Plagiarism

I just got a message from a guy named Norm Levine accusing me of plagiarizing some lines from his poems. He further charged me of being his generic equivalent. That was a cheap shot. 

Obviously, he’s an imposter, but the name sounded familiar. I checked my driver’s license and sure enough that was my name. In fact he is me… or rather, I. 

My poet-self is now suing my blog-self. Some nerve! My only defense is that the words seemed better suited for a paragraph than a stanza. Those jagged right-hand margins can be dangerous. I once jabbed myself on one and bled purple for hours. 

There is something about a phrase such as, aggravation was her longest word, it never stopped, speaking about my mother, which I regard as too low-falutin for such a high-falutin home as in a poem. 

Or, writing about second bananas, Thank God, we don’t get to see the movie / of our lives before we live it /. Then we would know our place / by the billing alone / and the rest / wouldn’t be worth the price of admission. 

I hope to settle our dispute out of court. Maybe I’ll write myself a check for $10,000. It will bounce anyway. It was no less than T.S. Eliot who advised us to steal rather than imitate. If theft is preferred why not from yourself? 

A better solution would be a slow blurring of borders and dropping of labels; call it poetic prose or prosaic poetry. Lately I’ve found more poetry in novels than in poems. In the effort to divest itself of archaic language, much contemporary poetry reaches for the conversational. Poetry has become an anecdote with an irregular margin and a zinger at the end. In our poetry group the most severe criticism one can say about a poem is that it is too poetic. 

Peggy's poems are different as are many fine poets. They have earned the designation. Her language stretches. It crackles with fresh metaphors and could not fit easily in a paragraph. The operative word is always, transformation. 

As for that other Norm Levine, we’re going out for a beer and throw a few darts, hopefully not at each other. Maybe, over time, we’ll merge into one person.

Poetry, A Serious Joke

There is something about a joke well-told that feels like poetry to me. And a poem, lean, with every word weighed and a zinger to punch you in the gut, that reminds me of a joke.

Maybe not a giggle or belly laugh but even a grimace lights a dim bulb with illumination that could be a serious delight. Both the poet and comedian use juxtaposition to great advantage transporting the reader to unimaginable places.

An extra word can kill it, a giveaway makes it stumble. The way a poem breathes, the pregnant pause, inflection, a gesture all arrest attention. If the teller/author doesn’t believe it, it shows.

Jerry Seinfeld spoke about a joke he had told hundreds of times which always got a laugh. One night doing his stand-up monologue he started to doubt it in the middle of the story. He thought to himself that it really wasn’t very funny but he knew the words so well he would tell it anyway because it led into his next joke. When he got to the punch-line nobody laughed. His doubt crept in between the words. The teller cultivates his own voice and cannot falter…. just as in poetry.

The poem also lives between the words in inexplicable ways. The line breaks, enjambments and how it is laid out on the page can all be crucial elements, even by omission.

Great poets, like Emily Dickinson, celebrated life from her remote perch. It took society decades to catch up with her unpunctuated exuberance.

Poets approach their material obliquely, with a certain frisson, often with irony, using language in unexpected ways. Transformation can be an elongated, demanding stretch or leap, landing in the realm of the absurd. The serious joke re-states and affirms the conundrum, I can’t go on. I’ll go on; funny the way Beckett is funny.

Many contemporary poems are simple anecdotes with a jagged right-hand margin. Even if the subject is contemplative or grim there is a tension built up in the telling and a final release…just like a short tale told with wit. Neither a poem or a joke can be explained; it loses everything in translation. As T.S. Eliot said, the genius of poetry is that it can communicate before it is understood...just like a well-told joke.

Poetry Criticism

There are two movie clichés that always make me chuckle.

Won’t you sit down? and, I can explain everything.

The first invites somebody in…even though I have never heard anyone put it that way. The second is the line said by a husband caught in bed with the other woman. It is usually movie code for, Give me a twenty minutes and I’ll think of something.

Every two weeks a group of four poets meet at our apartment to read their work and receive feedback. I’m allowed in because I serve the nuts and pour the drinks. I generally read a blog and offer my response to the other four poems. It ain’t easy.

Over lunch the other day with a friend who also hosts a poetry workshop the question came up how to criticize a poem. She wondered whether there was a website which suggested cogent language one might use. When I put the question to another poet-friend over lunch (we have a lot of lunches) yesterday she said something which hit home.

She felt that responding critically to a poem called upon the same faculty as relating to a friend. It entails close listening and entering into the other person’s world, suspending disbelief as well as a suspension of one’s own terms for the other. It’s a form of empathy; to meet the author, extend oneself, get on board, move with another’s cadence and take the imaginative leap.

Criticism is an unfortunate word. It implies negative thinking. Christopher Hampton, the British author, said that asking a writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what it thinks about dogs. My use of criticism is the constructive variety.

Some poems seem intent on closing their portals, on confounding the reader or bringing in references known only to a select few. Sometimes I read a poem five times and only find an opening the sixth time around. That entering in process can be a mysterious aha moment, accompanied by an interior drum roll or zither.

I doubt if there is any special vocabulary needed; more a matter of courage to risk saying something dumb or hurtful or obvious to everyone else. Some poems cannot be explicated, in so many words. If a poem is the other woman, the movie guy caught with his pants down shouldn't even bother trying to explain everything.

In the late seventies I attended a ten day poetry gathering in Port Townsend, Washington. My teacher was Stanley Kunitz. In the next room the group was led by William Stafford. Two of my favorite people. Kunitz offered his wise words in a most eloquent but authoritarian manner. I sneaked into Stafford’s class one day to witness a different approach. His rule was, No praise, No blame. He drew out the poet to express what she wished for the poem and whether she felt she’d achieved it. The entire group was drawn in and the criticism was a generous offering, judgment withheld. Won’t you sit down inside my poem?

Meeting the poem as a friend is a transformational act. We get to move an imperceptible inch.

Unanswered Questions

There are certain Qs for which there may be no A. For instance, where do dead birds go? Or more importantly how did my collection of bumbblegum cards disappear? Or what happens to failed poets?

I shall tackle the third proposition since I am intimately acquainted with the species. in fact, I'm one of them. Some of them (us) are running workshops instructing others how to be one. There's nothing wrong with a nation of failed poets.

Most are unrecognizable having been absorbed into the hum-drum life. Perhaps that guy in the market who waters the lettuce is one or the checker who let me in the express lane with eleven items. Ordinary folks... of this world but not quite in it.

It needs to be said that by most measure's in our greed-driven society the term successful poet is an oxymoron. At best we put up with them as court jester or some nuisance on the far margins.

Before taking my place in line I generally let others speed through the checkstand in a happy stupor with bar codes beeping obediently. I prefer the queue that barely moves horizontally but offers vertical flight instead; where else but from my weekly fill of tabloids. A cursory glance at the headlines convinces me that I have located the sanctuary of failed poets.

If there isn't a story about inter-galactic visitations then it's another citing of JFK or Elvis or the nonagenarian child found frozen on the sunken Titanic.

I'd love to sit in on the meeting room of the fabulists, that garden of fecund minds where gossip grows wild and baby alligators are hatched into our plumbing. I knew I was on to something when I read about half a mermaid found in a tuna fish sandwich.

One less question to ponder; as for dead birds maybe the answer is in the tabloids.

To Rhyme Or To Not

Rhyme has been out of fashion in poetry since it was ceded to songwriters. And with good reason, I believe. Cole Porter was as good as they come but he was no poet, even with his bees and educated fleas. I submit he had the music but not the concision and imaginative leaps.

To be sure there are still formalists in our midst. Donald Justice and Richard Wilbur are two highly respected ones. But most contemporary poets are not likely to be seen with a rhyming dictionary. End-rhymes went out with other rigid structures such as sonnets and heroic couplets. It may be the same reason why we don't wear suits and ties on airplanes and so much music is atonal.

Most of us regard Walt Whitman as our antecedent, followed perhaps by Wallace Stevens,
William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg. All of them wrote in free verse.

Ironically the art of poetry has a paucity of words to distinguish its many varieties. That word "verse" is itself a term now consigned to greeting cards. Rhyming poetry is more often associated with doggerel. Indeed poetry has many permutations and they all go under the name, "poetry."

Why has rhyme fallen out of favor? I think because life itself doesn't rhyme. Our experience is
fractured, simultaneous and asymmetric. In fact rhyming lines are devoutly to be avoided by many in favor of assonance or alliteration in a limited way. Rhymes carry the whiff of levity or constricted artifact.

There is an argument that the imposition of a rhyming right-hand margin forces the poet to stretch his imagination but too often it compromises language to obey the prescribed form.
It's fair to say, however, that much poetry is moving to performance as it seeks it's roots in the oral tradition. Thus we have rap music/poetry and a return to rhyme. Putting this aside I am speaking for the poem on the page.

Freedom isn't license but poetic license makes its own demands; to cultivate one's own authentic voice without affectation and alert to the limp and bloated language all around us.

It was either I or William Stafford who once remarked that all words rhyme with each other more so than they do with silence. With this mind, as a concession to the rhymers of the world, I offer the following:

All words rhyme with each other
more than the winds and the weather
but I prefer a B-flat
from the wings of a gnat
to the marriage of mother to brother.

Some Thoughts On Poetry

The closest word is alchemy. Making something out of something else; not base to gold necessarily. More often base to base but, of course, there is no heirarchy of image or experience
in transformation.

I might start with the act of throwing a ball against a wall. The wall might turn into the outer wall of my father's drugstore and with the ferocity of my throws I make a portal into his store, his profession, his life.

I might wonder what that act of throwing a ball is all about. How it returns to my waiting hands
or how it bounces off some ledge out of my reach. How this expectation of return is re-enacted throughout my life. Or how the landing of a ball into a hoop or side pocket or an eighteenth hole
can be a metaphor for arrival and embrace.

The wall could be the one my brother drove his car into 45 years ago as if summoned to get through to the other side when he heard a piece of music not possible in this world. Or the bank of bushes I steered a sled into as a kid with two friends on my back. Or it could be the wall my deaf daughter has learned to climb or even the I scaled 25 years ago, as if dodging searchlights and hounds, to start my new life with Peggy.

In my poetry I usually start with a vivid image or even a single word which conjures a moment in time and into which I can enter and rumage around. The days I can live within the poem, outside of time and place, are my great joy. The product is less important than the process.

A few years ago I spotted a picture of my parents vacationing in upstate New York. The photo was dated June, 1932. Since this was exactly nine months before my birth I decided this must have been my time of conception and as such the first picture of me in the twinkle of my father's eye and the coquettish turn of my mother's head. Maybe. Maybe not. But it is my truth. The facts of a poem are subordinated to the truth of the fabrication.

If I'm lucky I learn something about myself in the writing. When a friend offered me some Macadamia nuts I declined without thinking because I had always said no to nuts. I sat down
to write about the interchange and was brought back to all my food dislikes. From there I was struck by other ideas I had not re-visited in many years. Where did they come from? Is it time to circle back? Is change possible and how does it happen? The poem becomes the agency for
interior exploration.

I don't mean to imply that the poem can be willed. There is nothing so daunting and at the same time exhilerating as the blank page. I sit and stare and allow a flotilla of flotsam to wash over me.
Some stay afloat, some sink. I have to hear my voice or I disown it. If it is too deliberate, too earnest, too pleading, too much like the six o'clock news, too pretty it deserves the delete key.

If I have written some lines which take me to an unexpected place and possibly of inexplicable
origin then I am very pleased. If the poem can be paraphrased perhaps it would have been better served by a paragraph.