TYPES OF POET?
Poetmaster Rane told the workshop I was in this past time that there are two types of poets. Ones who write poems and ones who write books. I can see what he means.
What do you guys struggle with, thematically I mean, in your work? Maybe I can help. Maybe you can help me with my Achilles heel. It is a question of how much information is needed to "get" a poem or series of poem. Most of the time I'm not writing a single poem and thinking, "Ha...I'm the man." I have only felt the fleeting rush of heady self-loved approval once, maybe twice.
When building a link of poems, where the poems play off one another, I don't feel inclined to give away much in any single piece. Poems aren't candy. They are crops. They must be tended. I find myself wondering to what lengths I should go. I'm not really worried about the reader finding out I was born in Korea or that I am American. I like to think these things are clear. But adoption, that torn-sickle of my writing is difficult. It is a barrier of some sorts to try and clarify fathers and mothers. In any case, I'd like to pose the question: What are our weakness, areas of needed attention?
Maybe one person's weakness is another's strength.
Here's an example of a sequence I might run, say, in that book I keep working on. Does it work?
POSTAGE
Leafing through pages
of a phone book in dream,
I cut my tongue on a Korean War stamp
before noticing
a million of them,
falling from the sky.
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MOTHER TREE
I am free
cut loose from
the branches of the mother tree
surrendered
into the light, unto
fostered fingers of the silver bird—
I was nine
when I found you, planted,
arms part of an unreachable sky.
Running alone at dusk,
I cried for your attention
the single time in my life
pointing at a bloody shin
wanting you to see
what a snapped-back branch
had done to me.
On a hill in the woods
of a farm,
I wiped blood away with
colorful leaves
then
stood up,
cutting through aged silence
the roots quivering
as I kissed the bark
gripping
an ax.
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MIRROR
Ink ghosts
line the way
to you,
the way I cannot find.
My hesitancy to know you
is like
the way I am when I clean
a mirror:
Wiping the streaks in
the glass away,
the fingerprints of my birth mother
looking
for her son in the mirror
have been lost,
forgotten, washed over
by my skin.
The shape of myself emerging
from thick outlines
into the foreground,
my frail body revealed,
a useless pen
writing underwater on bricks.
Awkward in my
newly exposed
shadow, this latest image
of myself
going back into a dark bathroom
where
the mirror is struck into
two, then four
then eight hands
each tugging
before a dark horse emerges
frantic,
the promise like a broken beaded necklace,
everywhere
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PICTURES OF SEOUL
Taped over the headboard, eleven photos
of your neckline
with the river striking through.
Framed in a golden tomb, the cries of my mother
still most specs of traffic.
Tiny cars passing
over bridges, some
never returning.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
VISIONS
Lend me what a father owes his son.
It’s easier for me if I picture you in America, some dirty city,
wearing a brown suit, shouting to an invisible tech crew to hurry.
I have gone into bathrooms looking for you.
I try to see your face but it’s always flawed, always just
another variation of cinematic suspense where something gets broken.
When I realized you were not that man in that certain suit,
the one that I made up in my dreams with long hair touching his collar,
that these fabled films were my California sets, I ignored what I knew.
I told myself this place feels real when the film is rolling. The film is rolling.
I have imagined what your wedding would have been like,
pretended that it was your hand feeding me yellow cake with waxed icing.
A voiceless bravado calls me into dreams with cakes on fire.
Like any unknown son, I formed the bond for us, me and you walking in a park
was always my favorite memory. When I was ready, I had visions
of eating all your wedding cake, sitting alone, ready to sever you from me
with a plastic knife
in some empty hotel ballroom, eating cake on the dance floor,
doing the electric slide to silence, then leaving, slamming the door.
posted by Jae Newman @ 6:39 AM
3 Comments:
Jae,
If you're not under pressure (from a contract, etc.) to make a book, you don't have to force the creation of poems so that they will fit into a book. At this stage, just keep writing. The book is not the goal. Writing your best is the goal.
I talked to a Goddard MFA graduate who told me that not until all her poems were written did she then go back over them with her advisor to "discover" some previously unknown theme to be used for the title of the final manuscript.
Recently I put together my first chapbook, which was a good learning experience. Here's what I learned --
1) Wait to "discover" what the theme and title of the book will be. It may not finally be what you originally thought it would be -- in your case, you may think you're writing about "adoption" but you may discover something other thread instead.
2) Some poems already written will go together naturally in a sequence, series, or book. Others that you love won't fit into that final compilation. Also, you may have to considerably revise some poems, or create other entirely new poems, in order to complete the book.
3) The sequence of all the poems in a book is not the same as a sequence of poems. That is, all the poems in a book, in sequence from first to last, do not necessarily cohere as a "sequence" or "series" of poems.
I like the series of poems you posted today. I like moving from one poem to another in a series, looking for at least one image, motif, or other pattern that links them. In your series, I find many such images to group.
Great stuff!
Gwen
Jae,
I see from your sequence that you're doing exactly what you said, "not giving away too much in any one poem." If I write a sequence of poems, it is usually because after writing the first one, I realize I have more to say. I have rarely planned to write a sequence. I do think that it works out better sometimes to write a sequence instead of trying to cram everything you want to say into one poem. I don't know if I agree with Rane. I think if you're an extremely prolific poet, as Rane is, you have this huge body of work to choose from, and you can group thematically related poems together. I don't see anything wrong with that, but for myself, if I want to write a poem that is a huge departure from the twenty previous poems, I'm going to write it, even if it might not fit well into a book. For example, what am I going to do with the poem I wrote in response to Aimee's exercise (posted on my blog)? I've never written anything like that before. I like your poems, especially the last one.
Jae, I really love the last piece you posted, "Visions." Wow.
I'll be the voice of encouragement for writing books instead of individual poems. Though I found my first manuscript to be a pastiche of several themes and explorations, I'm really happy and insanely productive working on my current project, which is more focused. I'm writing poems that can stand on their own, but take on a whole new resonance in the context of the whole story. Why not be ambitious and cohesive? Nobody tells fiction writers that they should eschew the novel in favor of flash fiction.
I think when you find that story that needs to be told, when you tap into that which is (as Kirby Gann says - yeesh, is that pretentious?) wholly urgent, authentic, and necessary, run with it. That kind of momentum doesn't happen every day, and if you're feeling it, you owe it to yourself to see it to the end.
Of course if you're forcing things you might hit a wall, but maybe it can also work the way writing a formal poem can work: given the structure and the boundaries, you just might reach a new level of grace in your work.
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