BAY AREA POETS SEASONAL REVIEW
MARVIN HIEMSTRA'S Poetry In Spite of Itself
"Poetry in Spite of Itself" is a unique column published each issue in the BAY AREA POETS SEASONAL REVIEW written by Editor Marvin R. Hiemstra and held under his copyright. © 2009.
Heavy Lies the Head that Wears a Poem!Poems have been sneaking into my life since the day I was born. The three poems I’m about to discuss popped up out of my library and demanded to be counted and relished. That being settled I realized that all three poets/writers were men. What a bad boy I am! But then I thought…lady poets do seem to have an easier time of it. Society does not smile on a male poet: society seems to think that a lady poet is kind of sweet or not. When blatant exceptions like Sappho and Anne Sexton appear, society exclaims “Those dames really have balls!”
I never knew Sappho, but in Graduate School I encountered Anne Sexton. She did a reading: no women came. There were three scrawny students, that included me, yes, I was scrawny once, and 17 male professors in suits, ties, and silk underwear. It was the middle of summer school. Although the room was air-conditioned down to a polar bear’s wet dream, Sexton looked around the room immediately disqualifying we three students and, scrutinizing the professors with a more than a hint of contempt, she growled, “It is so hot in here, gentleman, you MUST take off your coats.” Although I was not a guileless youth, it still took me 3 seconds to realize that this was a Find the Best Hunk Hunt calculated to make Sexton’s life a bit more interesting after the reading.
My life long experience in the poetry world seems to suggest that women are usually able to take care of themselves.
For men the world of a writer is often a difficult place to be, but, fortunately, that conflicted situation often works to enhance the quality of writing.
Let’s talk about three poems that show the male poet’s uneasy position in the literary world, about a poet set against the grain, a poet wanting to assume the role of a poet: whatever that role maybe in a particular period of History.
So much grows in a poem but for obvious reasons it must begin, THE CUNNING CARROT, and end, THE NOBLE WRAP, with a flourish!!! To begin, THE CUNNING CARROT, the reader heart must be touched immediately or the reader probably will not continue to read the poem. The actual heart of the poem, RARE MEAT IN THE SANDWICH, should present an evolution, a story to tell, a mood to share, an insight to polish. Again at the conclusion, THE NOBLE WRAP, the reader’s heart must be touched into vital remembrance.
“Two Tramps in Mud Time” is one of Robert Frost’s many keen observations of his own place in the world.
(THE CUNNING CARROT)
Out of the mud two strangers came
And caught me splitting wood in the yard,
And one of them put me off my aim
By hailing cheerily “Hit them hard!”
The magnificent first line would securely hook anyone with a drop of curiosity lurking between the ears. Contrast poet stuck in his rural stronghold with two out-of-work lumberjacks drifting through. Frost knows one wants his job.
(from RARE MEAT IN THE SANDWICH)
The time when most I loved my task
These two must make me love it more
By coming with what they came to ask,
You’d think I never had felt before
The weight of an ax-head poised aloft,
The grip on earth of outspread feet,
The life of muscles rocking soft
And smooth and moist in vernal heat.
The poet tries to play all roles because he believes that the poet’s role must encompass all. Frost grants the specific path of action dealt to each individual. He respects the two wanderers from the lumber camps who need work. Frost, the poet, is attempting to unite all of life in thought, poetry, and in action, chopping wood well.
(THE NOBLE WRAP)
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.
The poet, floundering in a world of practicality, knows the ideal and at the same time knows the ideal is seldom reached or even approached. This potent study has taken us from mud to Heaven.
W. H. Auden’s brief, but profound, poetic study “Herman Melville” has yet to be matched by the longest biography and there have been many.
(THE CUNNING CARROT)
Towards the end he sailed into an extraordinary mildness
And anchored in his home and reached his wife
And rode within the harbor of her hand,
And went across each morning to an office
As though his occupation were another island
Melville was a poet always, not a prose writer ever. He did not just chronicle a whale hunt, with incredible personal sacrifice he offered it as one of Literature’s crucial metaphors.
(From RARE MEAT IN THE SANDWICH)
Evil is unspectacular and always human,
And shares our bed and eats at our own table,
And we are introduced to Goodness every day,
Even in drawing-rooms among a crowd of faults;
He has a name like Billy and is almost perfect
But wears a stammer like a decoration;
And every time they meet the same thing has to happen;
It is the Evil that is helpless like a lover
And has to pick a quarrel and succeeds,
And both are openly destroyed before our eyes.
Perhaps Melville, more than any other writer, dared to face the fact that the basic condition of life is terror and destruction. He had hurled himself about the world’s oceans in what might be called random attempts at self-destruction. He accidentally survived to somehow suggest in his work the contradictions that cannot be put into words, much less reconciled. Melville personal life was always a ship-wreck, whether he was on land or sea.
(THE NOBLE WRAP)
But now he cried in exultation and surrender
“The Godhead is broken like bread. We are the pieces.”
And sat down at his desk and wrote a story.
We delight in the juxtaposition of the Divinity’s Ultimate Gift for every human in the World to the Gritty Mundane of actually living and being a writer.
From Charles Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil we have this poem with the ironic title “The Blessing” translated from the French by David Paul.
(THE CUNNING CARROT)
When, by a decree of the sovereign power,
The poet makes his appearance in a bored world,
With fists clenched at the horror, his outraged mother
“Why was I not made to litter a brood of vipers
Rather than conceive this human mockery?
My curses on that night whose ephemeral pleasures
Filled my womb with this avenging treachery!
(From RARE MEAT IN THE SANDWICH)
The poem ruthlessly tells us in even more detail how roundly disliked the poet is by his status prone mother and later in the poem to his contemptuous mistress. All that is the norm of predictable societal machinations despises the poet. But, at best, the poet is truly above it all and Baudelaire tells us how. At best, we poets are above it all and don’t you, male poet or female poet or any combinations of the above, forget it for one minute or one eternity.
(THE NOBLE WRAP)
Poetic achievement is certainly the best that man can do: think from David’s Psalms to Emily Dickenson’s Daily Thoughts for a Petulant Universe. Here Baudelaire does not mince words about the poet’s hard earned cosmic diadem:
But all the treasury of buried Palmyra,
The earth’s unknown metals, the sea’s pearls,
Mounted by Thy Hand, would be deemed an inferior
Glitter, to his diadem that shines without jewels,
For Thou knowest it will be made of purest light
Drawn from the holy hearth of every primal ray
To which all human eyes, if they were one bright
Eye, are only a tarnished mirror’s fading day!
With the exception of those poets, like Mr. Byron, infamous for activities below the belt, poets are often very much unloved by the world because of the brilliance and importance of their perceptions and the creation of their poems which often assume an even higher significance than their creators. Jealousy is definitely the most prevalent and highly developed human emotion: a reoccurring batch of fresh poets makes certain that jealousy will never go out of fashion.
Still think you want to be a poet? Actually you do not have a choice. You are or you aren’t. Have a great life in either case! This column is dedicated to all the poets in the world who are struggling at this uneasy moment in History.
Marvin R. Hiemstra’s book, A Poet Wrangler at Work, will appear in 2011. Comments about this column as welcome: drollmarv@aol.com.
The Dazzle of Understatement
Poems come in more varieties than do spiders and new spiders are being constantly discovered. However, like the Michael York character in the movie Something for Everybody, I do have my preferences. If you the poet want me to remember your poem, give me a creation that is noble (the dregs are always with us and what a bore they are), a creation that is understated (the poem must open to bloom in my imagination: not on the page, not by illustration, not in obscurity, not by pay up on demand, not in Iceland only), and a creation that leaves deep feelings and welcome understanding thriving in my mind.
The two poems by San Franciscans I’ve chosen to share choose me. I’ll never forget either one. My first and burning thought was I must, must tell somebody about this so here we are. August Kleinzahler’s genre masterpiece, “A Wine Tale,” appears in London Review of Books, February 12, 2009, and Ken Saffran’s valiant synthesis, “Newton’s First Law of Motion,” can be discovered on Elizabeth Hack’s prize winning website of poetry and visual art, www.elizabethhack.com.
August Kleinzahler’s “A Wine Tale” begins by tugging the reader’s sleeve to enter the precise world of the poem:
Behind the chateau, its celebrated ‘candle-snuffer’ towers
and Gothic traceries engraved and worn proudly on the labels
of how many bottles of Pinot and Bourgogne,…
We move into a space we are eager to be and meet the hero of the tale, “…the old caretaker sleeps in the shadow of the cistern,….” Is this story mock heroic or a greatest story ever told? The caretaker dreams blissfully of his long quiet life and remembers the fairy tales of his childhood. He awakes stunned by his rich, detailed memories,
…not to mention the emphatic bande
pitching a tent in the lap of his purple-stained coveralls.
Nearly 70, he thinks to himself, sheepish but rather pleased
at the impudence, the importuning of his valorous little friend.
He muses that he shouldn’t drink so much at lunch, but there is much wine at hand, “…cherry, mint and leather, the tiered finish, in every swallow….” There is “the smell of the earth after last night’s rain, the smell of all those Aprils and Septembers….”
The poet gives his evaluation:
Who is to say if our friend is an epicure, a wastrel,
or but a simple man, a paysan,
of no particular ambition, wit or aptitude,
whose destiny has been to lift things up, clean them off,
and put them back down again where they belong
in paradise?
The reader’s thoughts glow: the poet is civilized enough to let the reader make the decision. The reader is grateful for that and the serene time in experiencing the poem, a refreshing genre painting of the spirit. The caretaker has fulfilled his destiny and his potency in the finest way that any man might. A poignant contrast to our current mindlock where no one could possibly be of any value at all unless that person is moving up and out of six figures.
“A Wine Tale” achieves much of its comfort and magnificence from a calm surface context: no elbow whacking metaphors, just reality, but reality perceived in all its dimensions. The caretaker is a vibrant hero: think only of all who have relished that wine in his care. Compare the caretaker’s function to the scatter dash lives many of us seem compelled to endure. The reader’s response does correspond to the moment in history when the reader approaches a poem: the reader of “A Wine Tale” finds solace at a tremulous time when little is functional.
Ken Saffran’s “Newton’s First Law of Motion” is the first poem I’ve seen about the Un-united States of America’s low point, 9/11, that has the actual courage to face the situation. The initial stanza has a power most poets can only dream about.
is it possible
to find them
in what is today
rain turn to snow
Quick response is “never, never!” But the underlying fact is “yes, many were rudely tossed back into the Cosmic Molecule Circus.” The reader moves quickly on.
an avalanche of debris
a moment ago was
remarkably fragile steel
the image of security
reflected in glass
so many lives
rising and falling
choosing to stay still
poured like gravity
onto brittle streets
The word/concept avalanche here is worth a zillion words. It must be said that Saffran makes brilliant use of what we Americans and the world know too well about 9/11 and floats his poem magnificently on that knowledge and feeling. Understanding the reader is the poet’s absolute most difficult job. Saffran not only understands the reader, but adeptly mines the reader’s state of mind.
The final stanza brings us gently to terms with the situation in the best way that can be done. The poet’s understanding is both surface and profound.
this season of substraction
light drains from trees
thin shadows touch
all we ever loved
wind has
the last word
remember
_____________________________________
Based in San Francisco, Marvin R. Hiemstra teaches performance skills to both writers and musicians. RATTLE noted that Hiemstra’s French Kiss Destiny the DVD “sets several new standards for poetry in our times.” The poet/humorist is at work on a new book of poetry to be titled French Kiss Coincidence. Comments welcome: drollmarv@aol.com
That Poet Stinker:
For the Birds!
There are poets who spend their precious lives trying to write the best poetry they can and then there are “poets” who waste their precious lives trying to bash those real poets. The scenarios that follow were all taken from life: to protect the guilty no names are included. Here’s just a sample what you may encounter on the bumpy road of poetry:
Witness a terribly important poet MC pulling the plug on the mic at a idyllic wooded park venue every time a dynamic poet stands up for the open mic. Fortunately a flock of noisy wild canaries fills in the silence.
Attend another poet’s reading in a used bookstore. Discover that you are the only attendee and notice that the poet reading (who you have known for 20 years) will not introduce you to the moderator. She gives the moderator a dirty look when you introduce yourself. The bookworms can’t help but smirk.
Join a writer’s group and after 3 sessions realize that one member always submits poems for group comment that have already been published. Consequently wasting the group’s time and assuring the group that their comments are stupid and pointless because that poem has already appeared in print. Magpies, gathering material, chuckle at the window.
Give a brilliant reading deep in the provinces and offer your book, first day out!, for sale on the book table only to overhear the extremely local Poet Laureate snap at someone who picks up your book to investigate. “I read that. It’s garbage. You don’t want it!” Multitudes of sullen seagulls slowly move into the parking lot.
Receive a once in a lifetime Pulitzer Prize in Poetry nomination and suggest a reading at your hometown small college you attended before you continued on to the State University of Iowa Writer’s Program and a Honors Degree in Creative Writing. Remember in spring the redheaded woodpeckers are really obnoxious. The Poet in Residence says the college would love to have you, but he doesn’t get back to you. You call three weeks before the event. Poet in Residence says they are too busy to use you and asks what year you received that degree anyway. You give the year and he snaps back, “Your mother must be really old!” You had mentioned a visit to your mother in the first communication.
Endure an insolent 45 minute telephone call from an Officious Voice asking you to be an editor for one book in a poetry series and “And, of course, we do expect a serious donation from each editor.” Because you like one poet in the series very much, you say “yes” and send the Voice a check for $400. Next day you learn from another source that you will NOT be one of the editors. You should have listened to the blue jays laughing on the deck during the telephone call.
Bring your new prize achievement to give a critic friend: he sneers at your book in the same way that legendary Kundry looked up and laughed at humanity’s most important moment. Cesspool crows always expect the worse. You know it took Kundry centuries to work out her redemption: listen and learn. Jealousy is never an excuse for any behavior.
To conclude on a happy note there is a universe of poets out there who both write splendid poetry and shine with kind understanding. When a poet walks up to you with a quiet smile in an after midnight Deli and says, “I like that poem of yours so much,” you know that moment belongs in History. A nightingale sings.
One last comment: some will proclaim – poets have a right to be stinkers just like everyone else. Wrong. Walt Whitman said, “Of all mankind the great poet is the equable man….” I say, “Of all mankind the great poet doesn’t have time to be a stinker.”
______________________________________
Based in San Francisco, Marvin R. Hiemstra has just been around the world promoting his French Kiss Destiny the DVD. Two recent reviews appear in RATTLE and Library Journal. Marv teaches performance skills and can be contacted at drollmarv@aol.com.
Open Mic Delight!
Your appearance at Open Mic is your signature, your soul, your footprint. Like the famous Buddha footprints that appear in stone all over the Eastern world, your poetic footprint should be potent, symmetrical, and perhaps include a a symbol or two: a Buddhist prayer wheel or the sun or the most candid image ever poemed.
Each poem is a slice of the poetic universe that you, and you alone, inhabit. Whether the poem is a just rained on backyard variety lyric (the current abnormal norm) or a fixed form (so many delicious forms are out there waiting for you to fill them with your heart) or a sincere and clearly stated tribute to another poet or terrifyingly topical or a “Get with it, you creep!” pronouncement or just pure fun and joy or a simple, sincere observation. The poem should reflect and be you. It should reflect and be you at your best. It should be unmistakably you and no one else. Why would you want to “write like” another poet?
So just why do you think you must present more than one poem at Open Mic? Do you think the audience might loathe one and love the other? Believe me if they don’t like one, you will be tuned out and the audience will be punching their blackberries. Contrary to my snide fantasy that follows, it really doesn’t matter if the stinker poem is first or last.
It’s not the quantity. It’s the quality. I know that is against the rough and tumble and give me a child until the child is five USA propaganda grain. Sometimes it is best not to share that idea with another American. Sometimes that concept even hurts, but, if you are evolving and let’s pray you are, it only hurts for a little while.
After all you are not the evening’s feature. It may be extreme ego devastation, but it’s true. Rushing inaudibly through five poems until the Poet Wrangler stops you is not endearing. Reading poems so quickly that no one in the audience can even begin to grasp what the poem is saying does not appear to be helpful to your alleged identity as a poet. You are not awarded with a check for one million Euros for each word you mumble. Quite the contrary you are politely, and sometimes not so politely, dismissed by the audience who justly regrets your name on the Open Mic list. So be kind to your name.
Even more crucial if you don’t happen to have a solid, vibrant poem ready for that particular Open Mic, don’t sign your moniker on the list. Your smiling, listening presence will be happily remembered. Your presentation of dead meat will not be remembered happily.
Often a poet is tempted to “try out” a half baked poem at Open Mic. This can be appropriate if the poet reads aloud the poem each day for about a week prior to the Open Mic event. “I don’t have time!” you indignantly howl. “You do have three minutes a day to transform yourself into an authentic poet,” I compassionately suggest.
Please sit down so you can comfortably squirm while you read this paragraph. It is your responsibility (remember the word responsibility has been rendered almost extinct by evasive lawyers out to lunch) to read the poem aloud 7 days in a row. Whatever half baked portions of that poem remain will be move much closer, much, much closer to that final fully baked and delicious destiny of the poem. Certainly you must read your poem with an eager red pen in hand and write down possible and/or necessary changes that will bring the poem closer to itself. Do the revision that it is your privilege to do. Rejoice in the result, a shimmering poem. Then be happy to share your poem.
Here’s a little prayer you might try. I’ve found it amazing effective.
KING KONG BIG MOUTH
Lord of the Wide Open Mic
My ears hurt.
Please no more poems about
the enchanted beat of microwave popcorn
that big time collective squeeze epic wiped out FOREVER by two ants
doing a high five on the Delete Key
afternoon delight on freshly laid ASTRO turf.
absolutely no hot potato shuffling of alleged or out to lunch poems
followed by asinine apologies:
"I know it’s in here somewhere….”
“Maybe it’s that poem I scrawled on the back of a pawn shop ticket. You know what that means! Got my glow-in-the-dark Rolex back. Poem is gone.”
“I guess I left that poem on my pillow. It would have made you cry.”
May I suggest just one dazzling breathing poem
out of in each open mic mouth….
If a poet reads 2 or more poems and the last poem sucks,
which poem will bounce off the walls of my mind UNTIL THE END OF TIME?
KING KONG BIG MOUTH
Lord of the Wide Open Mic
Please!!!!!!! Do what you have to do.
_______________________
Based in San Francisco, Marvin R. Hiemstra teaches performance skills to a wide variety of writers and musicians. RATTLE noted that Hiemstra’s French Kiss Destiny the DVD “sets several new standards for poetry in our times.” Comments welcome: drollmarv@aol.com
