Monday, April 18, 2011
Fresh Writing: Conversations about Poetry
I am a student at Pacific Lutheran University and complete an MFA in creative writing this summer. Going back to school has allowed time, space and finances to create, think, discuss and interact. Meeting other writers and considering other genres has been equally inspiring.
One writer I’ve enjoyed talking to and sharing classes with is Cindy Stewart-Rinier. (Isn’t that a great name for a poet? Rinier? It makes me think of René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke better known as Rainer Maria Rilke.)
Cindy and I will read together at the Mountain's Writer Series in May, so I decided it might be fun to talk frankly about poetry on the weblog since, truth be told, I don’t get poetry at all!
Cindy, being a sport, has agreed to answer a few of my uneducated questions about the genre! Watch out, this woman is one smart cookie.
Jennifer: I have to admit, Cindy, poetry is so hard for me to understand and to access. I feel a fool when I try and only certain poets have reached my heart. Sharon Olds, Billy Collins, William Stafford, Mary Oliver and some—although a very limited amount—of Emily Dickenson. It’s so hard to imagine an entire life devoted to working in this form. Please, enlighten me. What is the appeal of poetry, for you?
Cindy: I love poetry for some of the same reasons that I love dark chocolate. There's an intensity and complexity to good dark chocolate—the kind that is upwards of 70% cocoa—that is along the lines of the experience I have when reading the compressed language of poetry. Because it's so condensed, connotation, denotation, figurative language, sound, tone and mood all form a dynamic and mutually reinforcing experience of language that is, to extend the chocolate metaphor, very rich. Sometimes the poem is an enactment of the subject it treats, other times it sweeps you up and carries you along on its voice, and other times it folds you into Mystery itself, or as close to an approximation of it as we might be able to feel through words. Like dark chocolate, it might be an acquired taste. Not everybody loves the bitter with the sweet, but for those who have a penchant for complexity, the poem is just the thing. For me, reading good poetry is both a pleasure and a way of entering a state of heightened attention that makes me feel most fully alive, human. It is a kind of antidote to being bombarded with language that has an agenda, wants to sell me something, as in advertising or politics. In that sense, it leaves even chocolate in the dust!
J: Okay, I love chocolate and of course, the only chocolate I’ll eat is dark chocolate. But you are talking about experiencing it at a level I haven’t yet. I think I take in chocolate at a more unconscious level, perhaps as a way to get a chemical hit from the ingredients within that calm the brain or nervous system. I guess I don’t want to think so hard about what is going on. I like it, I eat it, that’s it. What you are talking about with poetry is the same—you are talking about really thinking hard about the words on the page—diving into sounds and even the condensation to find meaning. Isn’t that a ton of work?
C: I don’t consider it work as much as a genuine engagement with language. You can look at a painting and appreciate it on some level, but knowing something about its process, what its relationship is to some particular art movement is knowledge that enhances and deepens that appreciation. Poetry has its roots in the oral tradition when, in order to retain stories and pass them on, speech was modified to approximate music so the performed stories could be learned, remembered and passed on. Forms with strict rhythm and rhyme schemes served a mnemonic function. Since then, history, philosophy, politics, culture and technology all have, of course, influenced and mutated poetry and its forms. American poetry, like the political context that informed it, broke from the European traditions pretty significantly. In an oversimplification used by a teacher recently, two main traditions grew out of the American soil. One was Walt Whitman's ecstatic inclusivity, with its entry through the experienced, and the other, Emily Dickinson's rapture of daily life that enters through deep engagement with language. There's a huge diversity of “camps” in contemporary American Poetry—poetry of the self, of voice, place, witness, language, Nature, wit, beauty, family, the spirit, history, identity—and more I’m sure I’ve forgotten to name.
J: See. Smart! You are so smart about this. So, in your opinion, how can the layperson access poetry and even explore it without feeling like dolt?
C: A lot of us run aground by getting fixated on what a poem means, myself included. Archibald MacLeash’s often-quoted, “A poem should not mean but be” is a good reminder to approach the poem as an experience of language. Let yourself be aware of how it makes you feel in your body, your mind, your heart as you read through it. Then reread it and ask yourself questions about these reactions, see if you can identify what they were connected to, why or how they were generated. That’s when you might begin to notice things about different aspects of craft. Are there a lot of soft or hard sounds? Do they correspond or contradict the content? What about the physical shape of the poem? How does line length affect how you read? Does it speed you up or slow you down? The sense of the poem might escape you, but can pay attention to how it makes you feel, then start to look at how it makes you feel.
Though a lot of the poetry I’ve been reading in our program has been initially vexing, more accessible poetry now feels a little paltry by comparison. Kind of like eating Hershey bars after you’ve had the 73% Madagascar, you know? Except for an occasional nostalgic indulgence, it’s hard to imagine going back.
I think that some knowledge of craft is also really helpful, if not essential, toward a deeper understanding and appreciation of poetry. To be aware of what’s at work allows you to then begin to look at how it’s at work in each individual poem. When you see what’s actually packed into that tight little package of language, all the decisions the poet made in order for the poem to become that precise utterance, that’s where amazement is born.
Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook is a great place to start. Then, if you want to go a little further, there’s Edward Hirsch’s How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry.
For me, it’s also very helpful to hear poets read their own work aloud. When I’ve struggled with the assigned reading for our program, I’ve often turned to the internet to find audio or audio visual footage so I can hear the work the way the poet meant it to be heard. The Poetry Foundation has a website has a website with audio, Youtube has recorded readings, there’s an amazing project out of Lewis and Clark College here in Portland called the Oregon Poetic Voices Project where you can listen to archived poetry readings from poets across the state, and the Mountain Writers Series is in the process of adding a more interactive component to their website that will allow visitors to access their 38 years of archived readings it has hosted as well.
Fleda Brown, who I had the great privilege to work with last year, reads an essay on the work of a different poet each month on “Michigan Writers on the Air” which you can access through her facebook page, Poet Fleda Brown. There is such intelligence and clarity in her essays, I can guarantee you that you’ll learn a lot about poetry just by tuning in and listening.
So, hopefully, this is a start.
J: Thank you so much Cindy! Bravo for your words and your work here. Look for Cindy, this Friday, as she examines a book of poems for the Book Talk Conversation!
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