and by doing so, appears phony, too far self-removed from the universe in which lion kill prey to survive.
Thematically, I really appreciate Alcosser’s work, what she is attempting to convey. But as a poet she needs maturity, a letting go of strained poetics and, in their place, a raw expression that transcends language and poetics, arriving at our heart and a more arresting understanding.

Surrealist Poetry

2007-03-03T12:36:00.000-08:00

Dog

A large White and Black Head of and English Pointer
with an overly exagerated muzzle,
cocked at a slight angle¬,
about twenty-degrees–

Notice how the above is not a sentence.
Why am I being so precise?

The canine-head outmeasures its body,
which is non-existent against a dusty buckskin background,
seemingly coming towards me, into me
and, then, gone. My mind’s eye looking at nothing.

Running and panting,
galloping through grass’
the intestines shiny and slimy and alive.
Yes, by God, alive on the inside as well as out.

Heart pumping blood,
food digesting,
energy emanating from some magical source into the field and my field of vision.

Wife

Sensuous and desirable
kindness, kind-hearted,
looking a me with startled eyes,
now focused and coming towards me like my dog.

Young, younger maybe than what is real.
Supple curves and an image of how I might paint her,
art imitating art.
Nothing. Blank.

Wife. Part of me, forever.
Wife. Wife. Wife.
Naked and serpent-like,
moving through the firmament with head thrown back and mouth agape,
flying and moving away from me
amidst tumultuous storms with hair like I’ve never seen before, like I’ve never imagined.

Technology

A new world for me
from the imagination
¬–possibilities.

Foot

Sexy to me, yes.
Now to walk upon.
Gone¬–diabetes.

Ocean

Let loose, the mind.
No technical fixations here.
Deep and submerged, but comfortable.
Something above and a substrate below.
Where does it go? What about above?

But my reality in the middle,
here with midnight blues and reds
pasted like Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
Suspended and swimming,
a heavy matrix, like being buried right-side-up in powder snow.
Unable to put my foot down or even breathe.

Paper #2: Thoughts on Michael Craig, Postmodernist Poetry, and "Accessibility" Without Directing the Reader

2007-02-27T11:49:00.000-08:00

James F. Lewis
ENGL 550
February 27, 2007
Paper #2: Michael Craig, postmodernist poetry, and thoughts on “accessibility” without directing the reader.

Thoughts on Michael Craig, Postmodernist Poetry, and “Accessibility" Without Directing the Reader

Something that particularly struck me in our analyses of poems in last week’s class is how most of us so consciously directed the meaning of our poems and, so, unconsciously wrote poetry that is decidedly note “postmodern.” How is this? The answer involves gaining, first, a heightened degree of exactly what postmodernist theory and art entails: namely a certain ambiguity, but not really an ambiguity, as it is not a matter of writing to befuddle, but writing in such a manner as to foster a postmodernist reaction to the poem, that is, the inevitability of their being multiple interpretations of the work evolving through the interaction of author, text, and reader.
And so, I found Greg’s emphasis, however subtle, upon writing our poetry in such a way that doesn’t direct the meaning (which, interestingly, many of us are want to spit out to the class at the first opportunity) but, rather, to foster possibilities of meaning. I would imagine that Greg is not trying to “teach” us to write in this fashion, as if such an approach is the “right” way to write but, rather, to help us gain awareness, as poets, of what we are doing and its affects. You might say fostering the development of our self-awareness as poets. Anyhow, I found our propensity towards directing our reader striking and, concomitantly, the ideas of creating poetry that is accessible yet written in such a way as to generate more possibility for a greater variety of reader experiences and interpretations exciting.
Curiously, I found Craig to be more directive in his approach than say, Billy Collins. Sure, he left open possibilities for interpretation and meaning, but there seems to be a more ego generated aspect to Craig’s poetry, and the reader can feel the poets own issues and concerns egging him on to write. Which raises an interesting area to look at in poetry, namely, how much of it is ego generated as opposed to being inspired by larger concerns centered outside the ego, so called “self-less” concerns, if such a thing can really be considered to exist. I would add, however, that the directive style of writing poetry can be equally applicable to either ego or super-ego generated poetry. In any case, what I’m primarily interested in gaining here is more awareness of what I’m both doing as a poet when I write a poem and what, consciously or unconsciously, a poet may be engaged in when writing verse.
Just as aside, when considering contemporary poetry, confessional work, and egoism, it is worth noting how problems experienced with the self tend to make one, especially once awareness of these problems has developed, more egotistical, a state of being which clearly reflects itself in confessional poetry and all such poetry that works to expel our dragons or in some way assist our self in coping with life. An excellent case in point is the work of poets suffering severe depression; it seems all they can offer in their poetry is a corpus of dark, moody, verse that is, at times, nothing more than a vehicle for the purging of their disturbed psyche.
Is poetry is healer in this regard, for poet and reader alike? Sure. It certainly can be. But, is it the case in the contemporary era–perhaps indicative of our age and the vast amounts of clinical anxiety and depression that is part and parcel of it–that such verse abounds and, for this reader anyway, has become cliché. Save your morbid musing for your therapist, or, possibly, let’s create a healthier society by spilling out our bile amongst family, friends, and colleagues, behavior that is sure to make us all feel better and take some stress off our beleaguered egos. Then, maybe, we can explore some other possibilities in poetry, allow our verse to open up new ways of experiencing and seeing through feeling and the psyche. Finally healing, where are the possibilities for poetry? What can we capture or open up with the art in a post-contemporary period?

550: Favorites, Dislikes, Imitations and Parodies

2007-02-18T11:00:00.000-08:00

For a favorite poem, I chose a collection of poetry rather than a particular poem. The name of the collection is "Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry" by Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser. The work is a lovely little compilation of postcards the two poets wrote back and forth to each other after Ted's having been diagnosed with cancer. The two felt that writing to each other in poetry got at the heart of what they were trying to "say" to each other far-better than conventional prose letters and, so, corresponded for several weeks in poetry. Each piece is simple in style and structure, more like a Haiku, Zen-like, capturing the essence of life and existence in moving snapshots. Influenced by the collection, I wrote the following poem:

After Midnight

In nothing but nightclothes,
he ran through the streets of the
neighborhood at 1:00 a.m.
shouting, “Wake Up! Wake Up!”

Until a neighbor,
young, really, at thirty-four,
called the police,
who later arrested him for “disturbing the peace.”

–J.F. Lewis, February 10, 2007

Below is my parody of a poem out of Valparaiso Review that I particularly disliked. The scorned poem is "Iceland" by Kim Bridgford. The original is below.

~KIM BRIDGFORD~

ICELAND

The surface is both green and tipped with ice,
Its rocks like tortured lovers in the air.
Its flowers in the north are like the trace
Of women pinning grief up in their hair.

Its history speaks of families making claim
And poetry that helps to make a name
For kings of Europe. Out of the battle's grave,
Poetry will salvage what's to save.

Reykjavik's a palette flung to dry,
The weather never one thing or another.
It is a place of woven ancestry,
With people's names reflective of their father,

And down the middle the shiver of a line
Like a drying fish with sunlight on its spine.

© by Kim Bridgford

My Parody....

Iceland: Latitude 38.6 W, Longitude 43.3 N.

The landmass is of grass and glacier,
its outcrops evidencing severe erosion due to heavy wind.
Flora found in the north, including red-leafed clover
like similar species in Bend.

Its history is Jurassic,
And replete with fossils identified by Dr. Fitzpatrick
For the Museum of the Rockies. Out of the Pleistocene layer,
Dr. Zu will salvage any fossilized hair.

Reykjavik’s a useful depot,
The weather, however, is problematic.
It is a place of Icelandic bravado,
And the fervor can be systemic.

And down the center the melting crevasse
Like that in Antarctica’s semi-frozen mass.

Valparaiso Poetry Review: Thoughts on Jared Carter's "Prophet Township"

2007-02-12T08:07:00.000-08:00

Jimmy Lewis
550 Seminar
G.Keeler
Sunday, February 10, 2007

Valparaiso Poetry Review: Comments on Prophet Township, by Jared Carter

I connected to Carter’s poem because it evoked memories of personal experiences I’ve had with such deserted farmsteads across the Montana prairie. I have walked up to many such places; they are usually in the heart of unimaginable bird country in which one can pursue the best of sport. Young, naive, and sheltered from the struggle to survive, I experienced these abandoned homes in the most callous fashion, somewhat romanticizing the whole experience of being their with my birddogs as an experience parallel to that which I had come to know through the photo essays in certain sporting publications: Gray’s Sporting Journal, Big Sky Journal, Pointing Dog Journal.... Look at me! That’s my birddog running through the C.R.P. now surrounding the dilapidated house. That’s my hunting partner holding a rooster pheasant in the photo. Been there. Done that! Thank God their efforts failed. What glorious bird habitat C.R.P. makes and the fact that this is public land where I can play....
My father-in-law, pensive, erudite, reflexive with a tendency towards melancholia saw things differently. Now deceased nearly three years, he would walk around talking mostly to himself. “What happened to them,” with no question in his tonality. “Didn’t make it,” his gun broken open, walking around the debris beside the home, gamebirds flushing about, himself the progeny of a pig farmer. What is it about those of us with farming histories?
It wasn’t until later, after my childish sensibilities began to wear out or otherwise no longer suffice that I too began to feel. I too, carefully, ventured through some of these unhinged doors, nervous that my birddog might follow me and be killed by a rattlesnake seeking refuge from whatever inhospitable form of weather the prairie may have been spitting out. The flue, the old mattresses, the plank walls, the wind, wondering how.... Myself now a father, a family, wondering how and wandering to survive.
Carter’s physical and psychic illustration allows me to connect with this place and, by proxy, a deep empathy and respect for our struggle, for those who may have not “succeeded” but lived and tried. How do we define “success” anyway? When the wood ran out, when there was no hay for stock, when there was nothing for the children to eat, did what they had to do and left, abandoning the homestead, abandoning the dream, courageously going forward into whatever life awaited them. It is in this manner that Carter’s poem connects us with the presence of our ancestors, our recognition of their struggle and their acknowledgement of this recognition and empathy for them. I am left with a feeling of connection to people and to life.
On a more technical level, the above essay being more poetic in style and substance, I enjoy how Carter develops his impact verse by verse. At first, we come to understand what is done with the dead during the winter, the young and the old, the sick and the vulnerable, “a custom learned from their grandparents¬–how to make it through till spring, how to handle hardship on their own.” Then, we come to understand how fortunate one is to simply have to carry over the dead, that winter can be much worse than that. This process of placing children and the old in coffins filled with rock salt, seemingly heart-wrenching to the sensibilities of the contemporary reader, is clearly part and parcel of life for the residents of Prophet Township. The real disaster for such people materializes in the next stanza:

But there were times when no one lasted,
fierce winters when the wood gave out,
when there was nothing left to eat,
no hay to pitch out for the stock,
no way to break down through the ice
on the horse trough, or get the pump
working again.

Reality inserting itself forcefully and pitilessly upon a hopeful, struggling community, leaving for the reader in its wake no illusions of security and a final understanding of how, conscious of it or not, we are all struggling to survive and, unlike the people of Prophet Township, not one amongst us would know what to do with the bodies of the sickly, the old, the young should they fall ill and die in the cold of winter. What are our traditions passed down by our grandfathers, our grandmothers to cope with life? What will we do “with no heat, no money for seed”? Go shopping? Recycle? Using the medium of poetry Carter adroitly gets at this question for the contemporary reader, thus, making his poem unquestionably “contemporary,” and, by nature of the content of his work, perhaps redefining how we should determine what constitutes “contemporary American poetry. “Prophet Township” illustrates this constitution as a synthesis of form with content that bespeaks our historical moment and concomitant sensibilities.

Collins Inspired Poems

2007-02-06T08:38:00.000-08:00

As I Sit Here Watching My Wife Fill the Bird Feeders

The snow blows bitingly in the bitter north wind,
Last night, a forecast for blizzard conditions,
Snow, cold, wind, from the north–and nowhere else.
She scurries about, this redhead from Northern Europe

Making the world a better place for little birds, housefinches, sparrows, winter birds.
Nature is my two-year-old daughter’s coos and crys, as my coffee brewing in the corner of the kitchen.

An American flag flutters in the blowing snow, hanging courageously on the corner of his garage. A singular bird alights on the feeder,
And I type on my word processor at the kitchen table.
“Your daughter went into your underwear drawer and put a pair of boxers over her head!”

A fire is lit in the living room
And the thumb of my old birddog’s tail raps quietly but assertively on the carpeted floor.
Where are we? Really?
A place where hope is alive. A nasty winter storm. Fifteen-below tonight.

Convulsions

With the arrival of our baby-sitter
My wife invites me out to breakfast.
No matter that this is her scheduled time to work
and I am sick, absent from work.

Out to breakfast we go.
The air is warm with a tinge of spring in it.
More than a tinge really, a heavy dose,
and the feeling of warmth and the freedom of

The two of us being babyless for a moment
Brings on ecstasy. Movement.
The smell of fresh blueberry pancakes and greasy bacon.
A breakfast restaurant with only the two of us by the window.

Morning. Sharing. The moment is as fresh and natural as the
warm spring-like air.
The snow-melted water in the street I hear and feel under my shoes.
Really, we should go home now. Return. We both have work to do.

Me, with deadlines, beginning to panic. Negative emotions that constrict
my efforts more than help.
What kind of work makes us procrastinate? Brings on stress and anxiety?
We go anyway. Walking the streets of a neighborhood and looking at houses.

Greg Keeler Lectures on Contemporary American Poetry: Reflections

2007-02-06T08:34:00.000-08:00

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

On Whitman and his place as the first “contemporary poet” :

What intrigues me about Whitman occupying this position is his relationship to the united states. The U.S. and its democratic principals being an “experiment,” you might say, in the concept of “freedom,” I find there may be a connection to Whitman being the first contemporary poet and the social ideology that gave birth to the poet. Considering Whitman, I particularly emphasize the ideology of the U.S. rather than the specific social climate of the nation during the 19th Century, as ideals of our democracy we are still trying to define and reach in practice (thus, The Theory and Practice of Freedom). Whitman was an individual who conceptualized our democracy’s principals as manifesting an unlimited and unprecedented human freedom. Whitman, himself, strived to live a life reflective of these ideals put into practice. In living, thought, and expression Whitman pushed the very boundaries of the possibilities of freedom’s realities.
Where else could such an individual emerged in the world? Therefore, asking the question of whether or not poetic expression need be nurtured by the soil of social liberty or can it flourish anywhere and, is, therefore, inherent in all human beings but seldom expressed. Is there a parallel here then between what the U.S.’s ideology was and is still doing in the world as far as human potential is concerned and what Whitman did for the chains of poetics?

Influences:

A thought that came to mind during our discussion on Tuesday was influences and, in particular, the influences upon contemporary poetry. Greg’s comment about e.e. cummings and the typewriter, cummings particular fascination with it and the resulting influence of this fascination upon his work. What about computers? Laptops, especially, make it possible to write just about anywhere and, more specifically, to “publish” your work to the world within minutes. Word Processing programs...the possibilities are endless. And today, with the advent of voice recognition technology, the very definition of “writing” is changing. Writing, for example, like any artistic medium is just a vehicle upon which to express our thoughts and artistic vision and sensibilities. At one time, we used a quill, then a pen to a printing press, a typewriter, and the computer and word processor. With voice recognition, once the technology is perfected, having to go through the tedious act of typing will become obsolete, and, glass of our favorite libation in hand, we can close our eyes in the dark, speak into a microphone on a headset and watch our thoughts transcribed into type on a word processing program later to be edited an put into print. Imagine the freedom. This begs the question of what is writing, exactly? Artistic expression, an attempt to translate thoughts, not necessarily the banging away on keys, however stimulating this may be.
Also, on influences, the airplane, the satellite, the Internet, technology of all kinds, nuclear power, machines, television, phones, computers, etc. All of these have the power to influence, whether this influence is conscious or not. It may be, in fact, inescapable.

On the State of Contemporary Poetry as “opened up”

If that’s where we are, a poetic age in which both formalism and contemporary approaches to poetry can be embraced, what does this say about our cultural milieu? Are we finally, in general, getting beyond “black and white” dualistic thinking to something else? If so, what does this say about the future of poetry? Where will we go from here? Confessional poetry in formalist form? New forms? A complete abandonment of form? (already happening really). In any case, you might say that, similar to earlier observations on Whitman and his emerging as a “contemporary” poet, poetry of the 21st century will reflect the unique individual and social possibilities of its age.