Apocalyptic Laboratories

I read The New York Times online, but only rarely do I find any images I might use in poems. Today, I can't stop thinking about this tidbit from an article by Frederic Morton about the Bankruptcy Ball in Vienna in 1913:

"At the same time, Vienna was incubating in its own streets some of the century’s prime virtuosos of violence. One of them was active close to the imperial palace, Schloss Schönbrunn, where the emperor had received his heir. An elegant building on Schönbrunner Schlossstrasse housed young Josef Stalin, dispatched by Lenin to explore the empire’s explosive nationalities situation. It was during Stalin’s weeks in Vienna that he initiated his lethal feud with young Leon Trotsky, who, a few streetcar stops away, was publishing the original Pravda. All this while on the other side of town young Adolf Hitler was seething obscurely, painting postcards for a living.

What those three did the day after the Bankruptcy Ball history does not record. We do know that the Austrian Parliament voted against appropriating money for the housing bill. We also know that the emperor turned down the archduke’s plea for negotiation rather than confrontation with Serbia. Franz Ferdinand walked out of the palace defeated — to die 16 months later of a Serb nationalist’s bullet, igniting World War I.

His killer, Gavrilo Princip, was not a Muslim, but his buddies in his guerrilla band called him “hadzija,” after the Muslim pilgrims who make the hajj to Mecca. Why? Because the penniless zealot had walked from Sarajevo to Belgrade to receive the military training that would help him discharge his pistol at the archduke.

“Austria,” said Karl Kraus, who was Habsburg Austria’s H. L. Mencken, “is the laboratory for the apocalypse.” What would he say about America today?"

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There's lots in this Sunday's Opinion page for your inner Apocalypse Girl/Guy to enjoy. For example, Thomas Friedman muses about what he's calling the Great Disruption, when both our natural world and our economic world are saying, "We can't go on like this" (to use the words of Samuel Beckett, in Waiting for Godot). Go here for the whole article.

Magic Tricks and Interviews

On her blog, Leslie Pietrzyk writes about a trick that kept her writing when she came to a stuck place in her novel writing: "So I told myself to come up with three things that could happen, just really quickly: “You don’t have to use them,” I assured myself. “Just type three things really fast even if they sound ridiculous. Then you can go off to lunch.”

And it worked! Go here to read more.

And Deborah Ager reports here that it's a trick that works for writing poetry too.

While you're at the 32 Poems blogsite, scroll down for a great interview with Mary Biddinger (or go here directly, if you don't like scrolling. I love her discussion of wearing her administrator hat and her poetry hat, hats which struggle to control my own life on a daily basis (I worry I might end up wearing the hat of the nearest insane asylum on some days! oh, it's probably not politically correct to call them that anymore, is it?). She also talks about her ideal writing space, which might involve a wrinkle in the universe. The interview, conducted by Serena Agusto-Cox, is full of gems.

I think I've posted about other interviews conducted on the 32 Poems blogsite, and I suspect my favorites have been done by Serena Agusto-Cox. I've established in earlier blogposts on my site (based on my very unscientific survey of my bookshelves), there are very few book-length collections of interviews with poets, when compared to interviews with other types of artists. If Agusto-Cox ever collects all her interviews that she's conducted into one single volume (or 2 or 3), I hope she'll let me know!

When Poems Are Accessible

Yesterday's post made me dig out a poem I wrote about accessibility and poetry. I wrote it after hearing some sneering comments about the poetry of Billy Collins, whose work I happen to love. And then I got a batch of poems returned to me with a comment on the rejection slip: "Well, your poems certainly are accessible, aren't they?"

This experience reminded me of an earlier experience writing my dissertation, where I was criticized for writing that was too clear and sparkling. One of my committee members suggested that I "muddy up my prose."

It's like I tell my Composition students--you have to know your audience. Some people like poems that are accessible, and others don't. Some people value clear and sparkling writing, and some people want to know that you can write in academic code, which some might call jargon.

This poem was first published in The Xavier Review, in the Spring 2003 volume. It was reprinted in The Worcester Review in 2003.

Accessibility


He says the poems are accessible,
as if it is a bad thing, as if loose
limbed poems spread open their legs
to anyone who gives them a glance.
Those poems don’t even demand drinks
and dinner first. Slutty poems. Ruint.

Perhaps he wants a sulky
poem, one that lets itself be petted, who pretends
to like him, but always holds a part
of itself back while he tortures
himself with evidence of his poem’s infidelities:
other people, plainer than him, who profess
to understand this poem when he cannot.

Perhaps he prefers poems that ignore
laws of accessibility, that barricade themselves behind bars
and up stairs and through perilous mazes.
After tunneling through to the heart
of the poem, he’s so disoriented
that he can’t hold his head upright.

Better yet, poems that speak a language
of their own creation; only a very
few in the world understand how the words
are strung together in this idiom.
Instead of seeing it for the dying language
that it is, he proclaims its linguistic
complexity and pretends to understand.

Iconic Status, Writing Styles, and Suicide

One of my best friends has a daughter who is in high school. My friend grew up in Germany, so occasionally she calls me up to ask me questions, especially when her daughter doesn't understand something that she's studying, and it's out of my German friend's frame of reference.

Yesterday she called to ask about Sylvia Plath, and we had a brief discussion about Plath, Sexton, and Confessional Poetry. She said she couldn't understand Plath's poetry, but she could understand mine. She assumed that meant mine was better.

I said, "Well, many people have said that my poetry is accessible. And they don't always mean that as a compliment."

We also talked about American icons who kill themselves. Is it because they kill themselves that they reach iconic status? I mentioned "the Edgar Allan Poe theory of creativity" (a phrase I first read in one of Julia Cameron's books), which says that you can't really be a good artist unless you're in misery, drug addicted, and eventually, dead in a gutter.

Then, as I drove across town for a Lenten Labyrinth service, I heard this story on NPR about David Foster Wallace. There was an interesting discussion about whether or not writers can change their writing style. D. T. Max, who wrote a New Yorker article, says that "style runs so deep, you think you can change how you write. But to change how you write, you really have to change how you think. ... What made [Wallace] an amazing conversationalist, an amazing thinker and a remarkable writer was that his mind was always going so fast."

It made me think about the last time I wrote a novel. When I started it in 2003, I declared, "No love stories. These characters will not fall in love." I had in mind a falling out of love story, which was what I wrote, but a new love interest turned out to be integral to the plot.

In her wonderful book, Making a Literary Life: Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers, Carolyn See says we have about 10-16 characters for life. I would argue that the same is true with plot. Some of us are born to write (or our lives mold us to write) crime novels and some of us are born to write love stories.

And I suspect our poet lives are similar. We have certain subject matter that we gravitate towards and certain styles that are best for us. We can experiment, but I suspect that it's useful primarily as an intellectual exercise. I love to write in rhyming iambic pentameter to prove that I can do it, but I don't think my best poems emerge from these experiments.

I have noticed that my subject interests have emerged as I've grown older. It makes me wonder about Sylvia Plath and what she would have written, had she lived to be an old woman. That's a different type of intellectual game, and I do love to indulge. Still, I felt safe in assuring my German friend that I would not kill myself, even if it would gain me iconic status.

And there's a different question: does killing oneself, when one is a fairly unknown poet, lead to iconic status these days? I suspect not.

I'm lucky, I know. Even during my depressed days, life intrigues me. I want to stick around to see what happens.

Marilyn Nelson reading at Broward College

If you live in the South Florida area, or if you'll be travelling here, you'll want to know about this Marilyn Nelson reading at Broward College (formerly Broward Community College) in two weeks. Broward College is easy to find: take Hollywood Boulevard going west, after you exit from I 95 (don't panic when Hollywood Boulevard turns to Pines Boulevard at Highway 441--just keep going west); in about 7 miles, you'll see the campus on your left. There's plenty of parking, and a great venue.

Broward College and the Hannah Kahn Poetry Foundation
Invite you to an evening of Poetry with
Marilyn Nelson

March 19,
7:30 p.m.
Broward College, South Campus
Building 69, room 133 (across from Art Gallery)

Marilyn Nelson is the Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut and a three-time National Book Award Finalist. She has won the Annisfield-Wolf Award and the 1999 Poets' Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Winship Award and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Dr. Nelson lives in Storrs, Connecticut.

For more information, please call 954-201-8873.

Co-sponsored by the Broward College Foundation and Phi Theta Kappa.

A Writing Conference that Most of Us Missed

This past week-end, there was a conference that sounded interesting at George Mason University. It was a fiction writing conference, but I was most interested in the panel on New Media and Publishing Creative Writing. Go here to see the schedule and presenters and what you missed.

I'm always tempted by these things, because I have family in the area, so I'd have a place to stay. But there's plane fare and the registration fee. And my major fear is that I'll go to all that effort and won't have learned anything new. Or maybe I'm just afraid that I'll feel lonely and out of place and have to really fight my impulse to flee the room--I've occasionally felt that way at academic conferences with a literary criticism focus.

It's interesting to be reading blogs and to find write-ups. Go here, here, or here to read complete reviews. Bernadette Geyer's post was the one that made me zip around to read as much as I could. She mentions "the idea of Twittering novels or poems. Forcing people to focus on a single line at a time. It reminds me of a video installation I saw at a Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt. The video artist, Bill Viola, had taken a home video of a child's birthday party and slowed it down so that each frame was held for a few seconds on a very large screen, with the audio equally slowed, and very loud. I loved that the technique highlighted and emphasized details that would normally be glossed over in "real time". Every millisecond was hyper-emphasized.Slow blogging, slow reading, slow food... there's a global movement afoot to slow things down. I appreciate that. Less is more. Focus on every ... single ... moment" (again, go here for the whole post).

Our 19th Century Evening

No, we weren't snowed in and we didn't lose power. But our Sunday evening felt very 19th century anyway.

My spouse got some new music and wanted to practice his violin. When he's practicing, I find it hard to concentrate on anything that takes much brain power, like reading or writing. So, I got started on a project that doesn't require too much brainpower.

We go to a creativity/spirituality retreat at Lutheridge each year (go here to read more at the Lutheridge website, and here to read more at my theology blog), and this year, we're trying something different with our closing labyrinth ceremony. On strips of cloth, people will write the names of people and events that have been important to them, and we'll braid the strips together. Eventually, we'll have a long braid, which we'll coil into a labyrinth shape.

Someone figured out that we need about 2500 feet of braid, and that we'd need to have some of the braid already created. So, those of us with cloth and time have been invited to braid in advance.

Last night, as my husband played his violin, I cut strips of cloth and braided them into ropes. At the end of the evening, I had about 24 feet. So, yes, we're wise to be working in advance.

It made me think of my younger years, in undergraduate school, where I thought that art should have function. So, I would quilt, because a quilt keeps us warm at night, but I wouldn't paint a canvas, because who needed art for the walls.

I've changed my thinking since then.

At one point, I'd have thought about braiding scraps into coils of rag rugs--how very practical. One of those many projects I never got around to doing. Last night's braiding didn't make me anxious to try it, either. It's a kind of annoying thing. All the strips get tangled, and my arms got sore from trying to keep strips from tangling.

Interestingly, my undergraduate aesthetics did allow for the practice of poetry. I saw poetry as a way to change the world (how very 19th century of me!), and therefore, a functional art form.

As I cut and braided, I thought about how few people create their own art anymore. We download our music, instead of creating it, and we watch television, instead of creating our own dramas on paper or film. We go out to dinner, instead of cooking, and we buy art for the walls, instead of painting a canvas ourselves.

My 19 year old self was wrong in her thinking about creative pursuits, as she was about so many subject areas. Even if we create displeasing art, there's value in doing it, especially in these days when so few people are in touch with their creative sides.