Experiments in Poetry- Acrobatics or Expression?

For most of my writing life, I have been a practitioner of the style commonly referred to as “free verse.” My only nod towards form is to imitate common speech, allow the lines to fall as the breath does. I will throw in a dash of alliteration here and there, if the situation allows, but more often than not, the result ends up feeling obvious and corny.

In high school, I experimented with formal styles, like sonnets, haiku and the like, but abandoned any hope of producing substantial work along these lines decades ago. Cummings could do it, Shakespeare created the mold many of us seek to shape our work by, but beyond those two examples, not much good, in my experience, can come from us mortals using the same rhyme patterns.

Every few years has brought a shift in my work, whether subtle or jarring. Recently, due to exposure to the work of Anne Gorrick and Adam Tedesco, to name a couple of local examples, I was inspired to try some more abstract methods. I took a workshop with Katrinka Moore, whose work transcends the seemingly simple procedure of erasure. I clipped and blacked out, drew random words from a cup, reversed lines and tore papers into shreds.

As a matter of fact, that last one is one of my favorite RANDOM WRITING exercises. I have participants work on a rough draft or a freewrite, and then ask them to tear the work up into chunks. We tape the scraps together, and examine the new, convoluted text for intriguing phrases created by juxtaposition. New poems can often emerge from these accidents. I like to use this exercise to help participants to loosen then hold on first drafts, to learn to not be married to the words as they fall on the page. More than one poet has gasped at these instructions, but warmed to the activity soon after.

I began to employ these methods with my own writing, to see where they would take me. After a couple of years, I must admit that I myself am perhaps too “married” to the basically autobiographical roots of my work to feel much satisfaction in writing from abstractions. The Ziegfeld poems I discussed last week are based on actual events, not my own life, but for the most part, my poems have been inspired by my own activities, emotions, and observations. I’ve been able to craft some pretty decent fictions from some of these exercises, but I still can’t get past the feeling that for me, they feel like parlor tricks, and not actual expressions. I’ve regarded them as a sort of lesser body of work.

I’ve tried fitting them into readings, since they are by no means works that I’m ashamed of, but they are so very foreign to the majority of my poems I’ve never been comfortable presenting them. The reaction consequently has been lukewarm. I pulled a bunch of them together into a small chapbook, creating a home for my seeming orphans. I called it Llama Love, after the longest poem, based on Facebook’s poor translations of a friend’s Egyptian posts. They sold well, but I have to attribute that to my llama sketch on the cover (see above). I only printed up a few, and even collecting them together was unsatisfying.

I’m glad I pushed the boundaries, and may go back to these experiments from time to time, but as far as where I’m at now, I’ll be to returning to my former narrative full-time. The poet I am is a reporter, a witness, and not the abstract wordsmith type. It works for many I know who produce rich, textured work, but not for me.

**Where Am I?**

Greetings! Since June, I have had every intention of updating the blog, keeping readers up to date on the latest goings-on in the Hudson Valley poetry scene. I clearly have not.

Although the focus of my writing energies has been on my memoir-in-progress, as you poets know, poetry always happens. I've written about a dozen this year, but have no conscious recollection of how they got here. The 'when' I can tell by the dates scribbled at the end of each.

I tried to put together yet another version of a chapbook containing poems drawn from childhood, this time combined with the few horse poems that I feel are strong enough to see the light of day. As of today, I've missed two deadlines I set for myself, but I would rather miss a hundred deadlines than send out a manuscript that I didn't feel was the best I could do, with both the material and the order of poems, too, never my strong suit. It remains towards the top of the pile of projects in progress at my left on my very crowded desk.

I enthusiastically started a collection of poems inspired by the Ziegfeld Follies of 1919, and the performers therein. I've so far completed a dozen poems on that theme. How to proceed has been puzzling me for months. I sometimes lean towards a more avant garde approach, inspired by the intriguing work of my friends Anne Gorrick and Adam Tedesco. Lately though, I believe I may swing back again to a style I am more familiar with. The existing poems are narrative in nature, and I think something too different from that style would never hang together as one work. And so, this project too languishes in the pile.

I've all but abandoned my Valley of the Dolls poems. I spent much time tinkering, folding, shuffling, but have never been satisfied with the results. At some point I believe I will start again, from scratch, but for now, the yellowed paperback that inspire them and the aborted efforts themselves sink lower in the pile.

Perhaps the memoir is ruining me for all other projects. I am a hundred pages into a comprehensive rough draft, combing all previous efforts and fresh writing from my summer workshop with Marge Piercy and Ira Wood. I am treading time now, scanning my old diaries in order to construct a timeline to continue writing from Ultimately, I hope to have a final manuscript of writing to set aside for a month or two, then rewrite with some sort of grace and art, after the heat of getting the facts down (as I recall them now, and interpreted them in diaries then) has subsided.

Rereading the diaries, I am so glad I wrote down what I did, despite the large gaps of time missing at key points. In building who I am now, I have forgotten a lot of who I was then. Not an entirely despicable character, but younger, dumber, more naive than of course any of us admit to being in our twenties. There is an art to memoir, I suppose, of picking and choosing which threads of your life will best keep to the story you wish to tell. I am sorting now. Some who figured large then may be missing from the final draft. It will be for the sake of storytelling only, not to devalue contributions then.

There is the emotional draining of reliving all this. It was a difficult time. It was adulthood by fire for me, and I wouldn't be here if I wasn't there. My Beloved would be somewhere else, maybe happier, maybe dead, but here is where we are. I hope the story will be finished, and of interest to some. It is the only time in my life I wish to sort out on paper.

I don't know anyone who won't be thrilled to see 2016 done with. Too many losses, too much uncertainty. Where will we be as a country a year from now? Where will the arts be? Art survives when hope fails. Artists speak when others are without words. I will continue to speak. I hope some of you continue to listen, and that some of you are moved to action, or at least anger, by my words. It's my thing. It's my art. I do what I can.

Something Old, Something New

In 2015, I assembled a couple of chapbooks with old poems, and sent them around to a couple of contests. Predictably, neither of them found a home. Collections I've published in the past have never been based around a theme, or even written at the same time. Poems in the past have come to me one by one, and the only discernible theme has been, "me, me, me."

I did try a couple of years ago to write poems around the theme of horses. As it turns out, I had a tenuous connection at best with these beautiful creatures, although growing up on Long Island, next to a corral and next door to my grandfather's barn, they were common as squirrels. Of course, that very estranged relationship could be what I was supposed to be writing about in the first place, and not just a bunch of portraits of, "Horses I Have Known."

So, I have four or five decent poems about horses, and Long Island, and childhood. I have other poems about childhood too, so my last attempt at putting together a manuscript from poems I've already written will be to combine childhood poems with horse poems. This could work. Again, they have been written over twenty or thirty years, so they will require major revision to hang together, in my opinion. So, that project is in the pile.

This year, I decided to write one poem a month with the starting off point of current events in my life. The weather seems to open most of them, but after warming up, I think I've come up with eleven (so far) decent poems. These, perhaps with a couple others that I wrote outside of this exercise, should make a decently cohesive chapbook. As I wrote them, I just typed them up and put them in a folder, so perhaps my memory of them is a bit rosier than is warranted. We'll see in January.

I began a rather experimental project too, inspired by the works of Katrinka Moore, Anne Gorrick, and Adam Tedesco, among others. I stumbled on an old paperback copy of Valley of the Dolls over the summer. I copied ten random pages, then cut out pill-shaped chunks from the middle. I then switched around the cut pieces, and typed up rough, abstracts drafts of ten poems. I intend to make each successive draft looser and less connected to the original gibberish, but of course the results make more sense than you would think. This seems to be a good project to jump into when I can't think straight, or I'm too tired to write a "real" poem. Not thinking straight is absolutely required for this kind of word play. 

Basically, I am cutting myself some slack over the holidays, concentrating on relaxing (!) and enjoying the season. I'm also planning a trip to Florida in mid-February, via Amtrak, a less stressful mode of travel for both myself and my Roommate. I'm letting life lead for the time being. The poems wait, will wait, have waited, will be waiting. And will demand to be written when they will, always.