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Writing Without Revision

A few weeks ago, I wrote that I was worrying too much about writing too “perfectly” too quickly. In other words, I was setting the expectation of quality writing too high for first drafts, which resulted in non-writing. My task was to try writing some poems without revision, at least as a starting point. The experiment was not some Jack Kerouac test, let’s write and never revise. Rather, this was an exercise of not worrying about revising until it was time to actually revise. The goal was to just write and not allow myself the option of any revising for several weeks to free up the creative process. Specifically, I had set out a goal to write a “poem” a night for several weeks. So what resulted?

First, I was a bit foolish in the “a poem a night” for two reasons. 1) I was just beginning a vacation that spread across the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. I tend to be less focused and catch up on sleep and stuff, so I did not write every night. 2) This is probably even more important. I spent a lot of time trying to catch up on Battlestar Galactica. For several months, I had devoted some weekend time to watching a couple of episodes of this series. While I did not catch up (i.e., watch all of season 4’s first half prior to the start of the second half of season 4), I still spent a lot of time watching this…thus, not writing.

Outside of that, I’m pleased with the results of this task. I will not share any of that writing, for it is in no condition to share. That said, I did write and I wrote freely (we had some bitter cold and other very wintry weather, so a series of these focus on winter…at least as a background). Lines came to me, images rippled from my unconscious, and I just wrote and did not allow myself to revise. Much of this writing will end up in the trash, and that’s OK. But some of it, some of these poems, some of these lines will become, I’m confident, full-fledged poems. Hence, I will begin some revision work soon. Before that, I will allow myself a few more days of writing without revision.

W.S. Graham

I have been reading W.S. Graham recently (I have his Selected Poems from either 1976 or 1977). I have been very intrigued by his work since reading some of his work in Great Modern Poets edited by Michael Schmidt. Some of his phrasing is striking. Consider this from “Letter VI”:

A day the wind was hardly
Shaking the youngest frond
Of April I went on
The high moor we know.

One of Graham’s themes is the obstacle of language in communicating, so these violent warpings of language (though noticeably different than Dylan Thomas’s “The force through the green fuse that drives,” which is as much imagist abstraction as perplexing language) represent the obstacle of clearly communicating. At the same time, the language forces a focus on language, which helps clarify communication. What’s interesting about this particular passage is the way the line breaks do much of the work of focusing the language. I could reset this more traditionally, “A day the wind was hardly shaking, the youngest frond of April, I, went on the high moor we know.” Now…my resetting does not completely put this into a traditional understanding, but I think it gives you a sense of what I mean by the line breaks doing a lot of the work.

While a central theme of Graham’s is language, he does not spend much time writing poems about poetry, which I do not normally like. Sometimes, Graham’s poetry covers both territories, but the focus still remains on language. Here’s the first part of “Approaches to How They Behave”:

What does it matter if the words
I choose, in the order I choose them in,
Go out into a silence I know
Nothing about, there to be let
In and entertained and charmed
Out of their master’s orders? And yet
I would like to see where they go
And how without me they behave.

My reading of Selected Poems intrigued me enough to hunt down a copy of New Collected Poems (at a decent price). In Andrew Motion’s review of that collection, he quotes Douglas Dunn quoting Ian Hamilton: “It isn’t true that ‘if it’s good, it will survive.’ Someone, somewhere, has to keep saying that it’s good – or if not good, exactly, then at least worthy of a small piece of the historical jigsaw, the map.” So do my part in keeping Graham’s poetry alive.

A Book to Read

I just finished the A.C. Graham translation of Chinese poems. Originally a Penguin publication, the New York Review of Books has released it yet again in a very fine version: Poem of the Late T’ang. Several weeks ago, Jared Carter brought me a copy of The New York Review of Books with an essay in part about this reprint. One of the poems by the poet Li Ho was quoted:

The wind in the wu-t’ung startles the heart, a lusty man despairs;
Spinners in the fading lamplight cry chill silk.
Who will study a bamboo book still green
And forbid the grubs to bore their powdery holes?
This night’s thoughts will surely stretch my guts straight:
Cold in the rain a sweet phantom comes to console the writer.
By the autumn tombs a ghost chants the poem of Pao Chao.
My angry blood for a thousand years will be emeralds under the earth!

According the reviewer, Eliot Weinberger:

The poet was Li Ho, who did not fit any of the traditional categories assumed for Chinese poets. He was neither a Confucian civil servant restoring meaning to language nor a Taoist adept out in nature, neither a libertine nor a Buddhist monk. He was a Crazy Poet—the Chinese refer to him as the “ghostly genius”—who rode his donkey all day and wrote scattered lines that he tossed into a bag. At night, he emptied out the bag and put the lines together as poems, which he threw into another bag and forgot. His mother complained that “this boy will spit his heart out,” which he did at age twenty-six.

The poem quoted I find to be absolutely amazing. Of the poets I love (Hopkins, Crane, Thomas, etc.), I often find that their “meaning” is obscure or impenetrable (or both), but the words carry a power, a beauty that is musical. Meaning that the qualities of rhythm, sound, and mystery are abstract and yet moving. Many of the modern Greek poets are similar (Seferis for me in particular, though Gatsos’ Amorgos is a study of surrealism). Of course, I’m reading a translation and do not have the foggiest idea of what this is like in Chinese (though given that Li Ho is still read centuries after his death is a fair indication of his value in Chinese poetry), the translator has captured a moving, wonderful poem in English. I’ll assume that the Chinese is simply better.

Poems of the Late T’ang is worth the price simply for Li Ho’s poetry, but Graham’s introduction and his translation of Tu Mu, Li Shang-yin, and others are strong reasons to own this volume. Indispensable.

Suprise and Strength: The Criticism of Christian Wiman

I have recently completed Christian Wiman’s book Ambition and Survival. I was very pleasantly surprised by this book. Why? Well, I was for several years a subscriber of Poetry under the Joe Parisi days. When Wiman took over the reins, I was, over time, disappointed. There was some very good poetry (Christopher Logue’s continuing updating of The Iliad for one….cold calls). I was disappointed with the seemingly fewer pages devoted to poetry (and typically several poems by a poet in each issue resulting in fewer poets being represented) and more to letters, etc. Additionally, of the few poems I had read of Wiman’s, I was not struck by any particular fondness or rejection of the poems. Now…I do not think that one must be a great or good poet to be a good or great editor or good or great critic…all can be encompassed in one person, though this is extremely rare. Wiman makes a case for the changes in Poetry under his direction in Ambition and Survival, primarily arguing that poetry is a difficult art to create, so rarity in poetry is not necessarily a bad thing. I’m unswayed by his argument about his editorial choices, but at least he has a rationale.

More importantly, however, is Wiman’s frequent discussions of the creative process…and here is his strength. Specifically, Wiman recognizes the tension often associated with writing poetry: the need for silence to compose but the need to write something that is vocal. The way poets write often reflects aspects of their life:

The way a poet thinks about the relation of poetry to his life will have a great deal to do with the kind of poetry produced. There is a world of difference between the poem-a-day routine of Dickinson…and the sonnets Hopkins said he had ‘written in blood,’ between the seemingly limitless fluency of Auden and the precarious austerities of Hart Crane. It’s oversimplifying matters considerably to think of this difference as merely one of relative emphasis on process and product, as if for Auden and Dickinson it was the act of writing that mattered, whereas for Crane and Hopkins it was the finished work.

It is oversimplifying, but Wiman has hit on a bit of truth. I can think about my own writing and methods that I employ. Wiman spends significant time discussing various poets’ search for the perfect poem. Some poets strive for it and block up. Others strive for it and never get there but produce volumes of works. There is not one correct method, for each poet struggles with his or her own method to continue producing while seeking perfection. Yvor Winters blocked up. Crane and Dylan Thomas essentially ceased writing (but how much alcohol affected that is hard to deduce…Crane still wrote the blazingly magnificent poem “The Broken Tower” just shortly before his suicide). Auden wrote and wrote, but very little ever measured up to his early work. Yeats, on the other hand, turned a corner in his old age and became a poet for the ages. Across various essays in this book, Wiman approaches this topic and finds some common threads. One of them is that poetry comes from absence within the poet…something missing, and the perfect poem is a refuge from that absence, a perfect place. Now the “absence” that Wiman refers to often metaphysical (he spends much time talking about religious impulses and I agree with him that often poets are not “religious” yet seek the replacement of mystery inherent in religion through poetry), though it can be loss associated with the normal acts of living (loss of friends, absence of security, lack of hope, etc.). Hence, poetry is often an act of transendence by the poet.

Now, one can take these ideas too far, and my compressed discussion of them may give the incorrect perception that Wiman does. These comments are often scattered across several essays within the book, so their effect is much more measured and sustainable. I think that the creative act has many triggers and motives, and I do think that Wiman touches on part of this. He would, also, recognize that he is speaking from his perspective.
Wiman is also honest about the various schools of poetry that have become dominant and fallen away. Regarding confessional poetry’s becoming the de facto institutional poetic mode:

Don’t misunderstand me: when I argue for a more direct connection between life and art, I don’t necessarily mean the poet’s life. Lord knows that tendency has run amok.

Wiman, however, is never completely dismissive of any mode or method. Instead, he can see the value of placing the “I” of the poet in the poem. He does understand that any tendency can be taken too far and degrade its own value. What Wiman is striving for, in the end, is that poets write as the creative act pushes them…not to fit into any school, not to fit any perceptions about what poetry is or is not. “Enduring silence is no small part of poetry’s discipline, acquiring the patience to wait, knowing when not to write.”

Authenticity, Part 2

An earlier post discussed authenticity as I had found it in the latest season of Heroes and Battlestar Galactica (latest season that I have seen…season 3). But specifically about poetry, authenticity or its lack is often apparent by laziness, which manifests itself in incoherent structure, sloppy form, poor word choice, or numerous other items. I will not even try to state that I avoid completely all such laziness or any other pitfalls a writer faces as he or she constructs a poem. All I can say is that I strive to not be lazy, to question every thing I’m doing in a poem, etc. Also note that the below are essentially notes of my thinking and malleable to further thought, counter-evidence, etc.

Authenticity in art is really, however, a whole bunch of things. From the perspective of poetry, the poems that we classify as epics, narratives, and dramatic monologues have similarities to TV, theater, and fiction in that they usually have a world within which they work. The world of The Iliad contains gods and goddesses as well as humans (Odysseus) and humans slightly more than human (Achilles). We accept Homer’s world as he presents it to us. If, instead, Homer had written a secular epic without reference or indication of anything divine and suddenly Apollo arrives to revive Hector after being knocked silly by Ajax, we would not have accepted it because the world that would have been constructed was violated to maintain a character – the problem would not be in the presence or absence of the divine or semi-divine but in the inconsistent and sloppy structure. Obviously, in the actual text, Apollo’s appearance is not only unsurprising but his not appearing would have been surprising. Similarly, in the much discussed magical realism of many 20th century Latin American writers, the magical element works only when the author is true world he or she creates. In Carlos Fuentes’ Terra Nostra, the author maintains a consistent and despite the magical elements believable world view.

Regarding lyric poetry, I can look at the structure of a poem and propose those poems that adopt a full rhyming structure of ABAB and follow it throughout a poem only to at one point have ABAC or ABAb, where the b is a slant rhyme risk, inauthenticity by not obeying the coherence of the structure. Poems that mix full and slant rhyme seem automatically to be troubling to readers because it feels lazy (it may not be, but the perception is)…as if the poet could not find a full rhyme for every rhyme so willy-nilly chooses a slant rhyme.
Cliche rhymes are also risky. Rhyming “trees” with “knees” just seems too easy and overdone. But one can turn that into a strength…not by following with the expected rhyme but by following with an innovative rhyme. Robert Frost’s “Evening in a Sugar Orchard” rhymes “trees” and “Pleiades”:

They were content to figure in the trees
As Leo, Orion, and the Pleiades.

Frost sets up an expectation of rhyme and follows through with it, but with a striking, unexpected rhyme. This seems the opposite of laziness and thus the more vigorous and compelling. This is not to suggest that mixing full and slant rhymes in a single poem is lazy, inauthentic, or incoherent. Commonly, this is true, but poets can pull it off (Yeats, for example in “Sailing to Byzantium”). Or how a rhyme sounds to an American makes no sense to an Irish reader and vice versa. I think readers typically, however, allow for such language variations.

The errors of mixing metaphors, etc., also fall under this spell of laziness and inauthenticity. The point of all this is that an art must be true to its form to be genuine and interesting to the reader. Even if a reader cannot pinpoint such weaknesses (it is typically easier in science fiction and fantasy writing…I have a several friends who can spot minute errors of time-travel logic in time-travel stories and movies), the weakness is apparent even subconsciously.