The Moon Goes Through The Motions Too

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Wheel Within A Wheel

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All My Friends Are Trees

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My poem “The Zombie, Rejected By His Human Lover, Responds,” written in response to a poem I saw Megan Thoma and J.W. Baz perform at the Cantab, has been published in the Cordite Poetry Review.

Look at me! Getting published! I have four poems in Apparatus Magazine. Go read them!

This fabulous blog posting over at the Ploughshares site is a must-read. Although Alicia Jo Rabins, the author, doesn’t mention performed poetry or the slam at all, I think the article applies perfectly to performed poetry and highlights two aspect of performance that I think are part of what makes it essential for to my writing process:

enacting writing community as a team sport–another performative act which is by nature imperfect, lived out in time and through bodies, more analogous to writing a poem than to having written one. Some poets retain a vivid sense of live performance even on the page; Allen Ginsberg is among them. Perhaps partly because he structured his line-lengths in “Howl” according to the length of his breaths, you can feel the physicality in the poem; you can feel the poem breathing on the page. It doesn’t feel like an artifact.

This is something I’ve been stressing to a lot of the “page” poets I know — that imperfection is what marks really interesting and powerful writing. I read an interview with Thom Yorke of Radiohead in The Believer recently in which Yorke describes Jonny Greenwood’s role in the band, which includes encouraging the band to “add some wrong notes” to the music. One of the analogies I like to use is of a cubic zirconia — being synthetic, a cubic zirconia is flawless, and it’s this lack of flaw that makes one distinguishable from a diamond to the naked eye.

Then there’s this:

Witnessing the real risk of process is one reason why artistic community (the workshop, the residency, the collaboration) is so important. We celebrate each other’s successes, but we also observe the fruitful disasters, the failures that inherently attend real risk-taking. Through thoughtful critique, we help each other to consider those failures without attachment–simply to compost them and harvest the richness they contain, to deepen the process, and refine the work.

The “risk of process” is something I think slams especially bring to poetry. Of course it doesn’t always work, and of course, people who are there to win instead of the have fun and learn will miss out on this and end up making poems that game the system more than they do any of the things I find most interesting and useful about poems, but for myself, I find that putting a poem in front of an audience to be judged by non-experts often highlights that risk. There are other kinds of risk. I’d never substitute a slam for an actual critique from a trusted critic or for a good workshop. But it becomes another, very gritty arena in which to take risks with my poems, and it becomes a location for the community. There are other arenas, of course. Shows like The Encyclopedia Show emphasize the communal aspect of creation. The show’s curators prescribe topics and give writers a month to compose their poems. This simple restriction requires the writer to step outside her usual subject matter, often resulting in really powerful, interesting writing.

The whole thing is really quite insightful, and there’s a great video interview with Allen Ginsberg posted in the article. Go check it out.

One might be tempted, in writing a poem about a difficult topic like the violence that underlies sexism (and makes it both possible and pervasive), to become didactic. One might also be tempted to be heavy-handed in the storytelling, or to draw conclusions for one’s reader or listener. What one doesn’t see often in such poetry is humor and a complicated speaker.
This poem by New Yorker Eboni Hogan is, among other things, a list poem. It’s not a typical list poem, however, because the speaker is repeating someone else’s list, effectively creating two speakers, the story’s narrator and the author of the beer poster. Hogan switches back and forth between telling the story and quoting the poster, sometimes cueing us with numbers, and sometimes simply weaving the statement into the poem so that there are moments when it’s difficult to tell whether we are hearing the narrator’s perspective or that of the poster’s author.
This structural device is quite effective, and accomplishes a lot in this poem. One of the most difficult things to pull off in a three-minute poem is to address a complex, nuanced topic without becoming academic or didactic. This particular topic has been addressed often and poorly, and here Hogan’s unique structure allows her to treat the topic with the sensitivity and complexity it deserves and yet still tell a powerful story.
How, for example, to explain, in three minutes, the complex relationship between a particular person and the larger social and political context that informs, enables and partly causes their behavior without stereotyping or resorting the very sort of academic language I’m using in this very sentence? How do we bring an audience to that kind of complexity without preaching at them and while entertaining them?
The concepts that sexism requires at least the threat of violence to remain powerful, and that to some degree a larger cultural set of normal or accepted ideas creates an environment whose existence surrounds woman making otherwise benign interactions deadly, that marketing continues to rely on sexist ideas about women to sell things like beer, and that participating in seemingly-harmless joking like that in the poster is really a connection to those deeper and darker tools of oppression are not the sorts of topics most except a small handful of people want to think about ever, but especially at a bar or while doing reading for pleasure.
So Hogan co-opts the rhetoric of sexism, weaving the statements on the poster into her narrative. Instead of going down the list in exact order, she’s taken some of the statements out of sequence and ordered them in the poem to align with what’s happening in the narrative.
What this does is help characterize the male character in the poem — as he takes actions, the poster “speaks” to us, so that we are led to make an implicit connection between what the poster is saying and what the man is doing. This opens up the topic of how advertising might create or undergird or enable the violent choices of the male character without actually saying as much. To put it another way, instead of delimiting inquiry on the part of the readers and listeners by making a declarative statement, Hogan encourages us to infer connections, which opens up inquiry into the larger world outside the poem.
Hogan uses this technique often in the poem. Imagine, for a moment, that in this poem, the speaker had been raped by the man or shot by him. The sympathy we as her audience would feel for the speaker would outweigh the thinking she wants us to do, necessary thinking about how sexism actually works, thinking we can’t do if we are feeling too much. So instead, Hogan has the male character head-butt the speaker (here I just want to point out that whether or not this happened in this way to Hogan in real life is beside the point in terms of how the writing is done). Here’s the speaker’s description of the head-butt:

He bowed like a gentleman,
body curled like so many question marks before him
and blessed me with a running start
a grand, glorified, dick-encrusted
American-as-apple-pie Rambo-style head butt

Note that the head-butt is compared with several overlapping modes of manhood: gentlemanliness, wholesomeness (American-as-apple-pie), militaristic (Rambo) and sexual (dick-encrusted). The head-butt itself can easily act a symbol for penetration, implying rape, or as the motion of a bullet, implying murder or (as the poem’s final image suggests) execution.

Sticking with one overpowering image would not allow Hogan to weave together so many manifestations of sexism, so she’s made the choice to back off what emotional power she could squeeze from the poem and instead offer us the chance to notice these overlapping concepts. Instead of being a woe-is-me poem about a single, sad moment, it becomes a poem addressing a larger, complicated topic — how sexism itself functions.
Part of that function includes how deeply-ingrained its ideas are in our culture so that women who are aware of and critical about sexism often report realizing that they have internalized sexist ideas and messages without being aware of it. Remember how at the beginning I mentioned that Hogan sometimes switches from the narrator’s account to a list item from the poster without cueing us, so that there are moments when the line between characters is blurred? What a masterful way to illustrate that internalization!

She gives the poster the final line of the poem. The effect of this is to both tie up the list and also make it clear that we’re meant to go back over the list and examine not only what is underlying the statements themselves, but also, how they connect to the choices the characters makes. The poem doesn’t tell us what to do about sexism or sexual assault. It doesn’t condemn anyone in specific. It never makes any proclamations. What it does very well is invite us to continue thinking about its subject matter long after the poem is done, the entire range of images and ideas echoing in our minds like the gunshot in the poem’s concluding image.

I came across this video of William Stafford reading one of my favorite poems of his, “The Star In The Hills,” while looking for examples of his work for a friend. The poem is one to which I have returned over and over for years. I love the combination of quirkiness and spooky mysticism and the political commentary implied by the speaker’s attitude, but, in all honesty, until I watched this video, I never thought of the poem as funny.
As I’ve moved back into participating in poetry slams again after ten years away, I’ve had to relearn how to perform poems. When I began practicing and preparing my work for the stage, I found that, overwhelmingly, I scored better with slam judges, and connected more reliably with my audiences when I read from paper than when I memorized and “performed” the poems. I began paying attention to the poets around me whose writing and performances I admire and find powerful, and re-realized that reading is a performance, and that the reason my readings off paper were more powerful and effective than when I had poems memorized is that, with the memorized poems, I was trying too hard to perform, whereas when I read off paper, I feel less inclined to do so, and I sound more like myself.
That’s the irritating thing about the false dichotomy, supported by both sides of the divide, between so-called “page” poetry and “stage” poetry. Poetry is poetry. I expect that it’s because many “page” poets don’t want to take the time to become good at performance that they like to distinguish the two, and I think the same might be true of performance poets, who find it easy to win over audiences, but more difficult to do the difficult work of editing.
Those of us who have chosen both work to become better writers, participate in a largely arbitrary, fickle, nepotistic process of getting published; and also work to become better performers of our own writing, participate in a largely arbitrary, fickle, random game of chance that is the poetry slam. I cannot, of course, speak for all practitioners of performed poetry. For myself, I find that each informs the other and becomes part of the writing process, for the better, I think. It is most often the case that what a poem needs to work well on the page is also what it needs to succeed well on stage.
Reading is a performance. There are some incredible writers who are just awful at it, and I don’t believe that makes what those writers can do as writers less effective or interesting, just like when I don’t enjoy reading on the page the poems of an excellent performer whose writing is not as polished doesn’t make that performer’s work any less interesting. For myself, I hope to do well at both, because I believe that an audience deserves the respect of my bothering to pay attention to both of those modes of delivery.
Which brings me back to William Stafford, who has long been one of my favorite poets, but who, for obvious reasons, I have never seen perform his work — until I stumbled on this video. Stafford’s performance of this poem, which works so well on the page that I have read it if not a hundred than at least dozens of times, reveals something by which I was taken aback — how funny the poem is.
The humor becomes a part of the poem’s meaning, and underscores the political dimension of the poem at the same time. Stafford’s delivery, charming and somewhat folksy, makes the speaker out to be a certain kind of character — a likable fellow, which is important for the poem, since the subtext of the poem could make the character seem self-serving rather than eager. Stafford also feels the music in his poem and convey it well. All told, this was a pleasant surprise — giving a long-beloved poem a new, interesting dimension. Which is what performances of poems should be doing.

Last night I had the pleasure of hearing one of Marty McConnell’s newer poems, from her series-in-progress exploring fidelity. In this poem, the speaker is addressing her lover, who is leaving for a short trip. Aside from McConnell’s always-lovely image work, the poem stood out to me for how it uses structure, simile and symbol rhetorically.
In the poem, the speaker begins with a series of what are more or less literal images — (“our bodies toss toward each other in the night,” etc). Once the speaker begins to use figurative language, she makes what seem at first to be expected comparisons — “we are like our fathers,” and the symbolic image of the horses in the field: “the horses face each other in the field, daring each other to run.”
In the beginning of the poem, every sentence contains either a coordinating conjunction or dependent clause, which does several things: 1. underscores the speaker’s own ambivalence about not only what is happening, but also what it means, 2 it acts as a structural symbol for the the several dualities in the poem: the speaker’s internal struggle to identify as someone who is faithful, and two characters, who are joined together in love, but are also discrete people, and 3. creates a particular music we start to expect. When this suddenly doesn’t happen at “Do horses dare?” the sudden shift in sentence structure makes the statement stand out. The speaker then makes several such short, direct statements, mostly in the middle of the poem.
And it’s what these statements are doing that drives the poem to an unexpected place. The question, “do horses dare?” and the subsequent questions and observations (“we are not our fathers,” etc) unpack the previous section’s figurative language. The speaker disassembles her own myth-making about the relationship because though the narrative she first created will describe the relationship, she is not satisfied with what that description will allow her to make her lover’s absence mean.
She wants it to mean something more. So, she rejects the impulse toward romantic myth-making, and, under the guise of being empirical, leans toward a new set of images altogether, ones more mundane in construction, but also more capable of performing the task she wants them to: making the lover’s leaving understandable as a vehicle for her own transcendence away from the past faults hinted at in the end.
This disassembly is mirrored in the poem’s second half; for most of it, we are given a string of short declarative statements comprised of only one clause. As the poem progresses toward the end, though, the speaker begins to construct her single-clause sentences more and more like they are clauses in her compound or compund-complex sentences at the poem’s beginning. At the end, she leaves us with one final compund-complex: as the speaker’s lover’s plane is taking off, we get a sentence that syntactically and grammatically makes a pair out of the two characters again.
The poem itself, being divided into two parts, therefore has a rhetorical parallelism: first the speaker makes similes and symbols for us, then she unpacks them and ultimately creates new ones, giving the poem a feeling of winding and then unwinding, which feeling is enhanced by the dancing from complicated to simple sentences structures and then back to complicated again.
I think we are meant to know the speaker is a writer. That she makes so much of language use, and that the poem itself relies so heavily on grammar and structure to make its meaning is amplified by the image the speaker uses to generate the new myth of her relationship: that of writing a word on her foot (and here’s where I geek out even more about how the grammar and structure underscore the poem’s movement and meaning: in the most important and last of the single-clause sentences, the speaker, alone now, writes a single word on a single foot. Contrast that with the image of the two horses, who the speaker asserts cannot speak to each other.)
She is a writer, and like many of us, cannot always get out of her own head. She wants this absence to mean something more than simply an absence, and more importantly, wants it to take her somewhere new. She hints at this with: “I know what it is to be faithful.” One gets the sense that the speaker is so troubled by this leaving, and finds it so important to create a new myth about her lover’s absence because she has been unable to do so well in the past. Her solution is to write “home” on the sole (and note the obvious homophone association with soul — this reminds me of a passage in the Christian Bible, in which St. Paul argues that spiritual maturity is like having God’s law written not on tablets of stone, but on one’s heart — the speaker is coming to adulthood in this way — figuring out how to use language to change her innermost being). This final image, of a word on the bottom of a foot, paired with that of an airplane taking off, creates a mirror image, “home” coming down in a footstep, “love” going up in an airplane, home being that which grounds us, after all, and love, that which can takes us away and out of ourselves, to new selves, to new grace.

I briefly considered writing about my top ten favorite album of 2009, but since am not good at picking favorites or putting things into hierarchies, I made this mix of my favorite moments from my favorite 25 albums of 2009. If pressed, I could look in the play count of songs in my 2009 smart playlist in iTunes, which will tell you that Neko Case’s “Middle Cyclone” and Jay-Z’s “The Blueprint III” are about neck and neck in terms of listens. Neko is a little ahead, actually, but seeing as how her album had about a four month head start over Hova’s, I think it’s fair to say that those two albums tie for my favorite.

They represent sort of opposite ends of my consciousness and aesthetic sense, but also, a heartening breakdown of the social, racial and aesthetic walls of genre. On the one side is Neko’s lush, haunting masterwork, in my opinion an album worthy of standing next to Paul Simon’s “Rhythm of the Saints,” Johnny Cash’s “American Recordings,” and Over the Rhine’s “Good Dog Bad Dog” as an example of the best in folk-influenced pop music. On the other end of the spectrum is Jay-Z’s incredibly hooky, listenable 13th album, which I think, over time, even its harshest critics will realize represents a game change for mainstream hip hop, mostly because it is an incredibly joyous, adult album. Both albums feature some incredibly strong, moving writing.

In Neko’s “The Pharoahs,” we’re offered a complex, layered portrait of disillusion in romance: “You left me lying there awake/but you never came to bed/You kept me wanting, wanting, wanting like the wanting in the movies and the hymns/I want the Pharoahs, but there’s only men.” Neko’s choice of religious imagery is telling, highlighting, among other things, the unreasonable expectations our culture has of marriage and romance in general. And, not for nothing, it’s hard not to hear political disappointment as well. When our political leaders, handed a majority in Congress unprecedented in my lifetime, can’t conduct the most basic business of governance, Neko’s sentiment seems all too fitting.

Jay-Z’s album is filled with so many moments of transcendence above the normal tropes of hip hop, notable for the fact that he reworks tired concepts, like that of an emcee bragging about how ahead of all the other emcees he is, and using it to offer up a new version of power. In the second verse of “Off That,” it has its greatest moment, where Jay-Z redefines racism itself as something not only unjust but also uncool and indicative of immaturity: “This ain’t black vs. white, we off that/Please tell Bill O’Reilly to fall back/Tell Rush Limbaugh to get off my balls/It’s 2010 not 1864.” There’s hope that rises out of that, as Jay-Z celebrates his racially diverse friendships, his social mobility, and the simple fact that we finally elected a black man to the presidency.

In a year of disillusion for many of us, of economic hardship, war, and disappointment, there is still music, and there has been some amazing, lovely songcraft this year. The surprising and outstanding project by the Black Keys, resulting in the “Blakroc” album, the luscious clutter of Grizzly Bear, the pointed pop of Tegan and Sara, the exuberant post-rock of Kuan, the geek revival of progressive rock on the Decemberists’ “The Hazards Of Love” all indicate that as the first decade of the 21st century draws to a close, pop music in all its forms isn’t in decline. It’s becoming more diverse, more cross-cultural, and, as the for-profit music industry struggles to justify its existence, more based in a sheer love of music itself.

All Is Not Lost: Favorite Music of 2009

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