August 2009 – Lit Bits

Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day—Daily?

If you find that even the liveliest poems sometimes feel dead on the page, if now and again you’d like to be at a reading rather than reading, or if you’re just trying to squeeze more poetry into your busy schedule, Our Daily Sonnet will be a treat. Dismayed by the dearth of recordings of Shakespeare’s sonnets available on the internet, Adam Tessier decided to record videos of friends and strangers reading the Bard’s poetry. Videos will appear once a day, every day, until all 154 sonnets have been read.

Today’s sonnet:

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Joelle Hann is a senior editor at Bedford/St.Martin’s who worked on the third edition of Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry, and originally created the Teaching Poetry blog in 2009.

Hayden Carruth, Poet of the Month

Earlier this month-August 3-would have been Hayden Carruth‘s 88^th birthday.

Carruth was a prolific American poet who authored over 30 volumes of poetry, beginning with The Crow and the Heart in 1959. He also contributed essays, introductions, and his critical and editorial acumen to many other books and projects.

Fascinated and guided by the innovations of jazz, Carruth experimented with poetic forms throughout his lifetime. Still, he was considered a modernist who upheld the ideals of 20^th century modernism as expressed by T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, e.e.cummings, and William Carlos Williams.

At the age of 75, he won the National Book Award for his 1996 collection, Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey.

Here’s an excerpt from “Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey” on the Academy of American Poets Web site where you can also hear two recordings of Carruth reading his poems.

Scrambled eggs and whiskey

in the false-dawn light. Chicago,

a sweet town, bleak, God knows,

but sweet. Sometimes. And

weren’t we fine tonight?

Galway Kinnell has said, “This is not a man who sits down to ‘write a poem’; rather, some burden of understanding and feeling, some need to know, forces his poems into being. Thoreau said, ‘Be it life or death, what we crave is reality.’ So it is with Carruth. And even in hell, knowledge itself bestows a halo around the consciousness with, at moments, attains it.” (See more on the Academy of American Poets.)

Critics and contemporaries had to a lot to say about Carruth’s linguistic skill and existential bravery. Alastair Reed is quoted on the Poetry Foundation Web site: “[Carruth’s] poems have a sureness to them, a flair and variety. . . . Yet, in their dedication to finding an equilibrium in an alien and often cruel landscape, Vermont, where the poet has dug himself in, they reflect the moods and struggles of a man never at rest. . . . His work teems with the struggle to live and to make sense, and his poems carve out a kind of grace for us.”

Carruth died on September 29, 2008.

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Joelle Hann is a senior editor at Bedford/St.Martin’s who worked on the third edition of Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry, and originally created the Teaching Poetry blog in 2009.

Why So Serious: Are Happy Poems Taboo?

In a recent “Teaching Poetry” meeting, we wondered why poems about happiness weren’t popular. Or were they?

We gave ourselves the assignment to come up with five poems about happiness. But as we started to make our selections, we wondered if the real topic wasn’t “poems that make us happy.” In trying to sort this out, the following conversation ensued:

Nick R: I’ve been thinking about my favorite happy poems — I need to check if they’re actually happy or just bittersweet-hopeful. I want to pick Sharon Olds’s “First Boyfriend” as my first one, but that might actually not be exclusively happy. What gradations of “happiness” are we dealing with/accepting here?

Kim W: Hmm, interesting question. Poems about things that make you happy should count, right? As long as they aren’t undercut by a “but it’s all for naught since we’re gonna die anyway” vibe.

Anyway, maybe the debate over what makes a poem a happy poem is more interesting than the poems themselves.

Joelle: Poetry never is exclusively happy, is it? And what is “happy” anyway?

I was thinking of Jack Gilbert’s poem “Alone,” about his wife who has died. The intimacy of it makes me “happy,” or at least, I enjoy it.

In case you’re curious about the Gilbert poem, it begins:

I never thought Michiko would come back
after she died. But if she did, I knew
it would be as a lady in a long white dress.
It is strange that she has returned
as somebody’s dalmatian . . .

Nick R: I’ve decided that I’m much less invested in intrinsically “happy” poems, and more interested in the story/context of poetry that makes me happy.

So, without context, here are the poems I could think of (off the top of my head, and mostly canonical) that make me happy:

–Sharon Olds, “First Sex”
–Richard Brautigan, “The Beautiful Poem“/”Love Poem” (These two only make me happy when read back to back.)
–Andrei Codrescu, “Who’s Afraid of Anne Waldman”
–Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California“/”America” (As companion pieces)
–Frank O’Hara, “Why I Am Not a Painter”
–Phil Levine, “M. Degas Teaches Art & Science at Durfee Intermediate School — Detroit 1942”
–Philip Larkin, “High Windows“/”This Be The Verse”
–Everything by Frank O’Hara

Also, one quatrain in the Auden poem, “On the Circuit“:

Is this my milieu where I must

How grahamgreeneish! How infra dig!

Snatch from the bottle in my bag

An analeptic swig?

Kim W: I think the idea — there should be poems that make a study of happiness, just as there are poems that make a study of death, melancholy, love, loyalty, sex, loneliness, etc. — is intriguing.

In the pantheon of human emotion, happiness is just as important as any other experience, right? So why doesn’t it get due respect? Do artists, poets, and intellectuals generally view happiness as a myth or a sham? A fairy tale invented by the media and the advertising industry? It’s curious that we can’t find many poems that are meditations on happiness.

Nick, I was reading your book, Triangulating Happiness, again last night and thinking that the whole collection should be on my list, since it’s a book-length meditation on happiness. Right? (If not, please explain so I can disagree.)

Andrew F: For my money — people don’t need to do something with their happiness other than just have it, so they don’t write about it. Not less important than death, melancholy, loneliness, etc., but in no way frustrating, so there’s less impetus to write about, which is why it’s underrepresented.

Kim W: A literature teacher once made that same argument. He reasoned that there were no happy poems because the poets were too busy being happy to write about it happiness. But I don’t buy that. There are happy songs, right. We like happy songs because listening to them makes us happy. Art doesn’t just explore emotions, it evokes emotions.

Nick: Writing is traditionally solitary and introspective, so I think it’s easy to go that route and give the world another coy memento mori.

I set out to write forty-two explosively happy, or at least life affirming, poems that would (hopefully) go past the fleeting Frank O’Hara thing and maybe have some happy gravitas of their own. A lot ended up bittersweet/treacley regardless, but yes.

And I agree with Andrew, people tend not to theorize happiness . . . but I think that’s a mistake. Everyone knows what unhappiness and depression feels like, it’s easy to emote. I don’t think most people have a handle on happiness, personal or ethereal.

Kim W: I’m intrigued by Nick’s idea that happiness is harder to represent than other emotions. (Of course, all our emotions are tangled up together, but that’s another discussion entirely.)

It’s tricky to represent that life-affirming optimism, without getting autobiographical, and it’s hard to avoid the self-congratulatory tone that sometimes goes with that. Whitman avoids it in Leaves of Grass by tying happiness to larger forces of nature.

Joelle H: Maybe happiness is more palpable in language against the backdrop of poignancy? Is the fleeting nature of happiness more palpable than the actual state of happiness? Does it need tension to be representable in language?

Kim W: Are you saying that the threat of losing happiness is more representable (because of its tension) than the in-the-moment experience of happiness?

Joelle H: “Knowing” that happiness is transitory is more knowable in “art” than the actual state of happiness, which, I think, is a highly personal experience. It’s easier to “beam” happiness than to explain how you feel to someone — whether in a poem or not.

Nick R: In the graph below, I feel like any of the quadrants on their own is basically boring. I’m interested in the progression from C (and D, although that’s a weird quadrant) to B.

I feel like most of the poems that we think about when we think about happy poems are forgettable because they’re A. And I don’t like a lot of poetry because it’s C, with little movement. D has the potential to be interesting, but I’m more interested in movement.

This graph may or may not be inherently flawed (my attention is split by MLA updates).

Kim W: Where did you get this graph?

Nick R: Just threw it together on MS paint — realizing now that C and D should be switched, but otherwise I think it sorta holds up.

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Joelle Hann is a senior editor at Bedford/St.Martin’s who worked on the third edition of Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry, and originally created the Teaching Poetry blog in 2009.

Contemporary Politics/Poetics, pt. 1

by Nick Richardson

Historically, poetry and politics went hand in hand: orally transmitted national epics, commissioned elegies, Ozymandias’s shattered visage in the sand. But poetry may be the last thing that comes to mind when you think of contemporary American politics. Washington seems too antiseptic and bureaucratic –- too full of statistics and lobbyists, too devoid of romance — to sustain a fragile quatrain.

If this description strikes a chord, you may be surprised to learn that poetry in politics survives! But first, some background: did you know that Abraham Lincoln wrote poetry? It’s true, check out the two bittersweet, thanatotic cantos of “My Childhood’s Home I See Again.” And do you remember when, more recently, Jimmy Carter became the first U.S. president to publish an entire poetry collection (Always a Reckoning, 1995)?

Of course, we can (and should) expand our politics/poetry focus beyond the smiling righteous. There’s something in the easy tears of tropical dictators that makes me, at least, expect a lurking verse or two . . . and a quick Web search doesn’t disappoint. Apparently one-time military dictator Manuel Noriega is said to have been a poet before he turned to drug trafficking and . . . whatever else he was up to in Panama; Saddam Hussein is rumored to have written poetry about George Bush while awaiting trial in 2004.

Two articles mingling politics and poetry recently made the internet rounds, ultimately coming to rest en masse in my inbox! The first centered on Washington’s second big gesture toward poetics since inauguration day (the first being the first ever White House Poetry Slam): President Obama claimed “a great affinity for Pakistani culture and the great Urdu poets.” How funny that something as seemingly small as an individual’s poetic appreciation can grow to represent a cathected geopolitical stance!

The second article (entitled “Sarah Palin, The Anti-Poet”) examines — tongue firmly in cheek — found poems created by adding line breaks to excerpts from some of Palin’s more syntactically byzantine speeches. Regardless of political affiliation, it’s interesting to see: 1) the perceived dissonance between a politician and a poet (despite Lincoln and Carter); and 2) how well some of these found poems actually work, both rhetorically and as “poetry.”

William Shatner Recites Sarah Palin’s Farewell Speech as a Poem:

The above are just a few (literal) instances of contemporary politicians turning poetic. Can you think of any other examples?

Activity: Search for traditionally unpoetic government speeches and documents online. Add line breaks to create your own found political poetry. Does your found poem work as poetry — why or why not?

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Nick Richardson is an associate editor at Bedford/St.Martin’s. He holds an MA in Literary and Cultural Theory from Boston College and has published three books (two poetry, one prose) that exhibit what poet Andrei Codrescu has called “a fresh sort of daring in the overstrained broth of contemporary American poetry.” He is also the publisher of A Mutual Respect Books and Music, an underground chapbook press operating out of Brooklyn, NY.