Blue Door

in a brown adobe wall.

The door was always there.
The wall grew up around it.

We all want to see
what’s behind the door.

So does the wall.
It doesn’t know either.

Drama Kills Poetry: More About Constructing a Working Silence

Unresolved situations in our lives (dramas) interfere with the construction of the inner silence necessary to receive poems.   What makes a drama unresolved is the sense that something remains to be done to make the situation all right:  “I should have said to her. . . .”  “I wish I could. . . “  “Oh my God, what’s going to happen now?” 

Since only death (our own) will resolve the dramas in our lives (and not even then, the Hindus and Buddhists say), it would seem impossible for a poet to construct (or slip into) the silence necessary to compose a poem.

But it’s not.  Poems get composed every day.

There are a number of methods for reaching the silence.  One is to “write through” all the active dramas until either one reaches the state of “so what?” about them, or the internal voices subside on their own and the poem shines through.  I like that method because it puts in necessary work on both the dramas and the poems.

There are different ways to write through the dramas. 

• One is to just journal till you drop (the subject). 
• Another is to conduct an argument with oneself about the subject at hand. (This is particularly favoired by Cognitive Behaviorists, who go in for attacking and demolishing “dysfunctional” or “automatic” thoughts which produce inappropriate types and levels of emotion. 
• I’ve done both of those, and the thing I do now is to empathize with the voices that come to me out of the dramas.  I follow Marshall Rosenberg’s dictum, “Don’t just do something; stand there,”   naming the emotions that are being expressed by my drama voices, and then uncovering the needs behind those emotions. 

The voices help me in this, and we become partners (unlike the Cognitive Behavioral approach, where the voices are argued into silence.)  I do this in writing, and I also name the emotions and needs behind my own current responses to the drama voices. 

This method is particularly useful because it’s so quick.  Since I don’t talk about the situations but only the needs and emotions, I can be in the poetry zone is a couple of minutes.  I can even do this to a certain extent in my head without paper.

Comes in handy.

Poet in the World: Constructing the Bubble

To understand what the working poet (as opposed to poetry student) faces — and needs help with from time to time — sit down, set your clock for ten minutes, and draft a poem.

Actually five minutes was all I had this morning, and I had to construct my bubble of silence quickly. Luckily I was already thinking about the poem’s subject. In fact, that’s part of being “in the zone”: always on the verge of a poem.

Don’t look at your poem (or mine) as a finished product (that would be to misunderstand it); look on it rather as something to work on the next time you have ten minutes (or five):

NOISE

Pain is noise
yes and psychic pain, too,
and the radio
and the breeze
too cold around your neck

no the breeze
isn’t noise
that’s the poem

On the Borderlannd: Poets, Master Poets, and What it all Means

On the Borderland

A poet is an intermediary who works on the border between the visible and the invisible.  The poet’s job is to put the visible world in synch with the invisible world by bringing poems across the border.  A poem is a living organism made of language.  It uses all aspects of the language:  image, idea, sound, history, and the way language feels in the body when spoken or heard.

The invisible world has three territories:  the past, the future, and the parallel reality (which has been called the spirit world, the other side, the noöosphere, and the ontos on).  Though the poem comes from that world, it seeks to live and propagate in this world, and thus it must be attractive to human minds and hearts, which is where it lives.  It needs to be “meaningful” to people. 

It also needs to both follow and break rules of communication, and it is the poet’s job to help the poem do this.  This is what we mean when we talk about craft. Craft is the poet’s ability to take the invisible impulse of the poem and help it form an entity of words.  Craft is a very conscious occupation, which means that the poet spends more time on this side of the borderline than would, say, a shaman, a channeler, or a meditator.

What draws a poet to the borderland between the visible and the invisible is some kind of psychic wound.   A beginning writer of poems first seeks healing and comfort in the making of poems.  If the wound is not deep and heals quickly (as in the case of many adolescents), the writer will drift away.  If the wound is deep but the writer does not have a facility for language, then the writer will remain there, churning out bad poems, poems that can’t make their way into the cultural ecology.

If the writer finds healing while at the same time producing living work, then that person is a poet.

The type of benefit poets bring to their society depends on the invisible territory in which the poets work and the needs of their society at any given time.  Poets who work with past wrongs help their society re-think itself and deal with problems that it has ignored.  Poets who deal with the future write prophetic work that helps their society see where it is going and possibly change course.  Poets who work with the alternate reality help their society widen itself and become less constrictive.

What do poets need to do their work? 

Eventually the psychic wound will heal (unless the poet purposely keeps it open).  Then the poet needs another reason to be there.  This is usually supplied by some kind of vision of what her profession actually means and what good she is doing with it.  The vision will change as the poet matures. 

The poet also needs a sense of craft that is comprehensive enough to handle very wild inspirations and detailed enough to make articulate, articulated poems.  The details are vital down to commas and capital letters.

The poet needs courage.  Some of these inspirations come howling out of the other side, fangs agleam, and they almost always deal with painful subjects because that is where the adjusting needs to be done.   The poet has to believe that for some reason he can handle the wild inspiration without being thrown or torn apart by it.  This belief comes from experience, study, and personal contact with master poets who know the trick.  It can also come from religious faith.  A poet who stands completely alone might well get torn apart.  Pick your favorite tragic bio in evidence of this.

The poet needs the ability to create silence.  Without silence, the poetic impulse is distorted or blocked.   In this silence nothing matters but the poem itself.  Thoughts of outcome can’t intrude.  To the extent that they do, they will cripple the poem and make it smell of ego.  This poetic silence comes from an act of will independent of circumstances.  It can form in the middle of a battlefield.  it can form as a last act before dying.  The poet has to know it’s possible, and she has to have practice in constructing it.  This is something she can learn from a master.

Poets need masters who can stand on the borderline in silence and without being overwhelmed by thoughts of fear or reward.  The teacher of a poet needs to be able to communicate this attitude one way or another.  The best way is just by having done it.  The act leaves its mark. 

Poets need masters who can show them how to usher their work into the world without being overwhelmed by resistance or indifference from others.  It’s sad to know that the vast majority of poems will die without reaching the heart of even a single reader, but it’s true.  And so what?  How many flowers bloom unseen?  That’s how things are.

Poets need teachers who can show them the importance of craft without making a fetish of any one style or set of rules.  The impulse is always the most important thing.

Poets need teachers who are giving energy to, rather than taking it from, their students.  The teacher needs to be aware that he is the passing phase and that the new phase stands before him, poems in hand.

It’s a lot to do, but then that makes it worth doing.

Blizzard

Dad and I were talking about the sudden blizzard that came up Thanksgiving about 50 years ago and completely blinded us hunters there on the ridge so we didn’t know which way to go down.  One way led to my cousin’s farmhouse and the other way led to confusion and probably freezing to death since there was nothing that way for miles. 

The snow was so intense that when we finally decided which way to go, we actually slid down a twenty-foot cliff on the drifts. 

“I had us follow the power lines down.  Didja think the Old Man didn’t know what he was doing?” Dad asked.  He’s 89 now. 

“No, I trusted you completely,” I said. 

“More than I did,” he replied sheepishly.

And I realized that the power lines went down both sides of that ridge.

 

 

 

Still Caught by Narrative, I Daydream About the Good Ol’ Days

I mean like Homer, Milton, the Beowulf poet, Poe, Coleridge, all those folks telling stories with verse.  Now the lyric is King:  elucidating ever more subtle emotional states while less and less actually happens.  I’m not criticizing the lyric.  I started out writing them, and still do.  It wasn’t until I started following story, though, that I started having fun.  Maybe if we poets started telling stories again, we’d pick up a bigger following.

Caught by Narrative

I’ve been bitten by the narrative bug, and that’s the reason I haven’t posted lately.  Two bugs, actually:  the finish-up bug and the start bug.  I’ve finally finished my collection of narratives set in a small town in Ohio in the present time.  It’s been accepted by TJMF Publishing, and I owe them a second set of galley proofs.  Meantime, the Start bug has bitten me and filled me with a story from the same part of the world, but in the early 1900s. 

The thing about narratives is that they’re connected.  Connection is the heart of narration.  And since they’re connected — or should be — any piece I hacked out and posted here would be dripping blood, nerves, and sinew.  Maybe I’ll post both books if the hard copies don’t sell, but then I’ll have to post them backwards, last poem first, so that they read correctly on the screen.

But do you want to read two hundred pages of poetic vignettes? Each book will be about a hundred pages long.  My readers on PoetryCircle generally like the poems, but they’ve only seen the books being built, and not read one straight through.

Maybe there really is still a place for printed paper.

The Alchemy of Worse Alternatives

The kids in the alternative school
are mad because Bill the Director
won’t let them
explore storm sewers,

so they write BITE ME, SHUT UP,
and DIE BILL on the walls
in colored chalk, and draw Bill
with a bullet hole in his head.

“Make the blood look real,”
one of them says.

Then a teacher laughs, “Hey
you want a sewer, we could
send you back to Main Campus.”

So the bullet hole gets
covered by a hat, DIE BILL
becomes a green cat, someone
hides BITE ME in flowers,

and SHUT UP becomes a big
fat peach in which nestles the moon
holding in her arms the sun.

My Old Friend Marla

says she’s under surveillance.
It could be true.

She’s been poking around
in government records

for her book about
nuclear contamination

and people dying in
the small towns Back East

where the factories sit.
Hell, I’d be

disappointed in any
government that didn’t

at least check her out.
“Is she batshit crazy?”

my friends out here ask.
We have a lot of

local experience with
batshit crazy:

black helicopter watchers
chemtrail fearers

Federal Reserve haters
alien abductees. 

It’s a valid question
but it doesn’t matter:

even paranoids
have enemies.

She won’t talk
on the phone anymore.

She thinks anyone
who approaches her

after her public talks
is a “plant.”

I think she’s doing
their work for them

if indeed they’re doing
any work at all.

She hangs up the phone
and won’t answer my letters.

So I’m stuck
putting it in a poem

as I did with my parents
my church, my country

ever since I could write.

Highway 180 East

By the side of the road
picking up discarded

time.  Careful you don’t
become a discard yourself

but the damn stuff does
pile up.  Life

goes grey with it.
You gotta do something

with the blank faces
people toss off

as they go by.
Gotta salvage the fear

anger, love behind them.
Assemble the poems, then.

Folks will call you clever.
That’s all right.

Maybe they’ll take one
home.