Writing in the Raw

pfiore8 asked me to take her place this week for Writing in the Raw.  So here are some of my thoughts on poetry and a few suggestions for writing quick sketches followed by poems when I tried the exercises.

I was listening to the new American Poet Laureate, Charles Simic, last night on The News Hour as he was interviewed by Jeffery Brown and he had some interesting commentary on poetry and the writers of such.  I like to collect some of the better quotes of poets trying to explain their craft and what it means to them and society in general.  No one quote ever fits all possibilities of poetry, but there are several that resonate with me:

Poetry is just the evidence of life.  If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.  ~Leonard Cohen

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.  ~Robert Frost

Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.  ~Carl Sandburg

The poem is the point at which our strength gave out.  ~Richard Rosen

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.  ~Novalis

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.  ~Carl Sandburg

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.  ~Thomas Gray

Charles Simic must be a pragmatist at heart for his descriptions of what poetry means to him were very grounded and of common sense.  To paraphrase some of his quotes:
‘Human beings don’t know themselves.’ –
‘The best things in poems are accidents – glimpses of how we see ourselves.’
‘Poetry is how we deal with events in history that are beyond our control.’
And once when a student asked him what poetry was good for in a class he was teaching, another student answered, ‘To remind us of our own humanity.’

In my life, first came the storyteller, then the poet peeked shyly between the curtains and one day took a risk.  I found that my poetry was born of emotions too strong for me to digest any other way – whether happy or tragic.  They roiled around inside me in a process of distillation until something triggered a release.  When I tell my stories I can take my time getting to the point as long as the narrative is entertaining along the way.  But poetry requires a brisk sort of pace.  Few lines, careful word choices and a deft hand.  Sometimes I get lucky and what was roiled and distilled works for me and upon occasion other readers.

Some of my favorite poems came from quick 10 minute exercises done as warm ups for a longer writing session.  Just something of an appetizer.  Structured in directions, they can surprise me with their insight or humor. 

Here is one in which the rules were: each line is two words, the last word of a line must be the first word of the next line, the starting word must be the ending word.  My topic was: grief.

SOUL TO SOUL

Soul drained
drained  pain
pain wept
wept time
time passed
passed slowly
slowly healed
healed body

body craves
craves peace
peace comes
comes softly
softly lights
lights shines
shines for
for soul

Cronsense

An exercise in opposites surprised me one day when these words came out of my pen:

FOR

An open heart locked in a closed mind
in love and out of luck.

A narrow life led in wide spaces
conceals straight thoughts
and crooked hopes.

The early dawn rising
followed by a late breakfast
helps the noon sun
burn out the midnight lust.

The loud fabric of my skirt
belies the soft laments in my ears
as a smooth stone of longing
slides down my grainy throat.

I feel the steady, rocking pace of love –
hot love, cold desire.

I sink my teeth deeply into
the fresh peach.

Cronesense

An exercise of repeating the first words of each line throughout three stanzas:

HOME

Hands outstretched to capture hearth heat
Hopes licked by flames
Dreams glow in shimmering coals
Heart beats of memories untold

HOME

Hands rub warmth over each other
Hopes flare and crack
Dreams renewed dance in the flames
Heart beats hold the key

HOME

Hands bank memories to the back of the hearth
Hopes heat insulated by gray ash
Dreams flicker and damp down
Heart beats ever on

Cronesense

Writing instructions can lead to poetry:

INSTRUCTIONS FOR READING A BOOK

Select a place of comfort
  In the middle of all the things
  You need to ignore.

Be sure the light is bright enough
To hear the words.

Listen as you turn the pages
To the metronome beat of the story.

Let the characters act for you
  Let them take you away,
  Far, far away.
  Let them put you down
In a better place.

Close the book and share with a friend.
  Like a meal
  Like a gift
  Like a prayer.

Cronesense

And sometimes I just try to put my philosophy into a little nutshell:

LEARNED

Take what can be restored.
Restore what can be shared.
Share what is needed.
Need what can be passed on.
Pass on the value of love.
Love until your heart is full.
Then love some more.

Cronesense

72 comments

Skip to comment form

  1. I hope some of these suggestions help you enjoy writing poetry. 

    Now what do you have to share with all of us?

  2. Dumb beneath the flowery blaze
    That cycles warmth through passing days,
    Brutal ardor sways the yoke
    Of labored love that wraps and folds
    Itself in what it dumbly holds–
    The dreamless clay the heavens woke,
    the bending knee, the earth that broke,
    Softened soil takes the stroke,
    The stroke it takes to trestle toil.
    The roots that clutch the scented soil
    Rise in fueling skies that foil
    Flames through umbered canopies,
    Where birds are rolled like dice in trees
    And pantomime the dream to phrase
    A song that raises gates of praise,
    As if just rising from the ground
    could cultivate the air in sound
    beyond the wailings of the breeze.
    They blow the backs of salted knees,
    the slamming notes that ‘tempt to rhyme
    the swirlings in the pantomime.
    But heaven knows a garden grows,
    The well that shook the willow flows,
    And soaks the roots that clutch the soil,
    Like limbs entwined to trestle toil.
    Ardor rises from its berth
    To lay into the scented earth.

    –Compound F

  3. I pretty much suck
    I would say
    But I love Leonard Cohen
    One could quote him
    all day

    Here’s a bit from the song Closing Time:

    Yeah we’re drinking and we’re dancing
    but there’s nothing really happening
    and the place is dead as Heaven on a Saturday night
    And my very close companion
    gets me fumbling gets me laughing
    she’s a hundred but she’s wearing
    something tight
    and I lift my glass to the Awful Truth
    which you can’t reveal to the Ears of Youth
    except to say it isn’t worth a dime
    And the whole damn place goes crazy twice
    and it’s once for the devil and once for Christ
    but the Boss don’t like these dizzy heights
    we’re busted in the blinding lights,
    busted in the blinding lights
    of CLOSING TIME

    Poetry set to music is definitely more my bag. No original content here tonight, but you really can’t go wrong with LC.

  4. your economy is so effective.  or maybe its just what i most envy…

    ‘for’ is beautiful. 

    but ‘instructions for reading a book’ is a masterpiece.  if you made posters, i’d bet the companies that do school- and day-care supply would sell millions of them.  although the ‘prayer’ part might be an issue there…

    • fatdave on September 28, 2007 at 04:30

    They certainly have worked for you. I love the last Carl Sandburg quotation – ” Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.”

    Due to an intense argument on a UK blog, I have nothing original to offer tonight ( it’s 03:25 here), though I will add something tomorrow when I can get to my notebooks.  I put up a piece in the first week by Robert Nye which I carry in my wallet. I think the thread went off page and nobody read it. I can re-post that if you wish. It’s ever so good.

  5. as always.  I love your writing and your poetry.

    I don’t write poetry, but here’s a favorite of mine by Evelyn Lau.

    Suddenly There Was A Thunder Between Us

    When light shattered across the floor
    And briefly, there was a thunder between us,
    If your eyes had held water,
    it would have not spilled.
    And when we peeled aside the dreams,
    the skin underneath was still young.
    When all was black, you smoothed aside the words and said,
    It’s there, the light.
    When you want it, it’ll be waiting for you.
    A certain peace came into your eyes
    That this was no different,
    That this was so different,
    yet every bit the same,
    And your hands stilled with satisfaction.
    You did this without touch,
    So that, all around me, your hands stood shaped like shelters.
    All around me there was room,
    And after each hour,
    the hallways outside were like caverns.
    And around the corner and down the stairs,
    there lurked as always light,
    as ever, light.

    Thank you for sharing your beautiful writing with us.  :0)

    • fatdave on September 28, 2007 at 04:49

    As I say, this is the only piece of literature that I’ve ever had laminated to carry in my billfold. I was touched by it.

    The Rain Upon the Roof

    Listen. It is the rain upon the roof
    Telling of who you loved but not enough,
    Whispering of what is otherwise elsewhere.

    It would be sweet on such a night to die,
    Kissing another’s lips, touching darkly,
    Hearing the soft rain falling everywhere.

    Save that the rain has voices which complain
    You never loved enough, you were unkind,
    You ran away, you left your heart nowhere.

    Come back! Come back! The rain’s regret may cease
    But I will love you till my dying breath,
    And after, if there’s after anywhere.

    – Robert Nye.

    • Robyn on September 28, 2007 at 04:59

    To write a poem, start with the truth and remove the unnecessary words.

    To write prose, start with the truth and add the necessary words.

  6. Thank you so much Croney and everybody else. I will contribute a new one by one of my favorite poets,  Lawrence Ferlinghetti

    “PITY THE NATION”
    (After Khalil Gibran)

    Pity the nation whose people are sheep
      And whose shepherds mislead them
      Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
      Whose sages are silenced
      And whose bigots haunt the airwaves
      Pity the nation that raises not its voice
      Except to praise conquerers
      And acclaim the bully as hero
      And aims to rule the world
      By force and by torture
      Pity the nation that knows
      No other language but its own
      And no other culture but its own
      Pity the nation whose breath is money
      And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed
      Pity the nation oh pity the people
      who allow their rights to  erode
      and their freedoms to be washed away
      My country, tears of thee
      Sweet land of liberty!

    By the way, he has a new book out called Poetry as Insurgent Art his thoughts on what poetry is, could be and should be…

  7. Great essay! I’m more and more convinced that buhdyville is a distillation and concentration of my dkos favorities, along with some truly exceptional non-dkos writers.

    I’m so humbled by the great writers here!

  8. sweet to know this of you, and thank you for brushing away some of the ashes.

    Brilliant work.

  9. marked #80
    (ten moves in 22 months following Mom as the medical system murdered her)
    “Mom/Dad”
    “Art Books Etc”
    Contents changed how many times
    First the old diary
    Then the red spiral bound book
    flopped open to the one I wrote
    when Dad died:

    old soldier
    I saw you brighten at me
    then as if a curtain dropped
    you withdrew your heart
    each night
    you die a little bit more
    slip off into the killing fields
    prisoner of memory
    outside of time

  10. I want to see the desert blush
    at dawn
    while stars pierce the night
    hear the changing of the guard
    as croaking
    gives way to birdsong
    feel cold sand between my toes
    while my breath fogs anything near it

    so here instead
    entombed in a somber gray canopy
    a leaden sky
    as the wind screams
    and drones above like some hateful tympani
    the snow shifts and melts
    like my dissolving dreams
    as the cold intrudes into my joints
    the north country kills from inside out

  11. the barbershop sign
    red neon scrawl on the window
    after hours, after dark
    displays illuminated inside – red
    ghosts of hair clippings talking
    still furious afterglow on a
    clean swept floor
    their heads mown
    subjecting their pates to heaven

    a tear in the sky
    a thinning of the veil
    between the living and the dead
    a silhouette of a lost father
    in the clouds at noon
    on a bright winter’s day

    the barbershop sign
    busy torguing
    souls to the sidewalk
    the endless white line
    twisting heavenward
    or a hellbent spiral
    depending on your point of view

    picasso never
    let anyone have locks of his hair
    a life spent
    dodging witchcraft
    jealous ones sought his power
    and he knew it
    cherishing his helix, that
    tension of life and death,
    tantras and blessings spelled in paint
    a union of contrary worlds
    pulsing like a barber pole

    and the songs of the old warriors
    and the scent of cheap aftershave
    they’re forever shaking out the dust of foreign wars
    from their boots
    speaking in code about their injuries
    beneath wall mounts in barber shops
    the image of their faces
    shattered in infinitely opposed mirrors
    as planes of vision join
    as the barber pole dances

    yes the red afterglow
    all those meetings in spirit
    sometimes among ghosts
    someone told me it would be like this
    when my father’s soul slipped away
    with the clouds
    into the bright air of winter
    and strangers
    took his body

    • plf515 on September 28, 2007 at 12:14

    “Reading poetry in translation is like kissing through a veil”  – Vladimir Nabokov

    • fatdave on September 29, 2007 at 03:58

    Cronesense, Stonemason. Your exchanges are fascinating me. I promised I would find my notebooks and that I have done. This essay will remain and I shall add to it. I am following as closely as I can the events in Burma tonight, by internet, radio and TV. koNko has brought news of a possible coup and collapse within the Generals’ heirarchy. Aung San Suu Kyi is rumoured to be meeting with a pragmatic General today. There are snippets and no confirmations. I have to watch. It’s “Almed Men in the Streets”. Will ye no come back again……..? ‘Course you will. 🙂

    • pfiore8 on September 29, 2007 at 20:20

    stone
    time keeper
    historian
    it tells me everything and says not a word

Comments have been disabled.