Dzvinia Orlowsky: A Poet’s Anti-Rule Book Part II
Breaking the Stereo-type of Poetry Workshop Teachers or, Who the Hell’s Workshops Have You Been Sitting In On, Steve?
Many years ago, as an emerging creative writing teacher, I had the good fortune of facilitating a summer conference poetry workshop taught by a nationally established poet who had several books to his credit, each published by a reputable press. A student had submitted a poem to the workshop about a couple spending the night in the woods. The teacher wanted to know more about the couple: Were they deeply in love? Should we care? Why were they there on that particular night? He wanted more of the telling. I, on the other hand, wanted to know how the moon appeared brighter and what it was like, using similes which would reveal more about the speaker and the couple, why the moon appeared brighter at that hour and why/how campfire smoke seemed to linger in the surrounding brush. If, through these sensory particulars of how it looked, smelled, felt, I could get under the skin of the speaker, allow myself to see with his/her selective eye, emotionally tethered to the concrete via poetic devices mentioned above, I would come to understand the significance of the couple and, more importantly, of that night.
Whether or not the couple was in love or they hated one another, and whether, in the end, the moon appeared bright simply because its easy-reach appeal rhymed with delight or blight, I can’t remember. What I do remember, however, is that the three-hour session flew, and that my hand throbbed from detailed note taking. I couldn’t wait to get back to my room, organize my scribbles, and see where and how all this input for which I was immensely grateful would nudge the first words of a new poem out onto the page.
Some of us can’t get enough of plucking the worms, and others, turning over the large rocks to get to the worms. The ideal process of writing and revising combines both—negotiating unfamiliar, unmarked coordinates where language strikes with greatest possibility and surprising accuracy, as well as use of poetic devices such as imagery, metaphor/simile and sound.
As a poet, I’m quickly drawn to any essay that risks breaking of rules or sideswiping current trends. But I have a serious problem with sweeping generalities that encourage increasing cultural leanings toward a bias, an attitude of “this” vs. “that”, of “us” vs. “them” that continues to grow at an alarming rate.
Steve Kowit’s “A Poet’s Anti-Rule Book,” recently published in The Writer’s Chronicle presumes a position on current teaching practices I strongly disagree with. First, I disagree that creative writing students come into academic or summer conference workshops completely lacking in their own diverse and deeply rooted sense of who they might be as writers. This view assumes that a student readily accepts and abides by all rules, complying merely for the sake of pleasing “teacher.” In my many years of teaching, this has not proven to be the case. Students often come ready to do battle in order to justify and–in many cases–enlighten their teachers to diverse cultural nuances in addition to their mixed punctuation, their antiquated diction and voluminous abstractions. Even in remote community library workshops, if a one-shot Sunday session poet wants to write about kitty, fluffy purring kitty, chances are that I’m simply not going to get her/him to consider the subject of leisurely hours spent licking genitalia. Or the cat’s swagger as it freely walks away.
And that’s fine. After all, it’s not my poem.
However, it’s our job as teachers to encourage our students to meet us mid-ground. I was recently (gratefully) reminded by poet Nancy Mitchell of the following lines by Rumi:
Beyond all ideas
Of wrong doing and right doing
There is a field-
I’ll meet you there.
I don’t mean that teachers should be in the habit of co-piloting their students’ poems into sounding more like their own. Rather, I mean that we should remain open enough to consider other possibilities, other craft-related approaches that allow emotional truths to surface, purely and noticeably voiced. Misguiding students into believing that half the battle is won by simply breaking rules is deadly; it absolves them of the responsibility as poets to reveal, and in that revelation provide the vehicle by which the poem transcends the concrete and moves the reader in the process.
Which brings me to my second objection to Kowit’s assertions: I’m weary of poetry teachers being lumped into some large wad of drones who “facilitate” predictable workshop sessions, in which students are stripped of diversity and originality in favor of a half-dozen “best-bet” rules on how to write meaningful poems. Does anyone ever really say, “I think you need to get concrete and specific if the poem is gonna have a shot at the quarterlies?” If so, whoever he/she is, he/she shouldn’t be teaching.
Yes, the dictum “show don’t tell” has been used ad nauseam. It’s boring to hear, and equally boring to teach. But certainly, by now one has figured out that there are variations on that theme. A student of mine develops her poems (without compromising her own voice) along a “tell show tell” pattern – including concrete details and imagery -of which Ezra Pound speaks:
An image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. It is the presentation of such a “complex” instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art-
The problem I have with the term “concrete” detail is that it subconsciously conjures up an association with things artificial or of a paving track. In other words: denying one direct access to heart. Consider the “concrete” poem by Charles Simic, which reveals worlds in a single image:
Love Flea
He took a flea
From her armpit
To keep
And cherish
In a matchbox,
Even pricking his finger
From time to time
To feed it
Drops of blood.
Regarding the “Show, Don’t Tell” mandate,” Kowit puts forth, “Any quick look at good writing will demonstrate that effective writers spend a great deal of their time telling the reader what is happening, what a character thinks or feels, what a situation or event implies, and what the author would like the reader to think, feel, and believe. Yes Telling.” Then he goes on to quote the first four lines of “Hide-and-Seek 1933” by Galway Kinnell. If discussing Kinnell’s work in light of the more typical first-draft student poems one encounters in most workshops doesn’t unjustly tip the scales, he then excerpts the final eight lines of W.B. Yeat’s “Politics” to show, to his mind, that the success of this poem relies in its telling:
Yet there’s a traveled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there’s a politician
That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war’s alarms,
But O that I were young again
and held her in my arms!
Here much of Yeats’s poem’s emotional power is driven through syntax, meter, rhymes and half-rhymes. Sound links uproot us—to use Seamus Heaney’s words -“to master new rungs of the air.” We feel the poem’s wholeness, the appetite and gravity that pull us toward the memory, a projected imagining of holding an elusive “her.” To ignore these poetic devices allows the student to, as Pound writes, imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as an average piano teacher spends on the art of music. We can all imagine a less successful version of this “telling.” And why it wouldn’t work. Kowit’s points would be a lot more convincing if he had been able to excerpt student writing samples that merely tell and still manage to be decent poems. Regardless, I don’t think any workshop facilitator would say, “why not have her swinging an alligator handbag while staring into the window of a fashionable Dublin boutique.” At least not in this poem.
Continuing on with this idea, this facilitator would have just broken a cardinal rule by using the word “swinging.” “Poems demand active language,” Kowit goes on to say, “Students sometimes are given the idea the “ing” words should be avoided because the present progressive is apt to lack the energy and vividness of the ordinary tense.” Yes, students are sometimes given that idea—particularly if the action occurring in the present is not likely or doesn’t appear to need to be continuing into the future. Words like “twirling, swirling, whirling, turning” appear, for example, in countless poems about dancing. The student attempts to recreate a sense of movement in the poem more effectively achieved through rhythm and syllabic stress—two craft disciplines which I feel aren’t taught rigorously enough. Kowit concludes, “What language is or is not appropriate in any passage is determined, I think it would be fair to say, by the intentions of that particular passage.” Ya think? I can only match this revelation with one made by another published poet who once while giving a short lecture on figurative language years ago at the Cambridge Public Library referred to the act of comparing two dissimilar things as something he liked to call simile and metaphor.
Under rule header: “Avoid Sentimentality: When Expressing Overwhelming Emotion Use Restraint and Understatement” Kowit continues, “If one writes well enough and structures the poem cleverly enough, the reader can be made to weep over the tearing of a shoelace!” I have a hard time associating emotion with cleverness. My gut instinct: you’re in the moment, or you’re outside of it. I wouldn’t suggest printing on a condolence card Kowit’s “un-imagineable” poem:
Oh Belinda, you’re dead. boo hoo, boo hoo.
And will never to me be returning. I don’t know where in this poem to begin.
my heart for you it really and truly is burning
with your little nose and your chiny-chin-chin
Oh a million boo hoo hoo hoo hoos.
But oddly enough I can easily imagine someone deranged who’s just committed murder, spewing these words as he violently struggles to bury Belinda or whomever. Maybe a workshop facilitator who’s collapsed mentally? “It is not the emotion that is false or excessive,” Kowit criticizes his above mock-verse, “but the writing that’s inadequate to the situation.” What is the situation? Have I missed something?
For each of Kowit’s subtopics I find agreement and disagreement. Yes, readers have to be hijacked. No, not everyone reads a piece of writing five times mulling over each phrase. But to say that this only happens in a university setting (which by the way, I strongly feel it should) and that independently of a university setting, no “sane” person does this, is incorrect. Poetry comes into our lives to move us rather than to offer itself up for scrutiny and dissection, but as is the case with listening to music, the poems that get under our skin stay there, and it is not out of the question to find ourselves reading and re-reading passages. Or as Victor Hugo wrote: (I’m paraphrasing here) The first read lights the fire. Each subsequent reading finds the syllables that spell out the sparks.
In an attempt to end on a positive note, Kowit points to a colleague as example encouraging “guest appearances—to turn her students on to particular poetic orientations for which she herself has little sympathy.” “How clever and large-spirited!” Again I ask, aren’t most programs doing this? I can’t imagine programs not encouraging diversity. So much so that doing so, for me, seems rightfully spirited—without garnering extra applause for the effort.
In closing, I want to say I graduated with Steve from a low-residency undergraduate MFA program which hopefully, like me, he recalls as a positive experience, workshops and all. He’s a likeable guy, and I have enjoyed a good many of his poems in the past. Ultimately, I agree with his concluding quoted line from a poem by Nicanor Parra that supersedes all previous rules: “You have to improve on the blank page.” But I would ask that the same standard be held for writing articles on craft and teaching. Unfortunately, as a poetry workshop instructor of many years, I find Steve Kowit’s broad summaries disheartening. And to be perfectly honest, to those caricatures of academic incompetence of which I can’t help but feel included, I respond with a hearty “bullshit”—breaking Kowit’s own previously published rule to “never to use a word that you’re proud of.”
Dzvinia Orlowsky’s fourth poetry collection, “Convertible Night, Flurry of Stones” published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Dzvinia teaches at the Solstice MFA Low-Residency Program for Creative Writing at Pine Manor College.
Her translations of Mieczslaw Jastrun’s poems (with co-translator Jeff Friedman) appear in LAR Issue 9.