by Jessica Fox-Wilson
I am a sucker for memoirs.
For me, the experience is similar to reading poetry. I can catch narrators at their most vulnerable and open, when pain or circumstance propels them to craft an indelible image, or in the case of memoir, narrative. When poets publish memoirs, I find myself comparing their subject matter between two forms. But in reading the two together, at the same time, what do I discover about the writer? For some poets the subjects are simply too disparate to compare. In the case of Nick Flynn, and his memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, I got the opportunity to revisit the themes of his first book, Some Ether, in a new form.
Flynn’s memoir covers a lot of ground. In it Flynn asks the painful question, how did my estranged father become homeless? To discover the answer he starts at the beginning, piecing together the formative moments in his parents’ romance and breakup and analyzing the events of his childhood and adolescence. This back-story grounds the reader in the Flynn family dynamic, from the alcoholism that haunted his father throughout his life to the narrator’s own battles with chemical abuse. In his own way, the narrator builds the argument for the father’s eventual spiral into homelessness.
While Flynn traces his father’s footsteps, the memoir is far from linear. The narrative bounces between his father’s current state as a homeless shelter client, one that the narrator worked at for many years, and the near and distant events of Flynn’s childhood. In this structure, Flynn seems to arrange the book more as a poet than a prose writer. It is the reader’s role to apply each brief chapter to the larger narrative. This structure forced me to read the book in one or two long sittings, since I was rushing to arrive at the answer along with the narrator.
Some chapters are even anti-narrative, such as the short plays that serve as chapters late in the book. One of my favorite chapters is a list of synonyms for drinking, from “working on a scotch and soda” to “hair of the dog.” The chapter entitled “same again” ends almost every sentence with “I say.” For these four pages I felt immersed in the mindset of a chronic, desperate alcoholic. Taking the chapter alone, it felt like a poem. Reading the chapter in the context of Flynn’s story, I felt the desperation of both father and son, struggling with the same illness in their own ways.
After reading the memoir I picked up Some Ether, Flynn’s first book of poems. In many ways, these poems approach similar terrain as does his memoir. While the book of poems focuses on other events from Flynn’s childhood, notably his mother’s suicide, the language and images resonated with Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. For instance, the memoir covers time he spends in the summer resort Provincetown as a young man. Then, in Some Ether, he addresses the same experience through the poem “Emptying Town.” It’s a small detail, but the attachment he felt to the city (and the people he met while living there) is evident in both the poem and the chapter.
These shared details bind the two books together, making reading one almost a prerequisite for reading the other. These two seemingly personal books beg a larger question about the instincts of poetry and memoir. Both books use the narrative “I” and, considering their shared themes, seem to point to his personal background, the roots of Flynn’s writing. Both narrative and image share a constructed vision of similar events and hint at confession, but I am hesitant to call either of them “true”. After reading both books, I wonder how close the “I” in the memoir and the poems are to the actual author’s experience. I also wonder whether or not that matters to the work at hand, or if the artful construction of the experiences is enough.
by Jessica Fox-Wilson
Like most of us, I came to poetry through school. While I am certainly indebted to many of the great teachers I had in high school and college, sometimes I didn’t like reading poetry in school. Between required textbooks in the school year and recommended reading lists in the summer, it was all too much. Plus, the poetry seemed it should be boring, with all the allusions and rhyming stuff. Even with that, I knew I liked poetry. I liked feeling the rhythm of the words, seeing the images in my head. And I thought sure that better poetry was to be had out there.
Once I was free to explore poetry on my own, I found lots of great writing. It still had the same effect on me that “school poetry” had, but now it seemed illicit. I was almost afraid someone could find me reading it and discover that I liked this strange stuff, riddled with allusions and rhymes, but also bigger than the sum of its parts.
Listed below are the four poets I read, once I had the freedom to choose my own poetry:
Shel Silverstein
Now, I know every school child in my generation read Shel Silverstein. I mean, he wrote about garbage and magical trees and defying your parents. What else could a kid want? As I snuck my huge anthology off the bookshelf when I was supposed to be sleeping, I felt as though I was committing a crime. Click here to hear Shel Silverstein read “Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me, Too.”
Sylvia Plath
Jump forward eight years and suddenly poems about flying in giant shoe aren’t as appealing. Go figure. I think for certain young women, reading Sylvia Plath is a prerequisite for surviving high school, especially if you like to wear lots of black and fancy yourself a poetess. The nice thing about Plath’s poetry is that it holds up over time. When you’re 15 and rebellious, you can revel in her cussing out her father. Then, years later, you can marvel at her technical dexterity and the precision of her language.
Gwendolyn Brooks
During my sophomore year of college, Gwendolyn Brooks visited my campus for a reading. While I had never read any of her books before, I ran to my library and picked up them up. Within the cadence of Brooks’ short lines, came a freedom and a love of language I’d never felt before. I’d also never read poetry that was simply so real; her poems showcased characters that had real-life problems. When I finally heard her read, it was the first time I ever heard a master poet read. She was confident, musical and funny, and I knew I would never again see a poet of her caliber in person.
Ai
Ai’s book Greed was one of the first books I picked up because I read a glowing review. I can’t remember the review anymore or the periodical I read it in, but this review made me run to the bookstore and buy her book. I was shocked at many of her poems. Out of all the poetry I had read in my life, Ai’s seemed the most dangerous. Not only did she write about violence, sex and drugs, but she wrote in the voice of characters who were immersed in those worlds. I had not given much stock to the power of persona poetry before this book, but now I glimpsed how potent that form could become, in the right hands.
While writing this list, I was thinking of all the poets I didn’t include. When you have the freedom to choose your own poetry, you discover a wealth of poets who inspire you, or scare you, or who open up whole new avenues of thought for you. I’d love to hear from you: What poets (or poems) did you reach for when you were free to choose your own reading?
by Jessica Fox-Wilson
I think that reading is one of the most fruitful activities a poet can undertake, because it is such a varied source of inspiration.
Inspiration can come in many forms, from immersing yourself in your environment to listening to music. For me, reading other poets has been my greatest source of inspiration, because I can see the way in which theme and craft mingle in a successful poem or group of poems. Reading can benefit poets in the same way that studying art history benefits painters and watching sports reels benefits athletes.
While I will read any book of poetry, any time and any place, there have been a small handful of books of poetry that have altered the course of my writing. The four books below have broadened my subject matter or changed the way I see language.
An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991, by Adrienne Rich
When I was in college, I immersed myself in women writers. I felt that the traditional canon of poets didn’t necessarily speak to my experience as a woman at the end of the twentieth century. So, of course, I read a lot of Adrienne Rich. While I enjoyed her early poetry, because it is so full of rebellion and rage, I fell in love with An Atlas of the Difficult World.
Many of the themes Rich addresses throughout her work, from social justice to the complexity of human relationships, coalesce in this collection. Her rage is still here, but it is muted and mired in ambiguity. By reading this book, I realized that there is more than one way to write when in conflict with one’s culture.
Ultramarine, by Raymond Carver
While I was openly reading rebellious women poets in college, I was secretly crushing on defiant male poets. Raymond Carver topped my list of favorites. One of the strengths of this collection is that Carver reveals the beauty in that which is broken and discarded. For instance, his poem “The Car” uses a repetitive chat to mediate on his conflicted relationship with his broken down car. He describes it alternatively as “The car without brakes” and “Car of my sleepless nights.” When I’m stuck on a poem, I still use a chant to break up my ideas, years after first reading this poem.
The Complete Poems: 1927-1979, by Elizabeth Bishop
Through a strange coincidence in course planning, I took a series of classes in graduate school that required me to read Elizabeth Bishop’s complete collection five times in a row. In one semester, I had to read it twice for two separate classes. As I read Bishop’s poems over and over (and over), I gained a greater sense of awe and admiration for what she accomplishes in a single poem. Years after graduate school, I still return to this book and her work.
Bishop achieved a precision in her language that seems almost inhuman. Whether she used form, as she did famously with villanelles and sestinas, or in her free verse, each word she employed takes on multiple nuances and connotations.
While I aspire to her control of language, I don’t envy her process. (She was notorious for revising poems upwards of 20 times.) If you are interested in learning more about Bishop’s obsessive revision techniques, I would strongly recommend picking up Edgar Allen Poe & The Juke-Box, a new collection of Bishop’s unfinished work.
Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris
I will warn you that this series of books could cause severe back strain. This three volume anthology tops 800 pages each, and chronicles all of the major experimental poetry movements, beginning with William Blake and moving through to the twentieth century. Taken together, this collection of poems provides a rich chronicle of our relationship with (and against) language and form in poetry.
Now, I don’t profess to have read all, or even most, of the poems in these anthologies. It would take a lifetime. I prefer to use these volumes as a source of quick inspiration. I can select a volume, flip open to a random page and learn something new, maybe picking up a writing technique or a line fragment along the way.
There they are — the top four books that have inspired me and deepened my understanding of what poetry can accomplish. I’m convinced that without them, I’d be a different writer.
Now it’s your turn. What are the four books that have changed your writing?
by Jessica Fox-Wilson
Rae Armantrout starts out Next Life with a “Tease,” which hints at structure, idea and form, but barely fleshes it out.
The poem juxtaposes images of a cop imagining a serial killer, a tree that is also a skeleton, a black sedan and a knit red cap, asking readers to draw the parallels between these seemingly disconnected things. In Armantrout’s universe (as well as ours), they are connected because they exist, if fleetingly, in the here and now. This opening poem serves as a preview of Armantrout’s larger project. In Next Life, Rae Armantrout uses spare, specific language to explore the big ideas: the nature of identity and all existence.
For me, Armantrout’s language style was challenging to dissect. While she uses very few words, she manipulates these words through placement, line breaks and context to reveal their complexities. For instance, in the poem “Tease” her second section reads: “Bare tree/is to human skeleton//as the holy spirit/likens objects//briefly//to make the world up/of provisional pairs.” By placing tree, skeleton and holy spirit together, between expanses of white space, she reveals their connections. They are structure and spirit, living and dead, holy and common.
As in “Tease,” it seems like much of Armantrout’s language is concerned with the act of definition, or distinguishing a singularity out of the multitudes. It is an interesting task in these times to define individuality, since we seem to be inundated with details and masses of things. In the poem “Two, Three,” the poet wonders how many details must be shared in order to create a specific instance. As she ponders, she lists people’s details, as if she’s watching a crowd pass by. A few poems later, she defines the existence of a pet cat as more than a thing, despite the cat’s lack of self awareness. In this poem, the language is still spare, but she extends her attention on the image.
Throughout the book, she uncovers the nature of identity through a sustained attention to images. In some poems, like “Short Story” and “Clear,” she presents fleeting moments shared between people that define identities. Through observed interactions, like a woman chatting on airplane or an elderly woman guided by two younger women, she reveals the frailty and vulnerabilities in lives. In one of my favorite poems, “A Distance,” Armantrout cycles through various identities, inhabiting and discarding them as she tries to find the right one. In fact, they are all her, “a woman/ age 56.” The poem is intriguing because she again finds commonalities between children and adults, the frail and the brave. Identity becomes a communal and public experience.
Even later in the book, her attention turns to the larger question of existence. In “Visits,” she begins with doubting Thomas, thrusting his hand into open wounds. Then, she switches to a wholly modern context, someone who collects Statue of Liberty figurines, showcased on the local news. After these two unrelated scenes she writes, “It is from this wound/that humans first emerged.” Did humans emerge out of the wound of doubting, the wound of needing to prove existence through experience, or the wound of surrounding ourselves with the detritus of our culture? It seems that Armantrout defines existence in spite of culture, not because of it. Ultimately, existence is hard to define, because we have surrounded ourselves with mediated experience. We collect figurines of Lady Liberty, rather than visiting the real statue itself.
Next Life is a challenge to read. Many of her poems are collages of imagery and it is the reader’s responsibility to discern the larger picture. At times I struggled with making connections between sections or stanzas of poems, and between poems in the collection. As with a lot of poetry, it took several readings and a close attention to the poet’s linguistic choices for me to understand her ideas. But once I began to pay attention, I started to look at the world slightly differently, as if everything could be connected.
Armantrout, Rae (2007). Next Life. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
Rae Armantrout’s website.
by Jessica Fox-Wilson
I come from a long line of writers; I’ve only met a few of them.
After three years of graduate school, this is one of the most significant things I learned. Writers come from a long line of other writers, and the line stretches back as far as their reading habits. I learned this lesson from Deborah Keenan, my professor and principal thesis advisor, and author of Willow Room, Green Door: New and Selected Poems.
Reading Keenan’s newest poems in this collection, I was struck by how intentionally and specifically she lists her influences, as an act of homage and a point of reference. Her influences range from the literary to the artistic and even the musical. She carries on a conversation with other artists, rooted from her reflections on their work. She adapts their words and images, grapples with their meanings and twists them into something new. She quotes Jackson and Rukeyeser, names Kandinsky and Hockney, invites them inside.
Taken as an entire collection, Willow Room, Green Door is a record to living a creative life. Not living it as a Zen Buddhist or a Bohemian dropout, but as a teacher, mother, writer and wife. While reading the book, it is clear that she is conflicted about this type of existence. For instance, in “It’s a Book about Summer, So Cottonwoods and the River are Key” she writes:
… Every poet she knows
Who actually believes in the idea of making meaning
Lists the names of trees. Now that she is so much older
She understands all that she does as an artist that allows
Other artists to render her invisible. She
Is interested in how power works in her world. Why Cezanne
Wins every art brawl. Why his edges aren’t edges, why
The poet who says jacaranda wins and the poet who says
lilac loses … (21)
She acknowledges the dark side of living a creative life, of dedicating yourself to writing despite public accolades or “winning.” Particularly in this poem, she places this choice of creativity within a larger context of the seasons and the Iraq War, two alternate ways of marking the passage of time and the assignation of value. Art is valuable, but some art is more valuable. Life is valuable, but some lives are more valuable. She speaks up for the less valued in the world.
In another new poem, she writes of the need for “the beginning of a new art movement that would honor all that is small and precise.” (29) Her attention to the small and precise is evident throughout the book. In “Loving Motels,” from her 1995 collection Happiness, she accumulates all of the details of a motel stay – the phones and bathing suits and room service – and creates a collage of America. (176) In the mirrored poems “The Man Who Knew About Winter,” and “The Woman Who Knew About Winter”, from an earlier collection Household Wounds, she paints a portrait of a marriage in the details: a wife singing while making dinner, children mishearing song lyrics.
Before I started to read this book, I had hoped to uncover the trajectory of my teacher’s career, to find the line she has forged throughout her lifetime. Instead, I found a more cyclical arc. Willow Room, Green Door is arranged anti-chronologically. Her newest poems are followed by her oldest. This way, the consistency of Keenan’s vision and voice are highlighted. Certain themes recur throughout her work: wars (both new and old), living with family, the struggle to be good and faithful to yourself and your loved ones, and of course, a vital relationship with art. I think if writers strive for a daily practice, they should search out Deborah Keenan’s work, to see what a life lived through a creative lens looks like.
Keenan, Deborah. (2007). Willow Room, Green Door: New and Selected Poems. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.
|
read write poem news- read write poem napowrimo anthology
June 20, 2010 | 1:36 pmThe Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Anthology is still in production. Selection, placement, layout and copyediting are taking longer than anticipated. Thank you for your patience. I hope to have the piece completed in July. For those who have emailed asking if they can be included, the May 7 deadline for submission of work stands. Those who met that deadline will be included. Please check the post on this site listing who I received submissions from by that date. If you submitted your work by the May 7 deadline in accordance with our guidelines and your name is not listed, send an email to info (at) readwritepoem (dot) org.
- read write poem napowrimo anthology
May 5, 2010 | 3:09 pmRemember that Friday* is the deadline for submitting work to the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Anthology. Check out the guidelines for submission in the main column (to the left). On May 8, we’ll post a news item listing everyone we’ve received work from. If you submitted work and your name is not on that list, please let us know. Thanks!
*I initially said “tomorrow,” but I meant to say “Friday.”
- napowrimo congratulations, and a reminder
April 24, 2010 | 12:05 pmIt’s the final week of the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Challenge! Just 7 days left. With that, a reminder that Read Write Poem will culminate with the anthology featuring work from those who complete the challenge. A post with details for submitting to the anthology will be published May 1. Be sure you remove any information from the site that you want preserved — such as group content and personal messages. Those elements of the site will be removed May 1 as well. The main site will remain up as an archive.
- ‘underlife’ tour at january gill o’neil’s blog
April 20, 2010 | 8:11 pmJanuary Gill O’Neil’s virtual book tour has moved to her site and is underway now. Check out the lineup at Poet Mom.
 Archive for read write poem news »
|
thank you and farewell As of May 1, 2010, Read Write Poem is no longer active.
In late May, an anthology featuring work from those who completed the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Challenge will be published here and on issuu.com.
|
