January 7, 2006
Commonplace Book
A Commonplace Book, what is it? Simply a place for everything. The newly published (2006) American Poets And Poetry (Greenwood Press), defines it as “a notebook in which the keeper enters textual memorabilia, usually by hand,” but in the computer age, my commonplace book hereby called “Alabama Laureate Online,” will be a computer byproduct, even if notes from anywhere shall be incorporated in it.
Historically, the commonplace book was used pedagogically in colonial and revolutionary American schools. Thomas Jefferson, throughout his twenties, involved himself in “commonplacing,” the term used for this act of recording commonplaces.
Wallace Stevens’s Sur Plusiers Beaux Sujets serves as an example of a contemporary commonplace book. It served to enhance his art, and some of his “commonplacements” later turned up in his poetry.
Unlike a diary, it seems to me that a commonplace book is more than a recording of daily events though I recall the poet, Jack Gilbert, telling me that when he was engaged in writing a poem a day – and having his students write a poem a day, it was commonplace things that were noted and that became poems.
The commonplace book is a place for commentary, for engaging with thoughts about poets and poetry, a place for examination and for trying out new thoughts, a place to dare “say” whatever a writer desires. It is a learning tool and a resource for reading and writing. It is a place for bits and pieces of things as well as larger essays.
Advance Poetry Writing
In my spring 2006 Advanced Poetry Writing Class, I am using the following texts:
Ted Kooser, The Poetry Home Repair Manual. 0-8032-2769-8 (Univ. of Nebraska Press)
Peter Middleton, Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, And Consumption In Contemporary Poetry. ISBN 0—8173-5151-5 (University of Alabama Press)
Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook. 0-15-672400-6 (Harcourt, Inc.
TED KOOSER is America’s Poet Laureate. He won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Delights and Shadows. He should be checked on The Library of Congress website: http://www.loc.gov/poetry/laureate_current.html. Dana Gioia says that Kooser has written more perfect poems than any poet of his generation.” He is from Ames, Iowa and is currently a professor in the English Department of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Kooser says that “we are . . . indelibly marked by the poems we read, and the more poems we read the deeper is our knowledge of the world” The Poetry Home Repair Manual 7 ).
HAROLD PINTER won the Nobel Prize for Literature while I was in England in November. He seems to be best known as a playwright. Due to his ill health, a bout with cancer, Pinter did not go to Sweden. His Nobel speech can be found online: http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.html. I could leave England without bringing home his Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics, 1948-2005. It’s easy to forget what a powerful political statement poetry can make. Russia’s Yevgenhy Yevtushenko and Baba Yar comes to mind. Pinter’s official website is http://www.haroldpinter.org
From Various Voices, a little Pinter poem called “I know the place”:
I know the place
I know the place.
It is true.
Everything we do
Corrects the space
Between death and me
And you.
(1975)
The interesting word, to me, is corrects. Everything corrects. Corrects what? The space between. But there is only the space between, and that is “everything we do.”
“And you” And you . . . and you . . . and that is not less that everything, too, depending on the place that is known.
Six little lines and corrected space. A lot of think about.
Speaking of Nobel lectures, Wislawa Szmborska won the Nobel Prize in 1996 for her life as a poet. Check out “Movement One: Creative Coalition,” an Arts and Education Non-Profit Organization. It has a copy of Szymborska’s nobel lecture: http://www.movementone.org/
Seems to me people fail to recognize the breadth of poetry. Poetry is a powerful political tool. Pinter is a poet and a playwright. Kooser a retired insurance executive. Yes, scientists and insurance execs can be poets. Poetry needs to be taken out of the straight jackets some people thrust it in.
ANDREW MOTION is the Poet Laureate of England. He is the Director of The Poetry Archive. Check out www.poetryarchive.org
CAROL ANN DUFFY’s twelfth book of poetry, Rapture is a book-length collection of love poems . Duffy, an Irish poet, is to be one of the most admired contemporary poets. Rapture begins with a poet entitled “You,” the first stanza of which begins:
“Uninvited, the thought of you stayed too late in my head,
so I went to bed, dreaming you hard, hard, woke with your name,
like tears, soft, salt, on my lips, the sound of its bright syllables like a charm, like a spell.”
“The sound of its bright syllables” , I like that.
An excellent site for Duffy which contains a number of her poems and discussions about them is: http://www.universalteacher.org.uk/poetry/duffy.htm
WILLIAM FAULKNER started out as a poet. He said that “it takes you 200 rejections before you get to zero.” (Blotner biography 117).
And that means that we don’t even begin to start until there are 200 rejections. And that means: hang on to those rejections, they’re stepping stones on the road to where we want to go.
HAND IT TO THE ELEPHANTS: I just read in The Week, one of my favorite publications, that trainers at a Thai animal preserve had taught elephants to sit upon and poop into a giant toilet. They pull a chain with their trunks to flush. An elephant eats 100 pounds of food a day. No wonder the trainers love the new fangled elephant loo.
If it works for an elephant, could it work for my dog?
I think the elephant has more sense than my dog, bless him.
WORD OF THE DAY: ikigai.
It is that which make’s one life worth living.
What makes your life worth living?
What makes my life worth living?
Today is Saturday. No meetings,
just a cup of chai and my dreams
waiting, waiting.
SAY IT – “Je suis un poete, and believe it. No one ever said, thought, that poem-making wasn’t work, hard work—and then, Joy!
January 16, 2006
Bringing Up the Babe: 2006
Imagine this morning you have a baby on your lap. Imagine he or
she is looking at you with eyes full of wonder and love. Think for a
moment that this New Year cherub is your creative self, the work you
write. How will you bring up this word-child?
The New Year is a time of resolution, even though most of us don’t
believe that we’ll keep our promises to ourselves, that we’ll stick
to what we say we’ll do, and that by the end of 2006, it is just
possible we won’t remember our resolve at all.
What if we were to shift focus just a bit and think about our
commitment to that baby we bounce on our knee, think about how we’ll
assure the child grows in the fullness of its own being, think about
nurturing our new creativity?
The first word that comes to mind for me this January morning is
LOVE. No, I don’t mean the unfortunate triteness of it: "I love
chocolate!" "I love my dog, my cat, my pot-bellied pig." Not that.
Let us ask what this loving means, how it involves loving our
writing self and others who are busy writing too. I have at hand a
number of poems that are the first submissions from my creative
writing class, new words from new poets, at least to me, and I tell
myself: "First, do no harm." There are ways to critique without
condemnation. I once had a college literature professor who had a
stamp and a pad of red ink. As he read, he would plant upon the
paper a large four-letter word: "Bull!" I still feel the red heat
of his message and sense how inadequate I felt. I had another
professor, I will say his name, for after many many years, I respect
and revere him. Professor John Husband would take a poem of mine,
and point out one line. "Look how good this line is. What a
marvelous image! I can hear the sound of waves, I can see the
sandcrab with its tiny claws testing the air."
I felt so good about the one terrific line I had written that I was
eager to make the rest of the poem, the other seventeen lines as
good as the line he admired. We should begin, as critics, by
pointing out the positive. And then, there is room to show how a
poem may be improved.
Now, what should we feed this new-born? Beautiful, exciting,
marvelous words. "Book," we say, and the babe learns to read. Mary
Oliver, in A Poetry Handbook (one of the texts in my poetry writing
class), says that "to write well it is entirely necessary to read
widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers. [. . .] If one
must make a choice between reading or taking part in a workshop, one
should read." An entire chapter in Jack Heffron’s The Writer’s Idea
Workshop: How to make your good ideas great is entitled "Reading is
Fundamental." Hefron is the author of The Writer’s Idea Book and
co-author of The Writer’s Guide to Places. He is also a former
editor of Story Magazine. He says: "If there’s a secret to learning
to write well—other than, of course, writing and writing and
writing, it’s reading, reading, reading." He stresses the fact that
"reading adds richness to your language and to your imagination. By
reading good work, we learn the sound of good writing. We learn how
to handle the elements of craft." I believe that editing the
journal Negative Capability for twenty years and reading countless
manuscripts provided an incredible learning experience. One place
from which to learn is the publication of the Alabama State Poetry
Society, the Sampler. Here we learn who our other Alabama writers
are and become familiar with what they are writing. I am in the
process (with John Chambers) of putting together an Alabama
Anthology – poems that refer to or reference Alabama in some way.
Please send submissions to negcap@bellsouth.net. The anthology is
online at suebwalker.com. The anthology is currently online but
there will be a print version in 2007.
Children grow fast, and let’s say that the babe is ready to step
out into the world. Let’s talk, then, of submissions. Both Alabama
Writer’s Conclave (alabamawritersconclave.org) and the Alabama State
Poetry Society (alabamapoets.org) have current competitions
underway. Also the Eugene Walter Writer’s Festival (ewwfest.com)
has posted its 2006 contest guidelines on its website. Poetry Daily
(www.poems.com) has a free online newsletter that keeps writers
abreast of competitions and also sends to subscribers a poem each
day.
Regarding poems as they make their debut in the world, it is
important to keep up with publications that may be favorable to the
writer’s work. Poets and Writers magazine, Writer’s Digest, and The
Writer are on the shelves in most bookstores. They feature "what’s
wanted" sections, so have a cup of "joe" at your favorite
bookstore, browse the shelves, and sample books that beckon, that
say "take a look at me." Perhaps a reward we can give to our
fledgling child is a trip to a bookstore, to a library, to a
conference, to a reading. Writing is a solitary business and as
Tennyson tells us in "The Palace of Art," the soul does not thrive
shut away from human commerce. We need each other. We need to
support each other, read each other, and in this way that child of
ours will become the father of the man who will bring up a New Year
baby when 2007 rolls around.
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