Don't Muzzle the Ghazal

Tornadoes & Cricket

It's been too long since I posted here. Now that we're past the first of the year, and I'm (almost!) ready to begin a new semester, perhaps I can post more regularly and more frequently.

A week ago, we had unusually warm weather here. My wife and I went to southern Kansas and northern Oklahoma to visit family and friends. It was shirt-sleeve weather. Some days before, we had some snow and ice. Right now, the weather is more seasonable.

We walked on the Oklahoma State University campus and enjoyed watching an informal cricket game played by a group of Indian students. Like sandlot baseball, the game was clearly more for fun than for serious competition.

a pickup cricket game
on a warm Saturday in winter:
the wicket a domed lid
from a trash can
"Walla! Walla!

(I think I caught the encouraging cheer correctly.)

We returned to the Ozarks on Sunday. Monday night we were under tornado warnings from around 5:00 PM until after midnight. The sirens blew frequently after about 10:00 PM. The only shelter we have is a small closet under a stairway. Every time the sirens sounded, Rose, the dog, and I went into the closet. Our house dates back to the American Civil War — 145 years. Union cavalry officers were billeted in our house back then.

taking shelter
in an old closet
we breath dust
from an officer's coat

The storms extended from Tulsa, Oklahoma to Rolla, Missouri, a distance of about 290 miles. We didn't suffer any damage, but further southwest there was serious property damage and a few deaths. We listened to a radio station from Camdenton, Missouri. The announcer talked on the telephone with several trained weather spotters: Baily, Meatman, Donny, Router, Rev are the names I remember. These folks called in from various locations, including interstate overpasses from which they could see the storms roaring up Interstate 44.

Could You Stand a Poetry Stand?

It's an icy, snowy Saturday afternoon in the Ozarks, not bitterly cold but below freezing. Putting off some work, I poked around on the Internet and found "Poetry Stand," by Douglas Goetsch, in the Autumn 2007 issue of The American Scholar. Goetsch writes about a poetry field trip he took a group of students on, when he was teaching poetry at the New Jersey Governor’s School of the Arts.

Goetsch had the students run a poetry stand in Princeton, before the gates into the campus. Anyone could come to the stand and request a poem in any form about any topic. The students used scouts to bring some "customers" to the stand (there was no charge for the poems), but many people approached voluntarily. It would seem that if you offer people poetry that relates to their concerns, some of them will take you up on the offer.

I recommend Goetsch's article because it raises issues of poetry and the general public, of the attitude of poets toward "ordinary" people. His work with the students went a long way, apparently, to dismantle their initial perception of themselves as strange and wonderful and other people, non-poets, as dull and boring. Is the poet really a winged being from another realm, someone excruciatingly special, or is the poet a human much like others, but with the talents and training to voice human experiences in meaningful and moving ways? The statement of the opposites is mine, but I believe they reflect "Poetry Stand" accurately.

Goetsch sees poets as humans who can articulate human experiences into poetry. He is thoroughly focused on craft. I pretty much agree, with the qualification that there are as many ways of being a poet as there are of being human. And perhaps the phrasing is misleading: if "being a poet" means that one is a person who can write poems, that's fine; if "being a poet" means one is a person who is strange and wonderful and unlike the ordinary — well, ultimately, all of us are strange and wonderful, not just those who designate themselves as such.

Poetic Seasoning

What is poetic about a hot, humid July morning?

Not much. The dog enjoys it though, poking her head into the flower bed, hoping to surprise the very small rabbit who hides there (sometimes). Since the dog is on a leash, the rabbit is safe — safe and knows it, hopping only a few feet further away from the dog and then sitting motionless.

Is it poetic to arrive at work (after a 15 minute walk) wet with sweat?

I hear my long-ago English teachers, all the way into college, rebuking me for using a vulgar word like "sweat"; I remember showing one a poem in which I used "guts" — she thought "intestines" to be much more poetic.

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I wrote that fragment in mid-July; now it's almost the end of September in a different season, at least at this latitude. Fall has long been my favorite season. Since I grew up on a farm, in ranching country, the seasons and weather have always been important. Rainy weather meant my work was limited to regular chores and emergencies. When school started in the fall, my summer of hoeing crops, making hay, harvesting wheat was over. Always a compulsive reading, I enjoyed gifts of leisure time from the weather and structured study in school. (Well, the structured study not so much.)

As you may know, seasons are essential to traditional Japanese haiku — to the point that there is an accepted vocabulary of "season words" and almanacs listing them with examples. American poet and editor, William Higginson compiled two related books on season words from around the world: Haiku World: an International Poetry Almanac, Kodansha International (1996) and The Seasons: Poetry of the  Natural World, Kodansha International (1996). Each of these volumes has excellent poems and very useful  information.

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It's a warm, clear September morning. I walk our dog along the edge of a small parking lot, with a railroad running along its north edge. The right of way and grassy areas are thick with crown vetch, assorted grasses (Timothy & Johnson mostly), and moss thistle, an invasive plant not native to the Ozarks. I'm charged with the joy of autumn, its resonance in my life. (I fell in love with my wife in autumn, which is the best part of it for me.) What does all this have to do with ghazals? The seasons are not, to my knowledge, a traditional part of the ghazal, but perhaps there are ghazal poets, like me, who write with a continuous awareness of season and weather. If so, and if you have ghazals that use seasons and weather thematically, I'd love to see them. Send them!

Why Bother?

Why should I, you, or anyone else continue to write poetry? Haven't all the poems already been written? There are love poems, nature poems, narrative poems, and on and on. What do you and I and anyone else have to offer new in the way of theme or content or form?

Many years ago, when I was an undergraduate in Emporia, Kansas, another undergrad and I shared our "poems" (ironic quotation marks). The other fellow — whose name I've forgotten — surprised and shocked me by saying that there was no point in writing poetry because everything possible had already been written. I don't know about him, but, for better or worse, I've continued to scribble verses.

In a sense, my friend was right: the world probably has enough love poems, nature poems, etc etc. So, if I write a love poem for my wife, as I've done many times, why should I bother? Why not find the appropriate lines in the Song of Songs which Is Solomon's, in William Carlos Williams' The Desert Music, or Cole Porter? If I'm feeling blue, why not listen to the blues rather than scribbling a verse about it?

What makes the poem I write today — that you write today — different from the hundreds of thousands of existing poems?

The difference is that that theme, that content, that form is embedded in this situation, in the moment(s) in which you write. In other words, I haven't written this to this woman before, nor has anyone else. It is the situation, the personal, cultural, and historical context that makes it worthwhile to keep writing poetry. It is, of course, possible that  I or  you or  someone else will write something radically new. Ezra Pound's adage, "Make it new," is always relevant if difficult to achieve. Falling short of the adage, as I surely do, I can at least write in my situation.

This entry was prompted by a point of Friedrich Nietzsche's. I've been reading The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, in which an unpublished early essay of Nietzsche's is quoted. Trained as a classical philologist, Nietzsche wrote that classicists could keep their field alive by keeping it connected to their lives: understanding of the past is always vital in the context of the present (p. 30, my paraphrase).

If you wish a label for my position in this post, it is — existentialist. That's a label that's really a refusal to be labeled. Just keep writing, okay?

The Role of Rules

What is the role of rules in art? Should the artist (poet, painter, musician) seek to adhere to a clearly defined, detailed set of rules? Should the artist ignore all rules and refuse to have anything to do with them?

The Ghazal Page has just published David Jalajel's "Rules for Writing Arabic Ghazals in English." This article puts together the essentials of David's previous articles on using Arabic forms for English ghazals, microrhyme in ghazals, and enjambment. These articles present detailed information about the meter, rhyme, lineation, and stanzas of Arabic ghazals. David gives examples of his own English ghazals using these features as well as some examples from historical poets.

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche distinguishes the Apollonian and Dionysian types: the Apollonian values clarity, reason, order; the Dionysian values energy, intensity, spontaneity. These two, quite recognizable, attitudes may be found in poets' need for rules. The poet who needs rules, insists on them and on strict conformity to them, is Apollonian. The poet who despises rules, seeks open, organic forms, and finds rules stultifying is Dionysian.

This kind of dichotomy is very abstract: an extremely Dionysian poet, like Walt Whitman or Allen Ginsberg, will sometimes betray an interest in form and in rules; an Apollonian poet, like T. S. Eliot, will show moments of glowing spontaneity. Yes, this division is another version of the Classical vs. Romantic dichotomy and is equally superficial, yet the distinction is helpful as a starting point and as a caution to us not to make easy classifications of ourselves and others.

Me? I tire of the Dionysian "do your thing" attitude; I also tire of the Apollonian "submit to tradition" attitude. The poetry I return to includes work that tends toward either extreme, as well as work that doesn't fit these categories. People, language, and the world are too complex and subtle to be placed in one of two exclusive boxes.

Which Mind Are You In?

How do you write a poem? Where do you get your ideas? How do you know when a poem is finished?

Poets, artists, novelists get questions like these whenever the subject of creativity comes up. Several years ago, I wrote some FAQs giving my typical answers to such things. What follows here is a little more serious discussion.

It's commonplace to divide human mental capabilities into two sets: intellectual and creative, rational and imaginative, left-brain and right-brain, and on and on. Taking these divisions as mutually exclusive is a serious mistake: the two interact, influence each other, blur and blend. Still, there is some truth in the division. (The division is overly simple: we surely think, experience, imagine in more than two modes.)

I'm going to name the two modes analytical and intuitive. Almost any synonyms for these two terms will work, although with different connotations.

So: Which mind do you write poetry with? Both, you say? But you can't use both modes simultaneously — humans can't multitask in the strict sense of the word.

New questions: Which mind do you use most? Which mode do you start with?

If you're concerned about following the rules, if you scan carefully to make sure your meter is correct, if you rhyme according to a fixed scheme, if your rhymes are full rhymes and not half- or slant-rhymes, then, I'd say, the analytical mind dominates your critical process. You will find Edgar Allan Poe's "Philosophy of Composition," a mechanical, rationalized account of how he wrote "The Raven," to be convincing and inspiring. There's no role for the intuitive mode of thinking in Poe's account.

If, one the other hand, you simply start writing and go with the flow, casting aside any concern about form, rhyme, meter, and so on, then your intuitive mind dominates. You will find Jack Kerouac's "Spontaneous Bop Prosody" exhilarating and write all night long.

Which mind do you write in? Which do I? Is one better than the other? There'll be more comment on the "two-minds hypothesis" later on.

My Poetics

I've just posted a page — link at the right — that contains my statement of my poetics. I hope you find it worthwhile. It's squarely in the American tradition of organic poetry, of the poetry of flow and the natural. I don't put myself in the same class as Thoreau, Whitman, Levertov, et al, but I do feel part of that tradition.

Starting to Publish

Once a person has decided to write poetry, and has actually written some, the next step — the next desire — is to publish those poems. Back when I began to publish poems (45 years ago!), there was a pretty clear process. The wanna-be-a-published-poet person had to identify places where the poems could be submitted. There was a very helpful journal, Trace, which published a list of markets, along with poems and prose. Most teachers in English departments didn't have a clue: "Oh, send it to the New Yorker," they'd say, or maybe The Atlantic. Those magazines, of course, could pick and choose whom they'd publish. I could ever decide if these professors were just ignorant or being sadistic.

I was fortunate enough to get good advice.

I've edited for both hard copy and webzines. I have seen many submissions from poets who don't know the conventions. And maybe the conventions are changing. I wrote a blog post  about this in 2003.

I'd like to know (a) how poets today get started publishing, with "publishing" have the widest possible meaning, and (b) what you see as the conventions for submitting poems. I'm especially interested in how this works in countries outside the USA and in languages other than English. I will also (c) answer any questions I can.

If you care to respond to (a) or (b) or ask a question (c), please do it as a comment to this post.