Word After Word

In the summer, it’s hard to leave the house without sunglasses, water bottle, and a book of poetry.  Three things that are slim and provide protection and sustenance. Here are three new poetry collections perfect for July:

Mary Jo Bang’s ELEGY.  Devastating poems about her son’s overdose. They’re very intense but what’s so astonishing about this book is how Mary Jo Bang captures the weirdness of grief. Grief isn’t sadness. It’s derangement, and interesting. Amazing poems and the book reads like a novel.

Beth Ann Fennelly. UNMENTIONABLES. I fell in Love with Fennelly’s work when she read, goddess-style, at my college a couple of years ago, when her first book came out. Here, kudzu, Faulkner, running, women and painting, being an artist, and desire co-mingle. It’s like gazpacho. And it keeps getting better each time I read it. I love these green glorious poems.

Marie Howe THE KINGDOM OF ORDINARY TIME. Our teacher, Abigail Thomas, suggested we read this book. Howe writes about her kid, New York, bad friends, purposeful misunderstandings, regular days, kind of stabbing at things I walk right on past. She’s very funny. Like the other two books I am suggesting my poetry students read, these read straight through beautifully, they are clear narrative poems–this is a book that walks around on its own. You read it in a park, a bed, a car.

Pandas: what are you reading?

My book of poems The Boys I Borrow is a finalist (along with books by Ron Padgett, Laura Kasicske, Bob Hicok!) for the Balcones Prize. 

More information to come. Happy. I’m just so delighted about this and eager to read the winner’s book and the finalists’ books–I’ll post links to their work here soon.

From her new book Thinking About Memoir:

“But life doesn’t arrange itself conveniently into chapters–not mine anyway. And I didn’t want to write a novel. My life didn’t feel like a novel. It felt like a million moments. I didn’t want to make anything fit together. I didn’t want to make anything up. I didn’t want it to make sense the way I understand a novel to make a kind of sense. I didn’t want anywhere to hide. I didn’t want to be able to duck. I wanted the shock of truth. I wanted moments that felt like body blows. I wanted moments of pure hilarity, connected to nothing that came before or after. I wanted it to feel like the way I’ve lived my life. And I wanted to tell the truth. My truth doesn’t travel in a straight line, it zigzags, detours, doubles back. Most truths I have to learn over and over again.

Minton Sparks, my new favorite poet, a stunning performance artist, based out of Nashville, said this during her one-woman show, referring to a difficult member of the family. I laughed so hard. I loved my own people all over again.

 I just got back from Nashville, where I was honored to be part of a symposium on women and class and low class and work.   Dorothy Allison opened up the week and Minton Sparks closed it; I cried at both and laughed at both. When I called home, my Ron Paul said, “Your accent is back already.”  Creasy greens, shelley beans, “where are you from, somewhere south of decent?”, “sipping on a storm,” “truth be tole she’ll be the death of Darrell,” men named Lonnie and John Jackson, “didn’t say hi nor bye kiss my foot,” and “the hell she did.” This talk made me feel down-comforter safe, it’s familiar and luscious and finely wrought as anything I’ve ever known.

I did not want to come back.

But I am glad to be back in my studio, writing (I have a new star chart going–ten days without missing a studio session and I get a prize. What are the prizes? New sunglasses. New tight jeans. New book. New pen. New digital camera. So I can illustrate the blog. There’s more prizes.) writing using my metaphorical seed money, my life’s work.

I can’t do Good Reads right now.

My former students keep telling me I will love it. And I’m sure I would! I think it’s a wonderful thing and I am happy it exists but I can’t take on another password. I don’t want any more passwords for anything. I liked passwords when I was seven and I had an idea it would be cool to let people in my room who knew the password.

I do want to know what my friends and students are reading and I am incapable of reading a book and not telling people who might like it all about how much better the world is because we have this book. (I shudder when I think back on my obnoxious Nathaniel and the Pilgrims phase. The Shadow Divers obsession. My ongoing crush on Floyd Skloot. I drive everyone I love crazy with Good Reads.) But I just can’t sign up for a Program right now.

I want time to read good reads and time to call you on my phone with a dial and no call waiting and ask you what you are reading. Or not. Sometimes I think this great pleasure—talking about books we love, spreading the word—loses much of its richness and value when it’s posted, clubbed, defined, anthemized, registered.

Let’s just talk and be friends and have “my space” be the living room where we talk about books and food and basketball and boys and everything else that is good, no password needed, just come on in.

Eat is for eat, drink is for drink, Dr. Zhou says. She has helped a lot of people use Chinese medicine and common sense to get over IBS and a host of other ailments. I know she is right about eat eat, drink drink. One thing at a time. There are so many things that we THINK have to go together but they do not, such as bad luck and disappointment.

So yes. I’m trying to eat more slowly. More focus on chewing. But I can’t imagine breakfast without poetry.

And last week, four people asked me for suggestions of poetry to read (and there’s the Good Reads invitations—I’m sure Good Reads is fabulous but right now taking on another Web Thing feels akin to adopting a new puppy. I can’t set up any more accounts, record any more passwords, I just can’t right now. I know Good Reads is good. It’s like fiber. I’m scared of its thickness, the bulk.)

And, I found myself prescribing (I am certified to perform this procedure) poetry to three more people: first Bee, whose cough lingers, who is writing songs again. Then Marlena, my Bulgarian friend in

(Then a basket of student emails—what can we read over break? Good students! I hope I replied. If not, here we go.)

A poem a day is good, but all the poem-a-day books I have (except for Billy Collins Poetry 180 series) are too bent on Representing Poetry so you have to pick through all the boring Necessary Inclusions to find the good poems. I say just read wonderful poems.

If you just want to read poetry, and not study it, you want to choose poems who stand on their own beautifully. (Poetry Daily is good.) This doesn’t mean they’re easy poems, it just means that you can read them with your cereal and tea and not start the day frustrated, pretentious, idiotic, or stuffed. Good poetry meets you half way.

Poetry is like photography.  Diane Arbus says: a photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.

(I’m always in the mood for that type of experience.)

Like a tuning fork, a good poem sets the tone for the day.

Poetry for Breakfast

Kay Ryan

Wang Wei

Brigit Pegeen Kelly

Naomi Nye

Gary Soto

Poetry for Marlena

Tomas Transtromer

Eavan Boland

Sharon Olds

Elizabeth Bishop

Adam Zagajewski

Poetry for Musicians

Billy Collins

Rumi

Naomi Nye

Richard Brautigan

James Tate

Robert Bly Leaping Poetry

Pablo Neruda Love Sonnets

David Tucker Late for Work

Mark Halliday

Jim Carroll

Van Jordan

Poetry for Former Fiction Students

Marie Howe

Beth Ann Fennelly

Mark Jarman

Tony Hoagland

Van Jordan

When you ask a poet for suggestions on who to read she will give you a different list on any given day.  (Ally, tell me who are you reading, who’s good?)

“Reading poetry you have to use creativity—your own. A lot of your own,” B said.

Reading poetry is recreating or practicing that exat same thing that happens when you write. You have to stay really concentrated, really focused, on something you do not understand. You have to stay in that no-place. The strategies each person develops for doing that is their creativity.

This is why new writers are constantly urged by their teachers to read, read, read.  It’s writing practice.

During my mid life crisis, a few years ago, right before I discovered face blindness, etc., I got into a habit of reading Easy Books. I’d never read easy books in my life; I thought English majors weren’t allowed to read anything that was EZ. When I discovered we could and no one really cared at all, I went nuts. I binged. I took up mysteries. Now, I’m out of practice reading hard books. My reading muscles got slack.

Reading some harder books—poetry, Flannery O’Connor, Faulkner, Melville, Dickinson, Durrell—makes it easier to write because you can concentrate for longer in that world in that way.

Reading harder books is co-creating.

Louis Menand’s article on diaries and diarists, “Woke up This Morning,” (The New Yorker, December 10 2007) takes up the question of why we read diaires. He is so smart on blogs, reliability in writing about self/other, diaries, memoirs, and bad writing—five of my most passionate interests. I’m resisting (vaguely) the urge to copy out the entire article here, all of which has bearing on the creative writing workshop, writing from life, and how we consider our work.

“The impulse to keep a diary is to actual diaries as the impulse to go on a diet is to actual slimness.”

“It’s not that we imagine we would be happier if we kept a diary; we imagine that we would be better—that diarizing is a natural healthy thing, a sign of vigor and purpose, a statement, about life, that we care, and that non-diarizing, or worse, failed diarizing is a confession of moral inertia, an acknowledgement, eve, of the ultimate pointlessness of one’s being in the world.”

“The ego theory holds that maintaining a diary demands a level of vanity and self-importance that is simply too great for most people to sustain for long periods of time. It obliges you to believe that the stuff that happened to you is worth writing down because it happened to you. This is why so many diaries are abandoned by circa January 10^th: keeping this up, you quickly realize, means something worse than being insufferable to others; it means being insufferable to yourself. People find they just can’t take themselves seriously enough to continue. They may regret this—people capable of taking themselves seriously tend to go farther in life—but they accept it and move on to other things, such as collecting stamps.”

Do we learn more about a person reading their diary? Or does the impossibility of accurate self-representation mean we only get the feeling we know intimately who a person really is by reading about them in other people’s diaries? Menand says, “[Virginia] Woolf described from the outside by another person is likely to give us a more vivid picture of what Virginia Woolf was really like than Woolf described from the inside by herself. Introspection is not as reliable as observation. (That’s why we have shrinks.)

And, I’ll add: that’s why we have creative writing courses. Not to teach the art of introspection but to practice the science of observation of everyone else.

Inside, Menand claims, we are all pretty much the same. “It’s the outside, the way people look and the things they say, that makes them distinct.”

He notes that Woolf is “one of those writers who keep the instrument in tune: she wrote, sometimes just to be writing, whether there was anything of significance to write about or not.”

“’Never discriminate, never omit’ is one of the unstated rules of diary-keeping. The rule is perverse, because all writing is about control, and writing a diary is a way to control the day—to have, as it were, the last word. …   If it doesn’t contain a lot of dross, it’s not a diary. It’s something else—a journal, or a writer’s notebook, or a blog (blather is not the same as dross).”

“The memorializing of the mundane is part of the flattening of foreground-background contrast that makes diaries different from memoirs and other forms of historical narrative. It’s also a sign of the diary’s absolute fidelity to the present…. The just-the-facts elimination of perspective, discrimination, and reflection…”

This what we’re trying to teach our students. Yes, they must write what they know; unless they are particularly gifted. When they write further from home, they have to be careful television isn’t filtering their observation. Creative writing can’t be just-the-facts. It has to be close observation, combined with perspective, discrimination, and reflection.

An example? Menand himself on Schlesinger: “…he was a golden retriever: he like being liked much more than he disliked being disliked….”   And “…he dreamed of writing a novel…but despite a fair amount of self laceration…he never made much headway. (Not many people who have that particular dream do make much headway.)”

Writing a diary may keep us from completing our novels, and it may be the only way we get to them too. Self laceration and failure to write everything down—you are for sure not writing now.

“The only rule I have found to have any validity in writing is not to bore yourself.”

John Mortimer, Clinging to the Wreckage: another part of life

I know I want to teach  my students the art of browsing but I haven’t figured out how. I want to make them be happy. I’m like a desperate mother.

The browsing assignment J and I devised isn’t going to work. We road tested it and it failed. It produced standing, not browsing, and it wasted time instead of connecting students with the pleasure of panning for gold. But it seems more important than ever that I learn how to teach this skill.

I read my poetry to a class last week and spoke to the students about why anyone would write poetry and one of the questions was, “Who were your influences?” Without thinking, I said: “Ogden Nash, Richard Brautigan, James Tate, and Emily Dickinson.”

Answering, in a flash I saw myself as a kid, reading Ogden Nash, browsed from my parents’ shelves, and Richard Brautigan—how that book got into my uncle’s study in Possum Trot, I will never know. (Perhaps my cousin’s boyfriend, the one who built a teepee in their backyard and stayed for a year, the one who got her Gypsie Rose, the raccoon she walked on a leash.). Those books fell into my lap. Literally. As did my next great influence, James Tate. I found him browsing the stacks of the library at

The students wrote down those names. And I realized: I’ve given the wrong answer.

These books found me. They weren’t my influences so much as this was: knowing how to be found by what books I needed at any given time. That process, not those people. That’s what influences a writer. 

This is what I want to go back and tell that class: Don’t write down those names. You need your books. You have to get found by your own influences. Mine won’t work for you. You have to read haphazardly and widely and in libraries and used bookstores (shiny bookstores rarely have the depth and weirdness required for real browsing—the waves just don’t break). You have to use your whole body, like an instrument, and slowly troll through the shelves. It’s harder to do this kind of surfing on a computer. It’s exactly like looking for shark’s teeth on the beach; it’s the very best kind of shopping in the world. You’re looking for a “click,” a connection. You can’t know exactly what it’s going to be until you open a page, and at random, reading the lines—boom, a part of the world comes into focus that you’ve always known about, but have never really seen, really known. 

I loved those four authors, and they shaped my work. The arrogant sweetness and plain language and philoso-cheese in Brautigan inspired me and I wrote hundreds of bad Brautigan poems. From Tate, I took oblique-clear, humor-devastation, physical shapes-lunar endings. He showed me how to go to the place where you write poems from. Just simply how to get to that place. From Nash, play!!! Language as something plastic as silly putty.

But they aren’t really my influences. Influences change constantly. Influences are whatever you in love with that day. Browsing is the way a writer works under the influence. It’s a full body collision with books; fingertips are not enough.  Anything you find yourself is better than something assigned to you.

How am I going to teach browsing?  It’s going to be like teaching  empathy or celadon.

And I want it to be like tying your shoes. Something you do every day.