One of the most curious aspects about poetry is that the element of “truth” presented in any given poem is never stable. With this in mind, the truth that the reader must accept at face value is constructed by the poet out of his or her organic impulses, and must be credible simply because the poet pronounces that it is. A question with which I have been wrestling for years is the idea that the poet and the “speaker” are possessed by two distinct and disconnected identities. What I find fascinating is that I can read a poem about death, sadness, and strife, and in some cases, the suffering of the speaker, and then meet and converse with the poet who always seems to be a contented and well-adjusted individual. This might evince the possibility that the speaker is not always espoused to the poet, but is rather something of [...]
This entry is part of a series, Towards a Different Kind of Workshop» For beginning writers, rules of thumb are important. My goals are simple: 1. Get them to avoid cliches–not of thought (almost all thoughts are cliche), but of language and image. 2. Get them to play with cliche so that they master them rather than being mastered by them. 3. Teach them to vary sentence length against the line. 4. Teach them to be aware of word choice. 5. Teach them to know the difference between the concrete and the abstract, and all the hues and shades in between (a big mistake we make is teaching them to show, not tell without letting them know that the showing must tell–that an image must work for the poem. 6. Re-orient their sense of the “poetic” to include ordinary experience rendered in an extraordinary way, rather than extraordinary experience rendered [...]
Musicians, jazz musicians, keep fake books–at least they used to–with all the chord changes as well as written-down alternatives they may want to try. Why don’t poets keep fake books? I know Thomas Lux has his own personal anthology of poems he likes or is interested in. It’s a great idea. To make a good fake book, 1. Leave plenty of room in the margins to write notes. 2. Leave doodle space. 3. Keep the backs of the paper blank so you can write the poem out in your own hand, or write an answer to it, or a variation on it. When you write someone else’s poem out by hand, you get an entirely different relationship to the language–the line, word choice, etc. Here’s another strange practice, but one that appeals to me as a sort of loopy scientist: Read a poem once silently. Close the book, take a [...]
The other day, I posted a poem of Pablo Medina’s which I published in my second issue of Black Swan back in 1989. I put the magazine out with money from income tax returns. It was an act of love, an act of madness, and four issues went forth into the world before money prohibited my doing anything out of love. Many of the poets were friends of mine, others friends of friends. In 1990, I published a language poetry issue—probably the only poetry mag in Jersey that did so back in 1990. was my guest editor for that one, and layout and design went to the , then under . Aljira later came into a shit load of grant money. Back then, they were fairly new. For that issue gave us a poem. I look back now and realize I published some good poets and fiction writers who later [...]