State of Letters

Exercise Your InkTank Our Poet Heroes

In Why Poetry Matters (The Chronicle Review, June 27, 2008) Jay Parini argues that poetry doesn’t matter to most people. “They go about their business as usual, rarely consulting their Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Frost,” he says. “One has to wonder if poetry has any place in the 21st century, when music videos and satellite television offer daunting competition for poems, which demand a good deal of attention and considerable analytic skills, as well as some knowledge of the traditions of poetry.”

Parini goes on to argue that poetry only stopped mattering in the 20th century, when “something went amiss” and poetry became difficult. “That is, poets began to reflect the complexities of modern culture, its fierce disjunctions,” he says. Before that, poets such as Scott, Byron, and Longfellow, ruled the world. They were cultural heroes, as well as best sellers. And people loved their poetry because “it provided them with narratives that entertained and inspired. It gave them words to attach to their feelings.”

When even articles that argue for the value of literature (Parini’s title is Why Poetry Matters, after all) situate the art form in a rhetorical battle that it can never hope to win, what hope does it have of asserting itself as a valid, useful, or even practical endeavor. Of course television trumps poetry in the popularity contest. Television trumps everything. But if it’s true that poetry is largely regarded as “too difficult” to be worth the trouble for the ordinary reader, it seems something must have indeed gone amiss. What is it? Why don’t people connect to poetry in their everyday lives?

Let’s make the question a bigger one about literature in general: What place does literature have in your life? Is it about entertainment? Inspiration? Emotion? How connected is your experience of reading to your experience of writing?

You Better, You Better, You Better
I recall being immensely irritated by my first assignment in my first graduate program: I had to write about the state of contemporary literature. And then the second assignment pissed me off even more: I had to write a paper addressing the question, “Why do you write?” I think I believed myself above these concerns. I felt they should be self-evident—I read what I like and I write because I’m a writer—but it turned out that not even I knew what I liked or why I liked what I liked or why I was doing what I was doing, which was existentially weird and a little depressing.

If you hate me as much as I hated my professors for asking you to write about these things, I can’t say I blame you, but I’m going ahead with it anyway. Worse, I’m going to ask you to do it in storytelling form. Answer one of the two questions (“What is the state of contemporary literature?” or “Why do you write?”) in the form of a poem, essay, story, play, or some strange hybrid. Write your piece from the second person perspective, or (in other words) from the perspective of a “you.” Go team!

The Line Breakup

Exercise Your InkTank

Forms of literature are often defined in opposition to one another: Poetry isn’t prose because it’s lineated, and prose isn’t poetry because it runs to the margins. Of course, some poems aren’t lineated, which causes a rift in this trusty little system. But not only are line breaks a defining element in poetry, they’re also a powerful tool. We use line breaks to create rhythm and rhyming beats, to suggest meaning, and to create shape on the page. Knowing the power of the line break doesn’t make it any less difficult to harness, of course. Unless you’re working with a standardized form (like a sonnet or a sestina) the prospect of turning a block of “prose” into a block of “poetry” can seem like a pretty daunting task. What time is the right time to break a line?

Here are a few good reasons to break lines:
1. When there is a natural pause in the poem.
2. When punctuation marks a pause.
3. When the break causes a moment of interest or ambiguity in the next line.

See if you can use this basic system to break the lines in this poem by Matthea Harvey. Use a backslash ( / ) to denote a linebreak.

SAD LITTLE BREATHING MACHINE

Under its glass lid, the square of cheese is like any other element of the imagination--cough in the tugboat, muff summering somewhere in mothballs. Have a humbug. The world is slow to dissolve & leave us. Is it your hermeneut's helmet not letting me filter through? The submarine sinks with a purpose: Scientist Inside Engineering A Shell. & meanwhile I am not well. Don't know how to go on Oprah without ya. On t.v, a documentary about bees--yet another box in a box. The present is in there somewhere.

From Verse, Volume 18, Numbers 2 & 3 (2001).

Now let’s look at how the poet actually broke her lines. Does she seem to be following this logic? Any logic? Let’s look at some specific moments in the poem. One thing about poetry: sometimes the moments that pull away from expectations are the brilliant sparks that pull us in as readers. Good poems use elements of form (like line breaks) to synergize language and meaning and that isn’t always about following the rules.

Break Dancing

Write a short paragraph of prose (use Harvey as a model, if you like) without thinking about line breaks. Then, re-write your piece with lineation, making any adjustments to language that prove necessary. What happens to tone? Meaning?



Poems by Matthea Harvey

SAD LITTLE BREATHING MACHINE

Under its glass lid, the square
of cheese is like any other element

of the imagination--cough in the tugboat,
muff summering somewhere in mothballs.

Have a humbug. The world is slow
to dissolve & leave us. Is it your

hermeneut's helmet not letting me
filter through? The submarine sinks

with a purpose: Scientist Inside
Engineering A Shell. & meanwhile

I am not well. Don't know how to go on
Oprah without ya. On t.v, a documentary

about bees--yet another box in a box.
The present is in there somewhere.

From Verse, Volume 18, Numbers 2 & 3 (2001).


FIRST PERSON FABULOUS

First Person fumed & fizzed under Third Person’s tongue while Third Person slumped at the diner counter, talking, as usual, to no one.Third Person thought First Person was the toilet paper trailing from Third Person’s shoe, the tiara Third Person once wore in a dream to a funeral. First Person thought Third Person was a layer of tar on a gorgeous pink nautilus, a foot on a fountain, a tin hiding the macaroons and First Person was that nautilus, that fountain, that pile of macaroons. Sometimes First Person broke free on first dates (with a Second Person) & then there was the delicious rush of “I this” and “I that” but then no phone call & for weeks Third Person wouldn’t let First Person near anyone. Poor First Person. Currently she was exiled to the world of postcards (having a lovely time)—& even then that beast of a Third Person used the implied “I” just to drive First Person crazy. She felt like a television staring at the remote, begging to be turned on. She had so many things she wanted to say. If only she could survive on her own, she’d make Third Person choke on herself & when the detectives arrived & all eyes were on her, she’d cry out, “I did it! I did it! Yes, dahlings, it was me!

Originally appeared in Delmar.

Measure of Success

Exercise Your InkTank

Many of the writers I know measure their own worth by the quality and quantity of the writing they’re doing. No matter what else they may accomplish in the week, if they don’t get good pages, they don’t feel good about themselves. (Somehow, it usually doesn’t work the other way around, perhaps because, when the writing is going well, all of the other fucked up things about life seem to come into plain view.)

If you think of yourself as a writer, your sense of self will inevitably be influenced by the success of your work, whatever that may mean for you, but judging your life by your performance in one small area is an almost certain recipe for depression and anxiety, which can wear on you until it becomes what Coleridge called “an indefinite indescribable Terror.” Coleridge considered himself a paralytic writer once he reached his thirties and he wasted much of the rest of his life on opium addiction. That’s probably a fate most of us would like to avoid, but how do we maintain a commitment to our craft if we don’t invest and invest fully? Where do we draw the line between ambition and masochism? Gertrude Stein said, “You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result.” In my darkest moments, I think that’s easier said than done, but I’ve also got a few tricks up my sleeve:

1. I try to have a few different kinds of projects in the works at all times. When the novel overwhelms me, I turn to one of the three or four short stories I’ve got in the works. And if those don’t appeal to me, I work on an essay or some prose poems. Or, I just focus on reading. I consider the time I spend with books, time I’m spending on my own work.

2. I let people make fun of me for my self-important writerly drama. No amount of earnest pleading with me will convince me to lighten up about the amount of work I’ve been getting done lately, but call me an asshole and I’ll probably drop it.

3. If I can’t get over that ten page hump (the obstacle that stalls most of my stories, even those that I finish quickly) I look for fragments of stories that might juxtapose nicely with the work I’ve already done.

Give It A Shot
Here are a few items that I’ve been keeping in reserve. Select one and begin writing on it, with a piece of your own work in mind. Don’t worry about the connective tissue between the two. Let the language itself lead you from word to word.

1. While having lunch at a neighbor’s house, a woman hears her own husband’s description on the news. When she sees his photo on the television, she has no doubt that it’s him.

2. Since the early 1990s, trillions of discarded plastic items have converged, held together by swirling currents, to form the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch that now covers an area twice the size of the United States and weighs about 100 million tons.

3. A 25-year-old woman was arrested for assault after fighting with her boyfriend in the shower over whether the his dog could join them. The boyfriend said that he hoped his next girlfriend would appreciate the dog more.

Good Tools

Exercise Your InkTank

Narrative Perspective
It’s often said that one good measure of a writer’s strength and ability is his or her handling of narrative perspective. Failures or breaks in point-of-view are problems common to the beginner; they’re also very noticeable because they disrupt the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief. (When the perspective fails, we’re all suddenly very aware of the writer behind the writing, floundering.) As we develop as writers, we become more aware of the conventions. We learn by doing. And once we gain some fluency, it becomes less about screwing up and more about the ways in which we can make tools like point-of-view work even harder for us.

One of the most useful maneuvers a storyteller can master is the ability to offer the reader a look around a first person narration: No one in the office was talking to me. They couldn’t handle real fashion. Also, they were jealous little barn hens.

One of the most complex maneuvers in the storyteller’s arsenal is the use of free indirect discourse: Brie was wearing the black gown to the office again, despite the looks. Her grief costume, they called it. Could she help that the season’s lines were austere? Could she help that belted cell phones passed for accessories there? One day, they’d regret the taunting. They’d get down on their knees and beg her to reform them.

Dialogue
Good dialogue is a bit of paradox. When we say dialogue seems “real” what we really mean is that it’s an effective fraud. It’s free of the stink of artifice. If it were actually true to life, it would be wrought with backward sentence structures and littered with umm’s and err’s and ahh’s. When dialogue is informational, we know it’s fake—it’s advancing the writer’s agenda—and without some surrounding exposition or narration, dialogue can seem like a pair of disembodied voices in an empty white room. If dialogue doesn’t move the storytelling horizontally or vertically, it can feel clunky and out of place. And if we’re not invested deeply in the world of the story, dialogue can seem off or inaccurate or just plain wrong. A lot of folks think that writing good dialogue is about finding just the right thing to say. But maybe it’s really about timing and rhythm:

“I thought you weren’t talking to me today.”
“I’m not. I’m too embarrassed to be talking to you.”
“Well, I don’t know why you’d say that.”
“You know exactly why I’d say that.”
“Explain it to me.”
“You’d like that. It would give you a chance to feel justifiably hurt.”
“What do you mean?”
“Right now you’re just fake hurt. You’re the kind of hurt people do when they know they’re wrong. It’s a kind of trap.”


X+Y=Style
People tend to think of a writer’s style as his or her voice and there’s no question that voice is an identifying factor, but even writers who use a “transparent,” rather than “voicey,” kind of language have distinct and recognizable styles. A writer’s use of narrative perspective and treatment of dialogue can have a whole freaking lot to do with the overall feel of the writing. Developing your style of dealing with these elements can be much more important than an especially brilliant turn of phrase. Just by taking a quick look at how different people deal with the same basic scenario, we can see how personal style can emerge from these kinds of choices. Take one of the perspectives at the top and a chunk of dialogue from the bottom and write a scene. Change the language as much as you like.

Dialect Coach

Exercise Your InkTank


“Ow, eez ye-ooa san, is e? Wal, fewd dan y’ de-ooty bawmz a mather should, eed now bettern to spawl a pore gel’s flahrzn than ran awy atbaht pyin. Will ye-oo py me f'them?”
- George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion

“I ‘uz mos’ to de foot er de islan’ b’fo’ I foun’ a good place.”
- Mark Twain’s Huck Finn

Let’s be frank: Eye dialect (which pretends to represent nonstandard speech by variant or phonetic spelling) is problematic. For one thing, it’s really distracting. It diverts attention away from what was said and places the focus on how it was said. At its best, it’s a shade gratuitous, if not a little insulting. At its worst, it’s racist, classist, and condescending; it implies an ignorance on the part of the speaker, or a lack of education, or both, whether it means to or not. Consider the examples above: Shaw attempts to represent the speech of a poor street woman and Twain attempts to represent the speech of a slave. Notice anything problematic about this scenario? Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style recommends that you use eye dialect with caution—“Do not use dialect unless you are a devoted student of the tongue you hope to reproduce”—for the obvious reasons.

We’ve talked before about how to signal dialects that are essential to the story without reproducing the peculiarities of expression: It’s often enough just to describe how a speaker speaks in order to imbue the character’s language with a dialect a reader will “hear.” Beyond that, you can evoke dialect through sentence structure—cadences of speech. Let’s see how this works: Imagine a scenario in which a father walks in on his teenaged son and a young girl in the garage.

Begin here with a cadence that might work to signal a dialect:
He buttoned his jacket up to his neck and kicked a flap of mud from his shoe. “I don’t care what the hell you two do, just as long as you’re not doing it here,” he said.

And now add information about the way the speaker speaks:
He buttoned his jacket up to his neck and kicked a flap of mud from his shoe. “I don’t care what the hell you two do,” he said, his low hollow drawl burning. “Just as long as you’re not doing it here.”

Where would you place this character in the world? What kind of guy is he?

Y’all Hear Now?
Begin with the same scenario and establish a different dialect through your word choice and your arrangement of words.

Bad Language

Exercise Your InkTank

What the fuck’s the problem with using a few fucking curse words in your fucking writing? The truth of the fucking matter is that people curse all of the fucking time in real life. Why the fuck shouldn’t they do it in motherfucking storytelling?

Profanity isn’t new to literature, of course. Even Shakespeare cursed, but Shakespeare was also censored, both in his own time and beyond. The most famous alteration of his works, Thomas and Harriet Bowdler's Family Shakespeare (1818), omitted “those words and expressions that cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family,” so as not to “raise a blush to the cheeks of modesty” and as recently as 1996, one of his plays (Twelfth Night) was banned in an American school on the basis of its obscene content.

The debate about the appropriateness of certain language in literature is often cast as just such a collision between conflicting standards of morality and propriety. It’s the censor prudes against the corruptor potty mouths. And, to be fair, this collision is a real one. It plays out in our publishing houses and our theatres again and again, but it’s most apparent in the perpetual squabbling over what you can and can’t say on television. These days, you can say the words bitch and shit but you still can’t say God damn, and holy fuck is out of the question. It all seems so silly and arbitrary and besides the point and maybe it is. The debate over profanity in literature is perhaps more accurately cast as a technical matter, at least for the practitioners of the art; it’s about earning the trust of the reader and keeping it. Some find gratuitous cursing in literature objectionable, but where is the line between gratuitous language and earned language? Where would you draw it? Why?

1. I never use profanity in my writing. It’s cheap.
2. I only use profanity when the moment absolutely calls for it—no more than once or twice in a selection.
3. I only use profanity in dialogue, never in narration.
4. I use profanity, but I try to use it sparingly.
5. If my narrator/character is the type of person who curses, I see no problem with bringing that language into the writing.
6. I use exactly as much profanity as I want to use. If a reader has a problem, he or she can stop reading.

Dirty Birds
According to George Carlin in 1972, the original seven words, you can never say on television were, shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. Write a passage in which you earn the use of one or more of these seven forbidden words. If you are morally or aesthetically opposed to the use of profanity in writing, write a passage in which you replace one or more of the seven forbidden words with a viable substitute.