Showing posts with label Kevin Clark. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kevin Clark. Show all posts

Monday, March 9, 2009

Whom the Students Like: Poets




(image: ice cream fit for an emperor)











So I gave a test in the Introduction to Poetry Writing Class. I suppose it's unusual to give tests in creative-writing course, but there are other good reasons to do so besides the fact that it goes against the grain. We use a textbook [this time it's Kevin Clark's The Mind's Eye, which includes a lot of contemporary poetry] and the Norton Anthology of Poetry, and we do a fairly sustantial unit on prosody and traditional verse-forms, so although of course much of our time is spent on the students' poetry, we also read a fair amount.


On the test, I included a question about a favorite poem of theirs we've read so far--either in the Norton or in Clark's book. Shakespeare may be the earliest author I assign, although at some point, I usually discuss the English ballad tradition briefly as well as Anglo-Saxon poetry and how (for example) it influenced Hopkins.


Anway, here are the students' answers:

William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"

Ezra Pound, "In a Station of the Metro"

Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken" [we spend some time discussing the ways in which the text of the poem doesn't "say" what people now assume it says] [2 votes]

Langston Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" [2 votes]

Countee Cullen, "Yet Do I Marvel"

Norman Dubie, "Poem" (about a child burying a hairless doll)

Barbara Hamby, "Vex Me"

Wallace Stevens, "The Emperor of Ice Cream" [3 votes]

John Donne, "The Flea"

Theodore Roethke, "The Waking" [2 votes]

Wilfred Owen, "Dulce Et Decorum Est" [2 votes]

T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" [3 votes]


I was surprised by the fact that both Stevens and Eliot received multiple votes--Stevens, especially, because I had assumed the students had found "The Emperor of Ice Cream" to be too perplexing, although I try to show that it's really not as perplexing as all that (I assumed I'd come close to failing in this regard). We will have read more women poets by the time the second test comes around, but even so I was surprised poems by Hannah Stein and Ruth Stone (for instance) didn't get a vote. On the other hand, this is a vote only for one poem.

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Genitive Wednesday

Today I'm giving a poetry reading in a colleague's class and then fielding questions. Often students ask about where I or poets in general (like these students) "get ideas" for poems. Another way of asking this questions is "What is it that drives poets" (when it's not a taxi-cab driver, har har)?

My friend Kevin Clark tells great stories about having taken a workshop from the famous Southern bad-boy poet and novelist (Deliverance) James Dickey, known for archery, boozing, and fighting--a schtick associated with Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway and countless others, of course, even if the particulars differ. Apparently Dickey roared into the classroom wearing a hat that Burt Reynolds had given him during the filming of Deliverance. The roar of the poet, the smell of machismo!

To open up the workshop, Dickey asked the graduate students what, fundamentally, poets like to do in their art. Of course, trying to get on the good side of the Great Poet, the students were tempted to say that poets like to depict real gritty life, or to be the "unacknowledged legislators" of the world, or to "express the inexpressible," or to get carried away by inspiration, or to devote their lives to art. (As Seinfeld might say: Yadda, yadda.)

Kevin smelled a rat, however, and remembered that W.H. Auden's famous anticlimactic answer to the question was simply this: "Poets like to play with words." Of course, Auden was being a bit coy, and Auden did much more than play with words. But that was, in fact, the answer Dickey was looking for, and Kevin gave it to him, and we'll simply slide past the several ironies of Dickey's and Auden's having agreed with one another.

What Auden meant, I think, is that words constitute the medium of poetry, not ideas, inspiration, life, or love. Words are to poetry what paint is to--well, painting. By saying "Poets like to play with words," Auden was implying, perhaps, that poets shouldn't lose sight of the medium itself even when they're trying to write "about" something. Often the so-called "idea" for a poem comes simply from playing around with (or working with, if that phrase seems more respectable) language, even if the poem, when finished, seems to be "about" something else, such as a red wheel barrow or having your heart broken.

It's true that readers usually want more from a poem than simply the poet's having played around with language, and who can blame them?! To some degree, I ignored that consideration in the following poem, which plays around with a) words I enjoy, as words, b) rhythms of phrases and c) the grammatical/linguistic notion of "the genitive case," which in Latin refers to words whose endings change so as to signal that they are being used to suggest ownership (the bird's beak, or the beak "of" the bird), description (the field-lilies or the lilies "of" the field), or location (the farm tools, or tools associated with or tools "of" the farm). I think you get the idea that the genitive case in English is often signaled not by a changed word-ending (English is mostly different from Latin in that respect) but by bringing in the word "of" for assistance. I think Gore Vidal said one of the thorns in a novelist's side (he probably didn't use this analogy) was trying to avoid the double genitive: "Speaking of the King of Sweden, the Norwegian laughed." The repetition of "of" can seem awkward/awkward.

In any event, playing with words, rhythms, and the genitive case, and unafraid to repeat "of," I decided--many years ago--to write a poem that played with words, more or less for the fun of playing with words. Whether readers consider it fun is highly debatable, one reason I kept the poem relatively short. I won't read this poem today to the students, but I will encourage them not to forget to play with words, seriously--to work with words, that is. The poem:

Genitive Case

Of eucalyptus, of acacia,
of rhododendron, tubers,
and pubescence, essence and
viola. Of pulse, of frond,
of pool and cool, of breeze,
arrest, and musculature. Of
hush and curvature. Of rush.
of whisper, moan, variety,
shoulders, piety, also variegation.
Of ripe, of lip, of full. Gladiola,
of. Form, firm, fern, tongue, smell:
of these of course. Of you. Of to doze and of
to languish. Of liquids, tubas, lobes,
and drums. Of cheek, chin, choice.
Of moist. Of measure for measure,
for olives of all, of grape and fig,
laze and sprawl, days and quirks.
Of sycamore and buttocks, of
cedar, water, smoke. Of willing
and of waiting, salt and wit.
Of grin. Of sum.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Poets Today

Although I read and teach a lot of Old School poetry, I also try to continue to read contemporary poets, although it's hard to keep up with the all the poetry that's out there. That's not cause for despair; it's actually cause for celebration. Professor and writer Judith Johnson, I believe, applied the term "a false economy of scarcity" to the impulse some people have to create narrow canons of literature--an impulse that may be guided in part by a fear of abundance. An abundance of literature may make some people feel as if literature is "out of control." It may be out of their control, but it's not out of control. Some people may feel as if, with new literature pouring out all the time, "the standards" may disappear. Canons shift all the time; just look at any poetry anthology from the 19th or early 20th centuries. Standards vary according to criteria, in spite of a yearning to establish the indisputable list of great works.

Among the contemporary poets I've enjoyed reading are, in no particular order, Natasha Trethewey, Marilyn Chin, Mark Halliday, Jim Daniels, Virgil Suarez, Rita Dove, and Kevin Clark--to name only a handful. I like some of Sherman Alexie's poetry, and I've enjoyed poems by Gary Soto, too. I'm partial to my late friend Wendy Bishop's posthumous collection, My Last Door, but I think even if I hadn't known Wendy, I'd be impressed with it.

I also just like reading poetry in the magazines in which I publish, or in magazines I just pick up. Often I don't remember the name of the poet whose work I like. But there's good poetry appearing all the time. In recent years, I've placed a few poems in British magazines, and it's nice to see what sorts or things are going on poetically over there. I've read a smattering of contemporary Swedish poetry in Swedish, and I even translated one. It's by Marie Silkeberg, from her collection, Black Mercury. It appears in a book I wrote with Wendy Bishop and Kate Haake, Metro: Journeys in Writing Creatively. Here's the untitled poem (in English):

Mother! my son called in the night.
Mother! I can't see you.

You can, my precious.
You can see my voice.

Listen to the sky now, so wildly blue,
And to black birds when they fly.


Thanks again to Marie Silkeberg.

Copryight Marie Silkeberg; translation copyright Hans Ostrom 2007.

Thursday, November 15, 2007

Poem By Kevin Clark

Poet, professor, and scholar Kevin Clark has just published The Mind's Eye, a splendid guide to writing poetry. It was just brought out by Pearson-Longman in paperback.

Kevin and I go way back. He was the first-baseman and I an outfielder on an intramural softball team at U.C. Davis. Somehow our team won a championship. Kevin was known for great defense and consistent hitting, while I was known for somewhat reckless play in the outfield and the occasional head-first slide.

Kevin's also the author of In the Evening of No Warning, a superb collection of poems.

Here's a poem from Kevin; it's a smart contemporary sonnet, in which the imagery, phrasing, sound, and sense mesh perfectly:

MATERIALIST NOIR

By Kevin Clark

Love must ride a weak carrier wave here
In the land of just the facts, ma’am. Let me
Promise
The post-coital scent of your hair,
Your dreams in code, your eyes steeped clear as tea,

The white heroin of your inner thigh…
I’ve hidden each essential gift in rooms
Far from those detectives who have to try
All evidence for unimpeachable proof

Of absolute zero. And I should know,
I’m one of them questioning two selves: Dead
Sure and Maybe Not. When you radio
Me from behind your book, from deep in bed,

From the patio dahlias, there’s no place
the cops find us. We’re gone without a trace.


Copyright Kevin Clark 2007; first published in Askew.