Americanization of Foreign Style, Sense, and Sensibility

[miyako73]

I already got the perspectives of the poets from several workshops I attended, but not those of literary agents. Money makes people do things for you; thus, I offered. It was only one hundred dollars. A good bottle of wine is fifty bucks. Yes, I wasted that money because I wanted to make sense of my mother's old, big LV chest full of my poems. Should I burn them and start all over again with new voice, style, and sensibility? That has been bothering me. How about you? What is your goal if you have been writing since grade school? Do you write for the hell of it? Do you write because it is therapeutic? I think writers must have goals. Even self-publication can be a goal. Anyway, I'm seeing him again end of this year to find out if he can represent me.

I believe JBI's purist contributions are admirable, but he should remember that Western literature is currently in the Postmodern period--particularly in critical analysis and literary appreciation-- in which the purism of the classical Chinese poetry has no place.

[MorpheusSandman]

all those are old poets. Hardly cutting edge at all.

Gotta disagree here. Whatever is "cutting edge" in poetry today, those poets have had a tremendous influence in shaping. Ashbery and Stevens seem more cutting edge than most of the poets writing today, and even Dickinson, the oldest poet on the list, is embedded into the sensibilities of every modern, radical, elliptical poet I know of. Even if Lowell and Plath's confessionalism is a bit dated, it's also still producing award-winners like Olds and Gluck. So, I'm not sure what you mean by "cutting edge," but in terms of what I see getting published and winning awards, all those on miyako's list seem like pretty direct influences.

[MorpheusSandman]

He advised me to Americanize my stuff... I thought hard and found his advice sound. One has to dance to a prevailing music. When he gets a stage, he can dance to his own tune. Since I am seriously into this, and I really want to learn and improve, I have decided to try that American style, sense, and sensibility, an experiment of sort in my part. I want to hoard poetry collections. I pick three male and three female poets... Do you think those are enough for my Americanization experiment? Thank you very much!

I would agree with JBI that the foreign-ness is not really the problem with your work. That said, I never think it's a bad idea for a poet to immerse themselves in reading great poetry, contemporary or classic, especially from the language they're writing in. Reading contemporary work gives you an idea of what's getting published; reading classic work gives you an idea of what has influenced contemporary poetry; between the two, you should be able to find some mixture of the past and present that gives your work a unique quality. Unlike JBI, I do think imitation of great poets is immensely valuable as a writing exercise. While your imitations will probably be crappy at first, over time you consciously or unconsciously learn what elements of each poet's style you can assimilate into your own, and how various devices, forms, voices, structures, subjects, etc. work in various contexts. It also helps if you can mentally catalog these things, so at first you think "now I'm going to practice this device/mode/style."

Using Stevens as an example, you can see in his early work a "formlessness groping after form" (to reverse a line from The Auroras of Autumn), so that he has incredibly dense, rich, and difficult poems like Owl's Clover jostling up against lyrical, skeletal poems like The Man With the Blue Guitar; he has narrative poems like The Comedian of the Letter C next to collections of short aphorisms like Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery. You can see that by the time of his late long poems--Auroras of Autumn, Credences of Summer, Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction, An Ordinary Evening at New Haven, etc.--he's found a form and voice that can accommodate all of these modes at various moments, without lapsing into the pitfalls of any of them. On the other hand, there are poets like Dickinson that seemed utterly singular and original from the get-go. I think it's much, much more difficult to achieve that kind of distinct voice and style from the beginning.

Anyway, what I see as the improvements I've made in my own writing has come from a combination of the above method of reading other poets, gleaning what appeals to me in their work, imitating that, and then being brutally honest with myself about my own work and trying hard to understand what I like and what I don't. I won't completely disagree with JBI that poetry is a "sharing" art, but I will say that most great poets seemed to write for themselves first and foremost, and secondly (if at all) for their friends. You don't become Ashbery by trying to write for and appeal to other people, and I do see in poets like him a conscious playfulness that is more concerned with impressing himself and his coterie than publishers/editors (it just so happens he HAS impressed publishers/editors).

Two more pieces of advice: one would be to subscribe to multiple contemporary poetry/literary publications. I have 7 subscriptions myself: Poetry, American Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, Poetry East, Ploughshares, Rattle and Field. They're cheap, and this is a great way of getting an idea of what kind of work is being published, and even in the work you dislike I'd highly recommend trying to understand WHY an editor might publish it. Two is to start sending your work to these magazines (and others). The vast majority of your work will be rejected, but this is true of all authors. When you finally get something published (and you will if you persist long enough), it will do you good to ask yourself what it is about this piece (or these pieces) that got accepted.

Anyway, if I was to offer advice about your work it would be this: Work on incorporating detailed imagery and figurative language. When I say "detailed imagery," I mean to avoid things like, to use this poem as an example, "profound silence" or "coldness of still walls" or "dull painted ceilings." One can't imagine in a sensuous way the "profundity" of silence, or a cold wall, or dull paint. When it comes to silence, I've found it more useful to render it by what CAN be heard (like Tolstoy rendered silence in War & Peace by soldiers hearing water drops); describe the paint itself, and let its "dullness" be implied in the description; instead of saying the wall is cold, you could, eg, describe a hand touching something cold and compare it to the wall. For comparison, the line "I observed your oiled hands" is nice, but "played with your skin" is weak because it's too general; it would've been better to describe precisely what the oiled hands did. Such a poem, because it's, in essence, a dramatic soliloquy, would also be a good way to play with characterization. EG, the "I saw... I watched... I observed" parallels in S2 could be more suggestive about the speaker's character. The "I observed" is the most interesting of the three formulations as it suggests a kind of detachedness, which is, of course, the OPPOSITE of what stalker's are about. So you may consider making the speaker's language as detached as possible, so as to suggest that this is how s/he sees what s/he's doing, and contrast that against what us as readers see what s/he's doing (ala Browning's My Last Duchess). Anyway, I don't want to get too detailed about this one poem, as these are just some ideas of how to think about writing that you can apply to any piece, even those of a completely different nature.

[islandclimber]

Gotta disagree here. Whatever is "cutting edge" in poetry today, those poets have had a tremendous influence in shaping. Ashbery and Stevens seem more cutting edge than most of the poets writing today, and even Dickinson, the oldest poet on the list, is embedded into the sensibilities of every modern, radical, elliptical poet I know of. Even if Lowell and Plath's confessionalism is a bit dated, it's also still producing award-winners like Olds and Gluck. So, I'm not sure what you mean by "cutting edge," but in terms of what I see getting published and winning awards, all those on miyako's list seem like pretty direct influences.

I'd suggest Plath, though embedded with that "confessionalism" also certainly opened up a new sort of poetic vision that reconciled a kind of domesticity with the surreal, and certainly seemed rife with the issues of second-wave feminism. Morpheus, I know Plath and Lowell are often linked together with confessionalism, yet I've always found Path to be quite a bit more modern in sensibilities than Lowell?

The good thing with Miyako's list is that all of these poets would be direct influences on those writing and winning awards today. I made a mistake in my first suggestion in this thread. Unless one wants to move beyond the contemporary scene, in which case reading much of contemporary poetry/literature would be quite beneficial in order to work on constructing a new paradigm of sorts, one would be better served reading the works of the generation immediately prior, so as to understand how the current paradigm came about. In this case this list is quite appropriate.

[miyako73]

Morpheus, I use the following...

"profound silence"
"coldness of still walls"
"dull painted ceilings."

...because the "I" in the poem is a lizard longing to reincarnate as a man.



The following should be read as a whole...

"When you played with skin,
Sticky hair,
And flacid bones."

...because it is about erotic massage.

Nice pieces of advice. I'll keep those in mind. Thank you.

[MorpheusSandman]

I know Plath and Lowell are often linked together with confessionalism, yet I've always found Path to be quite a bit more modern in sensibilities than Lowell?

I wouldn't disagree with this, though what I would say is that I think it was more due to the increasing value of feminist poetics and the decrease in value of "sincerely agonized straight white male" poetics, from which the likes of Berryman and Larkin have suffered too, and less due to any divergences in style/modes between. Both Plath and Lowell could be uncomfortably personal, but Plath's feminist intimacy still has a lot of stock.

The good thing with Miyako's list is that all of these poets would be direct influences on those writing and winning awards today. I made a mistake in my first suggestion in this thread. Unless one wants to move beyond the contemporary scene, in which case reading much of contemporary poetry/literature would be quite beneficial in order to work on constructing a new paradigm of sorts, one would be better served reading the works of the generation immediately prior, so as to understand how the current paradigm came about. In this case this list is quite appropriate.

I absolutely agree, though it's a bit difficult to delineate "generations." Lowell and Ashbery are decidedly, at least, a generation removed from Stevens (as the former's major contributions came in the 60s and 70s, and the latter from about the 40s onward); while Plath and Bishop are, at least, several generations removed from Dickinson. I think it might be more helpful to think in terms of poetry "schools" (Confessional, New York School, New Formalists, Black Mountain School, etc.) and how they have influenced what's out there now.

[miyako73]

I read contemporary stuff. I appreciate them, but I always want to dig their early influences--the provenance of their sense, sensitivity, craziness, and confusion. So the six books are the ones I have noticed to be influential. The sparse love poems of Dickinson, I hope, can teach me in trimming down the verbosity of my poetic idea of romance.

[MorpheusSandman]

Morpheus, I use the following...

"profound silence"
"coldness of still walls"
"dull painted ceilings."

...because the "I" in the poem is a lizard longing to reincarnate as a man.

I understood what it was about based on your lone comment, but my criticism about their lack of sensuousness still stands. When I finish the poem I can't "see" these things in my head, not like I can "see" Keats' gathering swallows or red-breast, or hear his hedge-crickets; or imagine Eliot's night in the sky like a patient on a table. Such things are memorable because of their specificity and originality. They provoke new and vivid ways of seeing and thinking about the world that we sense. I mean, there are OTHER ways to be memorable (Pope's aphorisms, eg), but I think this focus on imagery and figuration are best suited to the kind of poetry you write.

[islandclimber]

I wouldn't disagree with this, though what I would say is that I think it was more due to the increasing value of feminist poetics and the decrease in value of "sincerely agonized straight white male" poetics, from which the likes of Berryman and Larkin have suffered too, and less due to any divergences in style/modes between. Both Plath and Lowell could be uncomfortably personal, but Plath's feminist intimacy still has a lot of stock.

I hadn't thought about that. You are right there. Probably more so than a genuine difference in "ars poetica", it was the independently arising and increasing value of that second wave of feminist theory. I might be biased towards Plath, as I've always found Ariel to be one of the more haunting poetic collections I have read, partially from an inability or lack of desire to remove the poetry it from authorial context.

I absolutely agree, though it's a bit difficult to delineate "generations." Lowell and Ashbery are decidedly, at least, a generation removed from Stevens (as the former's major contributions came in the 60s and 70s, and the latter from about the 40s onward); while Plath and Bishop are, at least, several generations removed from Dickinson. I think it might be more helpful to think in terms of poetry "schools" (Confessional, New York School, New Formalists, Black Mountain School, etc.) and how they have influenced what's out there now

Schools are a better idea. What do you think of Bracha Ettinger's transgenerational transmission of memory/trauma? A kind of Anamnesis of traumatic histories maybe, that is absent or perhaps unpresentable but at the same time ever-present? Her idea of "the artwork’s working-through of the amnesia of the world into memory is a transcryptomnesia: the lifting of the world’s hidden memory into its outside with-in-side..." Art/literature as a way of transporting trauma and memory from generation to generation. Perhaps an explanation of the way in which "schools" of poetry, art, literature, etc. transcend and pass through generations.

[kelby_lake]

I would have thought that the 'foreigness' isn't necessarily an issue; in fact, it can be an advantage- and of course, every poet writes about what they know. What he was probably suggesting is doing something like the film of Memoirs of A Geisha- fetishising the East for a Western audience.

But what you should really be doing is hanging out with other poets and get noticed that way.

[miyako73]

That was my initial guess, Kelby, but he was Asian, and he only wanted to be honest with me about the current literary trade.

Now, how do you make a poem not "clean and affected"? I've been reading Oliver since last night. So far, she has said nothing about that. Anyone?

[MorpheusSandman]

I might be biased towards Plath, as I've always found Ariel to be one of the more haunting poetic collections I have read...

I certainly don't want to imply that Plath is undeserving of her reputation. I do think she's a very fine poet whose qualities/abilities and influence are both on par with Lowell. In fact, I'd rank them about equally, with perhaps just a slight edge to Lowell given that he wrote so much more (I tend to value artists with greater oeuvres, all other things being equal).

What do you think of Bracha Ettinger's transgenerational transmission of memory/trauma?

Never heard of it. Sounds like typical lit-series "loldeep" nonsense from your description. As for that kind of thing, I prefer Bloom's notion of each generation reacting and misreading their predecessors. As for the idea of the trauma/amnesia across generations, that is probably truer in more insular and oppressed cultures. I think of, eg, the films of Theo Angelopolous which are palpably haunted by the traumatic history of Greece. Problem is, we're mostly talking about authors from the dominant cultures, not the oppressed and repressed ones.

[JBI]

I think Plath is mediocre. I get if she didn't kill herself she wouldn't be famous. She is a self-diagnosing hysteric whose rich upbringing in what only seems like a loving home is overshadowed by the tragedy she casts for herself by using imagery from pseudo-scientific nonsense likeFreud.

The audacity of this rich obnoxious woman to trivialize the holocaust by comparing her Elektra Conplex to a Jew in a death camp is both rude and disgusting. Her legacy is to influence countless copycat hysterics who interpret her work as somehow deeper and more tragic then it is, even after pretty much being rewritten by her "horrible" husband.

If you want authentic suffering try reading an author who actually did experience real trauma. The same criticism to Margaret Atwood.

Those poets are all old poets and not cutting edge. They are either dead, or almost, and all have been anthologized and become classroom texts. If you want to write contemporary poetry in the contenporary vein, read contemporary poets and engage in their poetic discussion, not their parents' and grandfathers'.

[miyako73]

JBI, what makes a poem confessional? If you write a poem inspired by your apartment that you find desolate without saying you are mentally ill, is that confessional? It seems to me any poem can be confessional if it's in first person, autobiographical and existentialist.

[sandy14]

Now, how do you make a poem not "clean and affected"?

An affected poem is one that uses poetic technique for no other reason than the fact that you are writing a poem. It is quite common (and I certainly was guilty of this) amongst folk who start writing poems and copy Keats and Wordsworth. This means you get lots of thees and thous and the word order gets reversed or everything rhymes and there is absolutely no reason for it, apart from the fact that "it's a poem."

A clean poem is one that has clarity. The poem is transparent - the poem is not stuffed with big long words that are out of place or make the reader do more work than they have to. The reader should be able to get an understanding of the poem without needing to be aware of thousands of years of poetical history or look stuff up. Sometimes you get "rabbit in the hat" poems where the first few verses hide the topic from the reader, and then the last verse reveals all and the reader is supposed to be impressed. It doesn't work. Clean means the reader can follow the line of thought/sound through the poem without being misdirected by overused or careless use of language. This includes the use of clichés which communicate very little to the reader.

I think Walter Carlos Williams and Robert Frost's poems are probably good examples of both.

However the style of "clean" poetry has come under fire. It is a good discipline to write "clean" poems, but poetry does not always have to be "clean" to work.