Last week, I posted
some thoughts and examples from my own work in response to
Joy Katz's Best American Poetry Blog entry about the use of repetition in the endings of contemporary poems. I summarized her entry this way:
Katz suggests two reasons for why there is so much repetition.
First, this repetition is a product of poets doing what they see everyone else doing it. In part, this may be out of some anxiety of expectation we feel while we write for readers (other poets) who are looking for repetition in endings. Katz explains, "So we're used to seeing it, and we've got those kick-kicks in our minds — our poems are Rockettes, or maybe they're blowing kisses, or landing a couple of punches — as we read each others' work. We do it because we do it."
Second, we repeat because it is a variation of free verse form, and repetition has a long tradition that informs our contemporary moment. Katz cites lines from Plath, Bishop, Yeats, Sidney, and Shakespeare, as examples.
While there wasn't anything particularly revolutionary in her post, and while I'm still waiting on the follow-up posts, her thoughts were productive in the sense that she compelled me to go back and look for consistency, patterns, variations, idiosyncrasies, recurring moves, in the ways I end the poems in my manuscript. As a result, I've been able to go back through the manuscript and reorganize a bit, try some things, and locate a couple of places that need shoring up, probably with a few more "linkage" poems, or a longer piece.
Continuing along the same lines (ha!), Joan Houlihan has
a review at Contemporary Poetry Review of four recent books. The review is worth reading for many reasons, but primarily because it focuses on opening lines and how readers use an individual poem's opening lines to make snap-judgements about whether the poem (and book?) is worth reading.
Anyone who has ever worked for or edited a literary journal knows this is often the case. One gets an initial feeling about the poem right off the bat. Knowing whether a submission is going to move on to the next round can happen just as quickly. For a journal, this is why it is important to have a number of readers and assistant editors, and that all the readers treat the slush pile work just as they'd like their own poems to be treated. Call it "The Golden Rule of Slush" if that helps. More on this and other matters related to slush piles and editing soon. I've got something percolating...
In her review, Houlihan compares the rhetorical function of a poem's opening lines to a movie's trailer, the idea being that readers determine whether or not to continue on into the body of poem in the same way they determine if they are going see a certain movie, that their decisions are based on initial impressions. One primary reason readers decide on their own and quickly is the disappearance of poetry gate-keepers due to a kind of the-world-is-flattening phenomenon in poetry publishing (internet, .pdf, POD, online pubs, etc.). Consequently, as Houlihan states, "the evaluation of what’s worth reading is falling more and more to the reader/buyer." (Um, shouldn't it be this way?)
I can say this is the case for how I choose to see a movie, and I'm pretty confident in my ability to suss out what looks good to me from the stinkers, and to do so quickly. And rarely do I read reviews in order to find out what's worth seeing. But is it the same for me in how I read poetry? This is something worth serious consideration and time.
Questions to be considered: Do I read more widely or deeply? And if more widely, how do I determine what's worth my precious time? How am I reading? Are I reading for craft? Reading for pleasure? Reading for entertainment? Am I looking to be delighted? Or for instruction? To understand myself more? The world more?
As an example of one answer to the reading for entertainment question, a colleague told me that reading Larry Levis is, for him, "like watching TV." I guess I was supposed to interpret this as a statement about value and the uses of Levis's work, or about the depth of his poems, and, as you might expect, I whole-heartedly and vocally disagreed with the characterization, or at least I disagreed with my what I inferred from his simile. But, it raised an interesting question about reading poetry as if it's entertainment coefficient were the same as an episode of
House or
The O.C.
Is this an okay thing to do? Are some ways of reading better than others?
As an aside, thinking about TV/Poetry reminds me of this exchange with Bob Hicok at the
How a Poem Happens blog:
HAPH: Do you remember who you were reading when you wrote this poem ["The Active Reader"]? Any influences you’d care to disclose?
Hicok: Of course you mean poets. Poets always mean poets when they ask that question. I don’t recall who I was reading at the time, or if I was reading. I like reading TV, to be honest. It turns the pages for you.
[h/t to Matthew Nienow for jogging my memory about this interview last night on Facebook.]
In her review, Houlihan looks at the opening lines of poems in recent books by Charlie Smith, Lawrence Raab, Bruce Bond, and Liz Waldner, and summarizes her methodology thusly:
I think most readers of poetry can tell from the opening lines of a book if it’s a book they want to read more of, just as most of us make a decision about seeing a movie from its trailer. As with a movie trailer, a lot can be seen in a small space. To test my theory, I’ll use the opening lines of four books, all written from the same aesthetic (an I-based narrative) so as not to confuse ideas about an aesthetic with those of writing ability. Imagine that you must decide whether or not the whole book is worth reading based on their opening lines.
Again, you should
read the review for yourself, but here's how I inventory her primary points regarding craft and appealing to readers:
- Opening lines that begin with or revolve around an "I" often precede poems that are flat and unsurprising.
- Poems that open with an omniscient, third-person POV often leads to "mildly interesting anecdotes" if not didacticism.
- Poems that use clever enjambment to interrupt the reader's expectations of syntax are more likely to persuade a reader to continue.
- Positioning yourself on the outskirts of tradition's boundaries, but not pushing past them, will give you a "dangerous allure" that will delight readers and make them stay with you.
- Poets today all write about the same subjects because they are all influenced by the same teachers at the same MFA programs, and if you're going to distinguish yourself, you'd better find ways to be both emotionally moving and unique.
Some of these points are directed more specifically at opening lines, and some of them seem more about poems on the whole. While I might not be on the same page as Houlihan in terms of her analysis of the specific poems in the review, overall, the reminders regarding craft and the poet's relationship to their audience are right on the money. In short, you've only got seconds to convince a reader to keep on reading, so you'd better figure out a way to make yourself stand out.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this entry, last week I posted the endings of five of my poems as a kind of evaluation exercise in order to see if my poems use repetition in
the ways discussed by Joy Katz. I'm going to do the same thing with the beginnings of those five poems.
Although she does include titles, something that Houlihan doesn't discuss is in her review is the title's relationship to the opening lines, and I think that's something worth thinking about. I'm going to include titles as well, though I'm going to hold off on my reasons until a later entry. I would be interested in reading about how all of you use titles, your strategies, etc.
So, here are the titles and opening lines of the five poems I mentioned last week. Applying Houlihan's points to my lines will hopefully help me to notice some new angles of approach to the manuscript, and I'd love to hear what you all think.
Looking at my poems, I'm feeling a bit like Charles Wright who, in a poem somewhere, wonders, "What do I d with all of this?" How do my poems' openings stack up against Houlihan's criteria?
_______
Cold sweeps east across the asphalt predestined
for the warehouses of the snow, the darkening
suburbs.
("Not Pregnant: A Theodicy")
Stuck good and bleeding out,
its horns torqued to gore, Di Modica’s
Wall Street
Bull charges headlong
toward the abyss.
("Of Falling")
Crossed-out and re-circled,
the
Want Ads’ daily litany
of numbers and names lies crumpled
on the bar where loose change
for the busted jukebox stacks up,
mini nickel-plated silos
looming lusterless over dusty
mahogany laminate plains.
("Field Rows")
Maybe it was enough to believe
the Zodiac’s blazing entirety
would be cast from the sky,
an effortless handful of salt
scattered to the Kansas plains’
red wheat.
("Heaven as Nothing but Distance")
April’s cold snap
fools next door’s
lilac buds, glistens
a white valediction on
last night’s roadkill mange.
("Praise Nothing")
As with any poet's work, some poems are better than others. As with any poet's work, some of Hoagland's poems are over-the-top better than others he's written. But it's not a good argument to pick out the crummier ones and use them as reason to push the entire cake off the table. Most folks who dismiss Hoagland, I've found, have hardly tasted his work.
I haven't read the new book yet, but I have read his recent Hollyridge Press chapbook, Hard Rain. From what I've gleaned from available info online, it sounds like poems from this chapbook have made it into the larger new collection.
