3 of 23 Pound Poetry Don'ts

Read Ezra Pound’s List of 23 “Don’ts” For Writing Poetry (1913)

in Poetry | January 30th, 2014

4. Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose.

13. When Shakespeare talks of the ‘Dawn in russet mantle clad’ he presents something which the painter does not present. There is in this line of his nothing that one can call description; he presents.

18. A rhyme must have in it some slight element of surprise if it is to give pleasure...

Curated by: Open Culture

I've had a short holiday from my book.  Resumed yesterday.  The break makes it clear, that in addition to the standard writerly insecurities, the subject matter brings me down.

Hamlet or Macbeth

Butcher's Chapter 9:  Plot and Character.

The emotions must harden into will and the will express itself in deed.

Hamlet: Events are then brought about, not by the free energy of will, but by acts of arrested volition, by forces such as operate in the world of dreamland.

Macbeth: strong, dominant, militant frame of mind.  Nothing is more wonderful than the resistless impulse, the magnificent energy of will with which a Macbeth or Richard III goes to meet his doom.

The fate that overtakes the hero is no alien thing, but his own self recoiling upon him for good or evil.

I'm pro reality, because lack of reality killed Jack.  That puts me clearly on the side of Reason.  My Reason failed to protect Jack, but that is secondary.  Primary, her irrationality, killed Jack.

The test of a man's sanity is the relation in which his mind stands to the universal.  Denise's action defied the universal.

Do I sound like Hamlet?

the end is the thing

Karr's art of Memoir

I don’t try to reconstruct empty spots. I’ve been vigorously encouraged by various editors to fictionalize. They would say, It must have been a very dramatic scene, saying goodbye to your mother. And I remember reading that Vivian Gornick said to her students, “Just make it up and see if it’s true.” Bullshit. In fiction, you manufacture events to fit a concept or an idea. With memoir, you have the events and manufacture or hopefully deduce the concept. You don’t remember something? Write fiction.

It pissed me off when I saw James Frey on Larry King saying, You know, there’s a lot of argument about the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. You know what? There isn’t. If it didn’t happen, it’s fiction. If it did happen, it’s nonfiction. If you see the memoir as constructing a false self to sell to some chump audience, then you’ll never know the truth, because the truth is derived from what actually happened. Using novelistic devices, like reconstructed dialogue or telescoping time, isn’t the same as ginning up fake episodes.

Today I just couldn't get going.  I was in a muddle about verb tenses: my book goes in and out of past and present, even inside a paragraph.  It felt lazy to me.  One model novel, Max Frisch's Man in the Holocene, is most mostly present, but has past in there.  But always in a discrete paragraph or fragment.

My friends David & Christine bumped into me in the Ballard library.  I confessed my struggle on tenses.  Since David had mentioned Karr and Liar's Club, I went to the shelves, picked up Lit, and skimmed a lot of tense changes by Karr.  Mostly past.  Like mine.  But present came flooding in for whole chapters.  So use the verb tense the story demands.

Autobiography is mostly contingent on voice. If the voice is strong enough, the reader will go anywhere with you. And who’s better at syntax and diction than a poet?

So back home, google, and this Paris Review interview of Karr in 2009.

 Prose always seems inadequate to me because every line isn’t a jewel. But it can’t be. Prose favors information; poetry favors music and form.

The memoir’s antagonist has to be some part of the self, and the self has to be different at the end of the book than it was at the beginning. Otherwise you have what I call the sound-bite memoir or the ass-whipping memoir. 

On Neiman Storyboard:

That suggests that you are supposed to give the [Reader] something: an experience – that distilled experience.

Interviewed by Dean Nelson in 2011, around minute 8:20, Karr says she doesn't write for herself--not "what is important to me."  My whole memoir is what is important to me.  Hmmm.  Should I say fuck it, shred the thing?

At minute 9:50, a memoirist has events, and you don't know the truth of those events, so you manufacture meaning from those events.

At minute 15, the truth has to ambush you.  Is this example, the events are Karr leaving for California.  Her own life narrative had been that her dad left her.  She had to scratch at the story, the events, to find the truth--that she left him not that he left her.  So how would that apply to my story?  What myth have I created, that through the writing of this memoir, I'll find the truth behind?  I really resist the pithy answers.  I don't trust "finding the truth."  I think it is just a new narrative--one that replaces another.  But as I do this rewrite, I am trying to open my mind.

She Died of the Fifth Act

I added more content today; about Brown and my daughter.  I hope soon I can start pruning, so the story won't be too vast to be grasped by the mind.

Butcher, in Chapter 7, says Unity for Aristotle is the principle of limits.  Without Unity, my action would be undefined, indeterminate, accidental to The Reader.  Uh huh.

Amusing quote regarding the history of the stage:  "What did she die of?" was asked concerning one of the characters of a bad tragedy.  "Of what? of the fifth act!"

I think my entire book is Falling Action.  I don't have a denouement where all minor effects are subordinated to the sense of an ever-growing unity.

The epic is a story of the past; a drama, the present.

In Greek tragedy, the tragic hero often fights against destiny; in my book, I fight against something equally rational: psychosis.  Temporary psychosis.

The hero:  character is destiny.

full circle today

I wrote myself full circle.  Around 11 I panicked.  I found new content that was evocative, and that I had to find a way to add that to the draft.  The material was heavy (which already brings me down), but the idea that my draft was expanding was disheartening.  It's already too long.  Each thing I add makes the final edit harder.  And there was the fear of more landmines out there to trip over.

I took a break.  Showered.  Ate lunch.  I found a way to constructively attack the new content.

And then, about 3/4 of the way through the new content, I realized that what I was working on was from November 2007--not November 2006.

Yes I wasted some time, but the good news is that today's wild goose chase validates not just my composition process but also how I'm approaching this revision.

Grave and Great

Still Butcher on Aristotle: Chapter 6 "The Function of Tragedy"

The action in a tragedy should be grave and great, and at the climax, at Recognition, produce catharsis in the audience.  Involuntary.  A purge of feeling.

Plato:

• 'the natural hunger after sorrow and weeping' is kept under control in our own calamities, but is satisfied and delighted by the poets.  (My emotions were kept under control for the time-frame of my book.  I had convulsions of grief during the early years, but I it wasn't until the day my divorce was finalized that the fatigue, the relief from a long, long fight with Denise, and the exhaustion from anger was mixed in with sobbing.  So when I think of catharsis, and what that convulsion can physically feel like, I think of that day.  How I can set the table for that in The Reader?)
• it makes anarchy of the soul by dethroning Reason in favor of feeling
• through drama man becomes many instead of one

Aristotle:

• the pleasurable calm that follows when passion is spent--"a harmless joy"
• pity turns into fear where the object is so nearly related to us that the suffering seems to be our own

Butcher

• tragedy provides not merely an outlet for pity and fear, but a distinctively aesthetic satisfaction to purify and clarify the feelings.  (I get lost here.  That somehow seeing the events dramatized, the characters and actions, grave and great, universal, and I guess the audience, in concert, reacting to the spectacle--all that is necessary to purify and clarify.  If it is only to provide The Reader perspective, I can imagine accomplishing that in telling my story.  But there isn't the Universal.  My story is the Particular.  It is very grave but not great, and the Reader will miss the collective response of fellow audience members.  And I don't have climax! I'm doubtful about what purify and clarify means.  I don't see how I can provoke it.  How can I excite the Reader to catharsis?)
• the audience is at an ideal distance from the hero.  "the pressure of immediate reality (which raises our defenses and coping mechanisms?) is removed."  (I'm getting closer here to understanding.  Distance. Plus now I can accept the need for "universal," otherwise the Reader won't be able to identify enough with the hero to be empathetic.)
• each thing that happened could not have been otherwise.  (Lots of randomness in my story.  That Aristotle would want refined out.)
• the pain is expelled when the taint of egoism is removed?? (This is too glib.)
• This is my central disagreement. "The private life of an individual (me), tragic it may be in its inner quality (yes), has never been made the subject of the highest tragedy.  It's consequences are not of far-reaching importance; it does not move the imagination with sufficient power."  (And Oedipus does?  Why?  Wouldn't the Reader have more fear if the hero was just an every day individual?  One thing about Greek drama is that (Oedipus, for example) the story is already well known by the audience.  So being great in that sense, famous, provides the audience the opportunity to be constantly comparing Sophocles version with the story they learned growing up.  A side-effect, then, of Oedipus being great, but not the central point.)
• the divine plan of the world. (Butcher reveals some of his baggage.)
• the more exclusive and self-absorbed a passion is, the more does it resist kathartic treatment.  (And Butcher knows this to be true how?)

I am choragus:

There is a Denise in your life.  Don't presume Reason will save you from his or her irrational act.  Either by warning you or by giving you the know-how to stop it.  There is no antecedent to her act.  If I, if you, have the knowledge, you would have acted to prevent it.

I don't have a climax.

• the NGRI verdict was an anti-climax.
• Denise's move back to Trenton Psychiatric was an anti-climax.
• filing for divorce was an anti-climax.
• getting laid, if i had, would have been an anti-climax.

Getting Jack back, now that would been a climax.

And the only moment I get close to that, is when I break down weeping, and as I have written, those moments I cherish.

I want to give that to you Dear Reader.

There is a Denise in your life.  Either you have suffered a tragedy like I, and this story can break through your defenses and quotidian coping mechanisms, and you can weep for your Jack; or you haven't met your tragedy yet. Then the death of my Jack, I hope, can help you see, for a second, what your Denise could do.

Catharsis:

• involuntary
• convulsive
• transport The Reader out of his hubris, his complacency, just for a second
• relief, it's over

The End of Fine Art

I finished Chapter 4 of S. H. Butcher's essay on Aristotle's Poetics.  I'm pausing from my rewrite to collect my thoughts.  I wasn't making much headway today anyway.

BTW, Chapter 4 is nicely entitled "The End of Fine Art."

Why have I been reading Poetics and Butcher's criticism?  It's interesting.  It's a nice counterweight to writing time.  When I write I eventually hit a wall.  My mood darkens, thoughts become heavy, foggy.  Reading Poetics is half-time.  Like the coach  putting correctives up on the board, and then telling the team we're not committed, not working hard enough.  Then kicking our ass out of locker room onto the field for the afternoon writing shift.

So what are some of my questions or conclusions:

1. Will The Reader react with pity and fear?  That is my intent.  I want recognition that there, but for the grace of god, go I.  To get past the headline--soccer mom kills 12 year old son--to--it could happen to you.  And here's what it would feel like if it did.
2. Plot: I don't stick to the probable impossibilities.  I include the improbable incidents that happened. Thus sacrificing coherence. Why? Because they happened.  In order for The Reader to imagine what it feels like.
3. The deux ex machina is Denise's psychotic action.  Outside the plot.  If it wasn't an irrational act it would be the fitting climax of a tragedy.  Aristotle writes "when the tragic incident occurs between those who are near or dear to one another--if, for example ... a mother kills her son--these are the situations to be looked for by the poet."  The story turns into memoir when the author is the father.  Poetry (or tragic drama) if the poet was a third party.
4. Where nature fails art steps in.  Aristotle's view that art perfects nature--imitating the particular in a way to reveal the universal ideal to the [cultivated] audience.  In one regard I do NOT want to do this.  I want to show nature fails.  No amount of Reason can stop it.  It is hubris to think you can.  And I don't want to allow The Reader an escape by believing that Reason could have triumphed.  However, I do need to be artistic or poetic.  I am selecting, editing, shaping incidents.  I am writing.  I want what I write to breathe life into my grief (confused thoughts, chaotic emotions, shock ... ) on the page in a way The Reader can personally imagine.
5. The poet imitates nature.  She creates a picture or "phantasy" on "the border-line of sense and thought." This is where the book operates--on that border-line.  The phantasy is an after-image that stays (or can be recalled) in the mind after the object that first excited it has been withdrawn.  Produces, in Aristotle's view, the spontaneous and necessary union of intellect and sense.  (Sense, here is sensory perception.)
6. The book is history not poetry in that it relates what happened, not what may happen.  Poetry exhibits a more rigorous connection of events than history does.
7. Oh yes, lest I forget, my memoir depicts meaner mortals, average people, not heroes like Hamlet.  The Reader does not "think of measuring the intrinsic probability of what they say or do."  Heroes are allowed to be or do the implausible.
8. Length: if it is too small, the whole is perceived but not the parts.  If too large, the parts are perceived but not the whole.  (The story is currently at risk of being too large.)
9. Side-effect: expose the fiction in the word psychosis.  That everyone is seduced by.  When it happened.  By real actors in the story.  And by The Reader.
10. Quoting Coleridge, Butcher says poetry steals access through our senses to our minds.  I do want to do this.  Particularly if "mind" includes the subconscious, the visceral, can I say, our emotional understanding as well.
11. Goethe, not Aristotle writes: "I had, as a poet, nothing more to do than artistically round them off and elaborate such views and impressions, and by means of a lively representation so to bring them forward that others might receive the same impression in hearing or reading my representation of them."
12. Ok back to Aristotle. I agree, aesthetic enjoyment proceeds from an emotional rather than from an intellectual source.  The main appeal of poetry is not to the reason but to the feelings.  (This reminds me that the whole reason I started writing poetry was because I was confronted at points in this memoir, with trying to say something that prose couldn't express.)
13. The pleasure of art is not for the artist but for those who enjoy what she creates.  (This reminds me of what Nick Flynn said during audience Q&A about catharsis.  He doesn't achieve catharsis writing poetry; he does sometimes achieve it reading it.)  Venue: http://www.poetshouse.org/programs-and-events/readings-and-conversations/art-losing-nick-flynn-marie-howe-kevin-young
14. tragedy reveals the true nature of a thing.  Yes, I agree with that.  I would like my book to achieve that.
15. the end then, is a state of feeling, it is a feeling that is proper to a normally constituted humanity
16. a poet charms the mind not instructs it

Examples of Aristotle's hubris:

1. poetry turns facts into truths
2. what has never anywhere come to pass, that alone does never grow old
3. no one can be a good poet who is not first a good man
4. philosophy is higher than poetry.  if poetry serves emotion (and sense) and philosophy serves reason, that philosophy is only higher than poetry, if reason is higher than emotion.
   Reason that only works in the ideal world, and fails when it confronts reality (i.e. my story), places philosophy lower than poetry.

Now Plato's turn.  Hubris?

1. art reveals to sense the world of ideas.  I know a conceptual artist that surely subscribes to this view.