Hello all,

It’s a cold, hard winter and yet February is the month when we celebrate Valentine’s Day, a day of love. True enough, but I am not going to write about love poetry, its history (it’s old), its variety (it’s complicated), or its ubiquity (too many) and not even its pitfalls (so prone to cliché.)

Rather I want to write about the poet’s (at least my) hate and love of poetry. I had a student many years back who said to me: “Writing poetry is the thing I hate the most that I love the best.” And quite famously, it has been said by more than one writer “I love to have written.”

In other words, the relationship between many poets and their making of poems can be fraught. A writer like me, who writes into the unknown, is inevitably venturing into risky territory. If I go into the dark woods or even a vast open prairie, I don’t know what I will find. I might find something I didn’t want to find or know, a proud, antlered elk or a silly goose. I might even find a bear. I might find what is preoccupying me even if I don’t know what it is before I write the words.

The blank page beckons and all my desire to fill it with the “right words in the right order” could be stifled by my fear of what I might find – that is the real terror of the blank page – not that I won’t write anything (the weather is a surefire starting point) but that what I write might be revelatory in ways that are hard to bear. So difficult that it might yield tears. That’s what Frost said – “no tears for the writer no tears for the reader.” What might be lurking there, just beyond conscious awareness, should be surprising (a gift) but can also be disturbing (also a gift, though of a different kind.) And yet I can’t resist the seduction. We want to know. That is the desire that we poets (at least I,) yield to. To allow such desire is to risk disappointment. (the poem might be bad or contrived or untrue, even after I open up to the page.) And no one wants to be disappointed. The precarity created in the tension between fear and possibility is what I (and other writers) live with. Sometimes I just hate that precarity.

What I love, though, to quote the poet Jenny Boully, is that in writing a poem (or anything, even this little essay) “one starts out with nothing and ends up with something.” Something that had never existed before the writing began is now a “something” in the world. (I had no idea Jenny Boully would pop up just then. Nor did I know how much this essay would employ parentheticals!) But the pleasure of such surprises is irresistible, And the possibility of sharing surprises with readers is also irresistible. It’s two layers of love – the love that goes into the writing and the love that sharing the writing with readers reveals.

The poem is where the writer and reader meet. The most interesting poems engage the reader in an act of co-creation. As I’ve said before – poems (at their best) don’t deliver a message. They create an experience that the writer and reader share. The poem achieves its fulfillment when the writer and reader come together. Writers need readers. Readers need writers. That is love. That is a kind consummation.

Just recently, after focusing on prose, I’ve returned to the practice of writing poems almost every day. Yesterday, sure that I had nothing in me but exhaustion, I began to write. My first words admitted my fear that I had no words:

I wish I had
words
but I don’t

Seems like my impasse was with writing itself. It seemed so to me. But then, this happened:

I wish
a wash
of tears
would come
but they don’t

I wish it weren’t
a cold climate
but it is

I wish the dead
had not died
in a cold country
but they did

I discovered in just a few lines my inarticulate and helpless grief about the terrible events in Minneapolis over the last few weeks. That was my first discovery.

The second discovery was that almost all the words were monosyllables and so in revision I moved towards making the entire poem monosyllabic, revealing a speaker barely able to get any words out at all. The draft, small as it was, gave me information about content and form and how those connect in this piece. How happy I am to have written this not very happy poem that I want to share with you. I don’t want any of us to feel alone in this moment.

Here is the poem, revised:

Monosyllabic

I wish I had
words
but I don’t

I wish
a wash
of tears
would come
but they don’t

I wish it were not
a cold land
but it is

I wish the dead
had not died
by cold hands
but they did

Thank you. Happy Valentine’s Day every day of the year.

Hello all,

Happy New Year! I hope you’ve had wonderful holidays and are ready for a new year. I’m happy to be starting my second year as Poet Laureate and am excited about upcoming events and projects, which I will detail in future notes.

We are now in the depth of winter even though we’ve passed the solstice and the days are, quietly, getting a little bit longer. We’ve had our first big snow and so it seems fitting to use this opportunity to share with you some thoughts about one of my favorite winter poems – “The Snow Man,” by Wallace Stevens.

In my last note I wrote about “The Day Lady Died,” by Frank O’Hara, in which the poet narrates the experience of remembering the death of Billie Holliday. Step by step O’Hara leads the reader to have the same experience he had. The Stevens poem is quite different. In five 3-line stanzas the poet leads the reader through an experience of mind as it engages with the natural world in a way that defies easy pastoralism or sentimentality. While O’Hara’s poem is deeply personal, Stevens’ is philosophical.

Here is the poem:

The Snow Man

BY WALLACE STEVENS

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

source: Poetry Magazine 1921

The poem begins by introducing two significant terms. “One must have a mind of winter” – “mind” and “winter” coexist on the same line. An abstract noun is paired with a concrete image. The poem tosses us between the two. One reading of the opening is that one must have a “wintry mind – one that is cold and pristine (our immediate associations with the word “winter.”) Another way to read the line is that one must keep winter in mind – that is to say, one must pay attention to see what is actually “out there.” In the next lines we are asked to “regard” and then “behold” visual features of the landscape, a pastoral view of a winter world, one that might appear on a greeting card. But Stevens, in his one sentence poem, shifts ground and urges the reader not to engage in projection – not to imagine that there is “misery” in the “sound of the wind.” The misery is not in nature but in the human mind attaching its own emotions to what is neutral ground. Stevens warns against the pathetic fallacy – the idea that nature mirrors human emotion. Landscape is a construction of the human mind (something that Simon Schama also says in his book Landscape and Memory.) We see this constructive process explored explicitly in another Stevens poem, “Anecdote of the Jar,” in which a human being places “a jar in Tennessee” such that the human placement of the jar organizes the landscape around itself to create whatever meaning is to be found when human and natural worlds intersect.

In “The Snow Man” the poet moves the reader from visual perception to sound. The viewer becomes a “listener” – the sound the wind makes is what the listener hears. The listener is a lone figure, separate from the land, who, in his isolated and dispassionate condition (he is “nothing,” a mere blip on the earth, now “beholds” (that word comes back) only what is actually there and then, surprisingly “the nothing that is.” The use of the article “the” reveals the third “nothing” as the existential reality of nothingness. You can almost imagine 31 Atlas shooting through that nothingness. The reader has been moved from simple perception to existential contemplation, the “nothings” of the last stanza link the poem to the terrible negations at the end of King Lear. Stevens’ poem starts humbly and ends wisely with a kind of cosmic view.

I like to think about this poem because it is such a good example of what poems can do so well –take us from one condition of being to another. The poem moves and so moves the reader. How good to be moved. How good to be altered so deftly in the still moments of winter.

Hello all,

This is my second letter to the Arts Mid-Hudson community, and I’ve been looking forward to writing you. Since my last post I’ve been busy giving readings and curating them. I had a great time at Bard College talking to graduating creative writing students. I got my B.A. at Bard and it was deeply meaningful to return there after so many years.. (you can see what else I’ve been up to on the Laureate webpage.)

Since I wrote my last post I’ve been musing on something that sticks with me from last month –reading. Not enough is said about reading poetry though lots of people write it and write about writing. But reading. How do we read poetry in a way that retains the true vitality of a poem.? I’d like to address that here.

I like a statement made by the poet Richard Hugo in a book called The Triggering Town. He writes, addressing the nature of poetry, “If you want to communicate use the telephone.” By that he means that a poem does not exist to deliver a message. It’s not, as I put it, a form of intellectual or emotional spinach. It’s not good for you. It’s not bad for you either. It’s neither good nor bad –exactly. A poem is an experience that the poet has constructed for you. Now that is a problematic statement because it suggests that the construction is somehow “intended.” I doubt that is the case. And in any case poems always exceed writers’ intentions, and because of this they bear reading and rereading.

A good example of a poem that constructs an experience is this famous poem by Frank

O’Hara:

The Day Lady Died

BY FRANK O’HARA

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday

three days after Bastille day, yes

it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine

because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton  

at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner

and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun  

and have a hamburger and a malted and buy

an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets  

in Ghana are doing these days

                            I go on to the bank

and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)  

doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life  

and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine  

for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do  

think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or  

Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres

of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine

after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE

Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and  

then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue  

and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and  

casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton

of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

Copyright Credit: Frank O’Hara, “The Day Lady Died” from Lunch Poems. Copyright © 1964 by Frank O’Hara. Reprinted with the permission of City Lights Books. Source: The Collected Poems of Frank O' Hara (1995)

In this poem we are led along by the poet as he travels through a day. Everything in this poem suggests both movement and impediment to movement. The poet gives excruciatingly banal details about his walk through the city. The numbers and the foreign names make the poem a kind of stumble. The persistence of “and” builds an accumulation of feeling and event such that if you read the poem out loud you will find that you will stop breathing at the same moment that O’Hara describes the moment when everyone in the 5 Spot stopped breathing. O’Hara is avoiding the moment of confrontation with Billie Holliday’s death until he can’t avoid it any longer. That’s a physical experience. That bodily experience is what the best poems do for readers.

I don’t for one minute think that O’Hara did anything more than write down what he experienced that actual day. In his famous manifesto “Personism,” O’Hara asserts “sometimes you just have to go on nerve.” Poetry is some nervy business.

When you read a poem give in to experience. Forget poems with direct messages. That’s propaganda. Ugh.

Just “go on nerve.” Have some fun.

Happy holidays everyone. See you in the new year.

Welcome to the Laureate’s Corner!

Hello,

My name is Ruth Danon, and I’m Poet Laureate for Dutchess County and Beacon. For almost a year, I’ve given readings and curated events in libraries, cultural centers, bookstores, and other venues. With this note, I’m inaugurating a new project – a monthly letter in which I will write about the literary arts, poetry, and the life and times of the Poet Laureate.

So, the first question is: What is a Poet Laureate and why does such a role exist? Poets Laureate are appointed at the city, county, state, and national levels. It’s an honor to serve in this role. To my mind, the Laureate is a poet who has two primary functions – one is to present this rich and varied literary art to communities in all sorts of settings, often outside of any academic institution. The second is to advocate for poets and poetry – in this way suggesting that poetry can be vital to personal and community life. I think, particularly at a time in which so much time and human energy is expended (and perhaps wasted) on social media, that poetry can provide an antidote to the loneliness that seems to be epidemic. Beyond that, poetry can provide greater access to the rich inner life that every person can experience if it’s not blocked by too much external noise.

In the last week of October I was invited to read some of my work at the Staatsburg Library. It’s always fun to read my work. I’m a ham from way back. And I love libraries. But the real delight of the experience was the context. It seems that in Staatsburg, for many years (10 I think), some residents of that lovely community gather once a month to share poems on a particular theme. Mind you, these are not poems they have written – these are poems they have scouted out and brought to the group to share and discuss. It’s a reading group. Quite wonderfully, in all the time that the group has been meeting, there has only been one instance of duplication. What a rich compendium they have created. The entire collection is preserved in the library. How wonderful to know that poetry is being read with such attention and pleasure.

The group had asked that I pick the theme. I decided on “Poets, Criminals, and Spies.” And wow, what terrific and varied poems showed up. And what thoughtful and tender conversation ensued.

Also, there were cookies!

So, welcome to the Laureate’s Corner. I’d love to hear from you about your questions, comments, and experiences with poetry.

Til next month,

Ruth