Jeanne Emmons’s The Glove of the World is a persistent and varied immersion in the natural world–Emmons’s poetry has a deep commitment to ecology on every scale, from internal organs (“It is the moil of the fisting muscle knuckling / and squeezing over and over the blood’s milk,” from “Blood Pressure”) to our earth seen from space (“The great, warm animal of the planet is raked by horizontals, / stroked from side to side by the neap and flood of tides,” from “Texas Coast Beneath Crescent Moon”).  Often, these differences in scale serve as metaphors for each other–that earth is a “great, warm animal” whose pelt the tides “stroke,” and the movement of blood through the body in “Blood Pressure” is “a verve, a wild garden.”  The first poem in the collection, “Mollusks,” compares the speaker’s way of thinking about the world to the way a mollusk takes in water:

Is this only how I dig in and wait,

clamped inside myself, taking in the view

through the narrow flume of my knowing?

It’s a great question, and it showcases Emmons’s method of uniting the various scales of the natural world through metaphor, but I’m not sure that’s what this poet does–I have a hard time describing this sensibility as a “narrow flume of […] knowing.”  Rather, the image at the very end of the book, in “The Web at the Center of Light,” more accurately metaphorizes this kind of poetic consciousness:

But what is too small or formless to be loved

[…]

slips even now between these words,

syllables, sounds, synapses, and is not grasped

but pours transparent as water

through the bright open spaces

of the web at the center of light.

Thus, the poet claims what is too “formless to be loved,” but also what has form–the “words,” the “web at the center.”  Whatever she doesn’t capture in the poems themselves has still “slip[ped] in.”  That list–“syllables, sounds, synapses”–in its parallel structure and alliteration equates parts of words to waves in the air more generally to parts of our brains.  Everything is united with everything else through metaphor, and the rest comes along “through the bright open spaces,” so that the poem, Whitman-like, contains everything.

Your assignment:  Write a poem that includes imagery from the natural world.  Choose at least one small thing (something on a small scale–a part of the body, or a small bird, or a small plant, or a bone, or a piece of a bone) and one large thing (on a cosmic scale–a star, a planet, a series of oceans).  Create a surprising metaphor, simile, or metonymy uniting the two scales, and include it in your poem.

One of my dearest friends is an engineer, and about eight years ago he told me about QR codes, and he said, “These are going to be great for poetry.”  I must admit that I had only the vaguest inkling what he might mean, and that inkling didn’t really develop into anything concrete for me until I read Collier Nogues’s very exciting book of erasure poems, The Ground I Stand on Is Not My Ground (Drunken Boat, 2015).

Nogues erases historical documents about the Pacific War and Okinawa in particular.  Each poem bears a QR code, which, when scanned, takes a reader to an online, interactive version of the poem (which you can also access at www.thegroundistandon.com).  If the reader scrolls her mouse over, or drags her finger across, a line that Nogues erased, that line reappears for the reader, so the erasure poem and its source text can both contribute to the reader’s experience of the poem.

When I write erasure poems, I worry about lineation–do I retain the spacing on the page, whiting out the words I want to erase, a la Mary Ruefle?  Or do I re-lineate as I go?  The beauty (or one of the beauties) of Nogues’s method is that the reader gets both–on the paper-and-ink page, Nogues has relineated the text, but the digital version retains the original spacing so the reader can encounter the original text, and the erasure, in situ.

For example, page six of the digital version of “Editor’s Introduction” consists of only two lines:  “There is no record / of”.  That placement on the page mimics its content–there is literally no record of whatever we’re talking about.  In the paper-and-ink book, the hard copy, the lineation is:

There is no record of the difference we

made

copyists and clerks, minor employees. (lines 11-13)

Because we’re told what there is no record of, it’s a bit more specific and determined, and while we lose that sense of having literally no record, we gain a sense that we’re going to discuss the “copyists” and “clerks” as they relate to texts and textmaking, a discussion that’s crucial in an erasure project that makes poetic texts in a way that questions our traditional, Romantic ideas of authorship that say a poet’s diction must come from inspiration, or the Muse, or the poet’s emotion recollected in tranquility.  Erasure poems make us confront the philosophy that authorship is a consciousness encountering an already-made world–erasure poems are poems because of the author’s curating of the words we see.  This curator does a particularly thought-provoking job because the digital and paper-and-ink texts create slightly different poems that push against the source material and begin to ask to what extent a poet is a “copyist and clerk” after all.

As “Editor’s Introduction” develops, the erasures begin to be about the process of erasure itself, and about erasure’s status to the documents it erases, and, by extension, to the power structures that created and depend on those documents.  Erasure poetry becomes a kind of subversion of the dominant discourse of empire:

So,

reproducing Empire

in writing

felt like this:

I contained a universe

a pure part of heaven. (31-36)

Please excuse my spacing–there are spaces and alignments that aren’t well-represented here.

On the hard-copy page, those lines are the kind of playful, honest self-reflection that discusses the poem’s own methods openly and thereby attracts readers by transcending the constraints that enabled the poem–it theorizes the process of erasure even as it creates beautiful poetry through erasure.  However, on the digital version, the typography of what happens after “felt like this:” must be seen to be appreciated:  http://thegroundistandon.com/editors-introduction/editors-introduction-17/

The Ground I Stand On Is Not My Ground is artistic, creative, experimental, and politically important–the kind of book people will continue to use to discuss erasure poems and the power of digital media to support poetic innovation.

Your assignments:

Nogues’s assignment for you is simply to write an erasure poem.  Find a document.  Erase.  Lineate the result however you wish.

I have two variations on the assignment:

Assignment Option 1:  Write an erasure poem that, like “Editor’s Introduction,” confronts something that has been erased.  Write an erasure poem about erasing, using a document you associate with power.  The history of the document erased in “Editor’s Introduction” is particularly fascinating for this exercise–that document, Robert King Hall’s introduction to Kokutai No Hongi:  Cardinal Principles of the National Entity of Japan, was an Imperial document banned in Japan by the Supreme Command for the Allied Powers after the war (layer upon layer of control exercised through document, or through erasing and suppressing documents).

OR

Assignment Option 2:  Read Nogues’s poem “Dear Grace,” which is multiple erasures of the same document.  Find a document.  Erase the document different ways–put several of the different erasures together into one new poem.

This review is going to be two, count them, TWO reviews in one!  I know you care about poetry value.  I know you’ve written six poems in a row, and it’s getting exhausting.  I have an exercise that can help.

I discovered the work of Betsy Sholl in Heather Sellers’s great textbook, The Practice of Creative Writing.  Sellers does what many creative writing instructors, and I include myself, have trouble with—articulating exactly what makes great writing great:  the “strategies,” to use Sellers’s term, of images, energy, tension, pattern, insight, and revision.  She lists principles of each, so those of us who have intuited these concepts from our reading can unpack them, using Sellers’s language, and explain them to others.  I think we worry that breaking down creative writing this way might feel formulaic, but the way each writer uses these strategies is so dynamic and idiosyncratic that it’s like complaining everyone is the same person because everyone has a skeleton. We hang different meat on those bones.

Sellers also includes an introductory chapter on “Reading to Write,” which not only helps students approach close reading but also gives particular writing exercises arising from dynamic and responsive reading.  One of my favorites of these is her imitation of Betsy Sholl’s poem “Genealogy,” first published in FIELD magazine.  I was so taken with the poem that I bought Sholl’s newest collection, Otherwise Unseeable, which contains “Genealogy.”

I must admit I was disappointed.  I love her language, I love her imagery, and I love her swagger.  I love the danger behind each poem.  But those great qualities are muted somewhat by a pronoun change in the first poem of the book—you guessed it, “Genealogy.”  In the FIELD magazine edition, and in the Sellers textbook, “Genealogy” begins, “One of my parents was a flame, the other a rope.”  In Otherwise Unseeable, she revises the line into the third person:  “One of her parents was a flame, the other a rope.”  The images are still great, but the third person distances us from the narration.  There’s something more immediate at stake when the speaker herself has such dangerous objects for parents.  If we’re being told a story in the third person, we sense the speaker isn’t herself in danger—she’s speaking.  If a first-person narrator is speaking, I always worry that she isn’t going to make it to the end of the poem.  I know she must be, if she’s speaking in the past tense, but still it feels like a whispered confession we’re frightened might be overheard.  I loved the first person in this poem; I missed it in Otherwise Unseeable.

Your assignment is cribbed from Sellers—she assigns an imitation of “Genealogy,” one in which students keep the rhetorical structure of the poem and change the nouns.   I started there, and then ended up cutting out a lot of what I’d written.  Thus, your assignment from me is to begin a poem, “One of my parents was a ___________________________, the other a ________________________,” and then go from there.  If you have access to the poem “Genealogy,” you can follow her structure as much or as little as you need, but make sure you change all the important words—all the nouns and verbs.  It should be clearly recognizable as a new work.  Make sure you pay homage to Sholl in your title, or in a note on your poem, too.

Here’s mine:

Genealogy

after Betsy Sholl

One of my parents was a blue flip-flop flapping

on the Thrifty drug store floor, the other

a cappuccino on a wrought-iron table.

The line of Latin tattooed

on my lower back

says, “I hate and I love.”

One of my parents was a pair of large red eyeglasses,

the other a puppy I carried by the collar,

convinced it was drowning.

One of my parents I sang, the other I elbowed.

In the sidewalk of my becoming,

one stuck a foot out, and one trailed behind me,

catching my heel.

One was an anemone, the other a wave.

How they stood next to each other in photographs.

I was a girl calling across the liquor store parking lot to a boyfriend

she didn’t have.

The cut-up is a Dadaist poetry composition technique that asks you to take a poem (or poems), cut it up, and rearrange it to form a new text.  Some practitioners also do the fold-in, which requires two texts–you fold each in half vertically, and then line up the lines and read across.  While William S. Burroughs was a proponent of the cut-up in the middle of the 20th century, poets are still composing under the banner of the cut-up, as in David Lespiau’s 2011 collection Four Cut-Ups.  You can read my review of it on Drunken Boat:  http://www.drunkenboat.com/db15/four-cut-ups-or-the-case-of-the-restored-volume

Your Assignment:  Write a cut-up or fold-in poem.  Print out a poem, or re-write its words singly on another sheet of paper,  Then, rearrange them into your own poem.  Or, you could write a fold-in.  Print out two poems with similar spacing.  Fold each in half vertically.  Read across the new lines (which will be one-half one poem, one-half the other).  Your poem will be the result.  If you want more detailed instructions:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-up_technique

“You look so straight-laced,” the Aberdeen, SD, poet Pen Pearson once said to me.  HA! I thought.  In my back pocket, I had an e-mail from Lucie Brock-Broido, who wrote to me after I reviewed her latest book Stay, Illusion, for Drunken Boat.  In the e-mail, Brock-Broido said, “You are as feral as I,” which, if I were the kind of person who got a tattoo, I might put somewhere on my body where I could remember it forever.  I am straight-laced enough that I don’t have any tattoos.  Or, I want to go incognito among the straight-laced.

For today’s review and assignment, I’ll link to my review of Stay, Illusion:  http://issues.drunkenboat.com/db20/reviews/mistaken-churl-lucie-brock-broidos-stay-illusion-barbara-duffey

Your assignment:  Write a poem with the word “inarguably” in it.  Of course, you will probably find yourself writing about something that IS arguable, which will add contrast and texture to your poem.  Think of being boastful, of infusing your poem with false confidence.

Most of my favorite books bear coffee stains. I once returned the Selected Levis, on inter-library loan from a big fancy library, to my home-library librarian-friend who conspiratorially whispered, “We won’t tell them and see if they complain.”  As far as I know, they have never complained.  While I stained just one page of the Levis, the whole bottom edge of my (ugh, signed!  First edition!) copy of Valerie Wetlaufer’s debut collection, Mysterious Acts by My People, is water-crinkled in an umber smudge.  What do I so love about it?

Wetlaufer unites the lowbrow and highbrow, the profane and the fancy, in beautiful poems that make us question exactly what standards we’ve been using to determine something is “lowbrow” or “profane,” anyway.   It’s an academic cliché to discuss “liminality” and to question the “liminal spaces” between categories, but Wetlaufer really does it, and does it with such uniquely beautiful language that you start to feel like maybe you’re a jerk for thinking something is so out of the scope of poetry.

For example, her “Love Poem in Three Parts” tells its addressee, “I want your fist inside me.”  By the end of the poem, the speaker tells her lover, “Through thin walls we hear / my parents talk & fuck.”  The hard k’s reflect our discomfort at hearing our parents copulate, and the profane nature of this sound is emphasized not only by the status of “fuck” as an obscenity (sometimes even in the legal sense).

Often, we code Latinate words as highbrow and Anglo-Saxon words as lowbrow (see Joseph M. William’s iconic Style:  Lessons in Clarity and Grace for a discussion of why—after the Norman Conquest, the ruling class spoke French, through which English inherits its Latin influences.  I am oversimplifying; if you’re interested, check out the Williams).  It is not just a coincidence, then, that neither “talk” nor “fuck” has its roots in Latin.  “Talk” is from the Middle English, and while “fuck” has an unclear etymology, the OED lists the most likely progenitor to be the Dutch verb “fokken,” which meant “to strike” in the 15^th century and then evolved to “to beget children” in 1637 and “to have sexual intercourse with” in 1659.  Part of our sense that something is cultured or profane, lowbrow or highbrow, comes from power differentials; those in power define what they do as highbrow, and those who are subjugated do things that are, by definition of who does them, lowbrow.

I realize that this is not necessarily a new insight.  However, I think it sheds light on why Wetlaufer’s “I want your fist inside me” feels profane—is it because this book begins, “I loved a girl / when I was a girl”?  Mysterious Acts by My People questions the marginalization of lesbian experience, and asks us to look for our own prejudices and discomfort at “non-normative” sexual behaviors, by dramatizing them using blunt language.  Set next to the parents’ “fuck[ing],” it becomes normative—we can feel discomfort even at the normative behavior of two long-married people having sex in their own bed in their own home at night.  So why should we marginalize lesbians for performing behaviors that might make some readers feel discomfort?  I want to make sure that emphasis is on “some”–plenty of people will read that description as being as normal as it is.  What’s important is that Wetlaufer splits discomfort from moral judgment—we shouldn’t use our personal discomfort to determine what is “normal” or appropriate or acceptable behavior. Or the stuff of poetry.  Something shouldn’t have to seem beautiful to be poetic.

Or, perhaps it represents our discomfort at any sexual behavior being spoken of openly in poetry, our Puritanical history influencing our reading.  In that case, it feels particularly subversive to describe specific sex acts in beautiful ways.

I also want to point out that the contrast between the fancy and the profane, the lowbrow and the highbrow, that marks much of this collection is not only thematic but is also coded in the DNA of the book’s language.  It’s in the etymology of Wetlaufer’s diction, and it’s in the title of “Love Poem in Three Parts”—“love” is also not Latinate, but Saxon, and we don’t consider it to be lowbrow, particularly.  Or do we?  It is, at worst, considered a “universal” experience, felt by the upper and lower castes alike.  Again, an oversimplification, but it does highlight that etymology alone can’t account for our sense of profanity.

But this is just the lowbrow, the profane.  We haven’t discussed the highbrow and the fancy.  The speaker of “Love Poem in Three Parts” calls the lover’s clothing her “vestments” (you guessed it—Latinate) in the first section of the poem.  In the third section, the speaker and her lover are “wearing / white & clasping hands.”  By the end of the poem, the frank discussion of sexual acts, and the lyric beauty of the English language, combine in the closing image:  “You dip your face / into me like a kitten drinking milk, your whole face / disappearing into the shallow bowl.”  In “like a kitten drinking milk,” the assonance of the repeated short i’s, and the consonance of the repeated k’s, texturize the image and contrast it with the soft sense of the kitten’s action and tongue.  The assonance of repeated “ow” sounds in “shallow” and “bowl” ends the poem on a moment of sonic beauty and on a sound that can be both a common orgasm or a specialized, lyric invocation.

Thus, Mysterious Acts by My People invites us to widen our concept of what is beautiful and poetic by examining why we find things to be profane—saying something in Latinate vocabulary does not mean it’s inherently better than something with an Anglo-Saxon moniker, and sex is sex is sex—we’re uncomfortable about it, and we love it.  That frisson is perfect for poetry—lyric beauty emerges from that contrast.

And the word “coffee” comes to us from the Arabic qahwah, in case you were wondering.

Here are your assignments!  And yes, that’s plural.  I’ve asked Wetlaufer to write an assignment for us, and I’m going to provide one, too.  Here’s mine:

Write a poem that includes a word or action (preferably both) that makes you uncomfortable, or that you find “profane” or “lowbrow.”  “Elevate” that word/action into the lyric with the most beautiful language you can muster.

Wetlaufer’s assignment:  Wetlaufer told me that she wrote many of the poems in Mysterious Acts during a year-long poem-a-day stint.  We’re going to do a starter version of that, so your assignment is to write a poem a day for the month of April, starting now!

Hi!  Welcome to National Poetry Month!  Each weekday in April, I’ll post a short review of a poetry collection I’ve read recently, followed by a writing assignment inspired by the collection.  Happy writing!