A boxer and a poem

The creative writing class I teach is compulsory for Communications students at Massey University, so not everyone in the class (read: most of them) want to be there. Many have either never written a poem or written one only once somewhere in the dim past. Somehow their high school teachers managed to skirt poetry and focus on prose because it's 'easier'. There are always one or two self-selected writers per class even if they're not prepared to fess up to it, and there are those who are writers even if they don't know it.

I love seeing a student's face when he or she reads out a poem and the class applauds or I say 'wow' or 'that's a poem!'  or something teacherly like that. There's always a small shift upwards in the bones under the young skin in front of me, the eyes seem wider, the face brighter. Then they look around, concerned that perhaps we're making fun, that it's not good after all.

A young man in that situation will almost always dart a glance sideways concerned he'll be ribbed, and of course he is - his mates' eyebrows will raise, there'll be nudging, a giggle.

There's the young woman who tells me she wrote her poem when she was sitting in front of a movie. She just wrote and wrote whatever came into her head while watching what was in front of her - two pages of 'stuff' - thinks it must be too long for a poem, cuts it down to a page, realises a lot of it makes no sense, is not even sure it is a poem, but hands it in anyway. What 'it' is is an astonishing piece of language poetry. She has never written a poem before.

There's the young boxer who isn't 'getting' poetry, asks his Dad about it, so his Dad gets down his favourite poems, and together they read Rudyard Kipling's If.

Another bloke, the boxer's friend, who still doesn't appear to believe that his fine observations of a house he used to live in once are a poem. The original is restrained and poignant. Every revision is great. He keeps looking down at the ground and shaking his head like I'm a bit cracked.

The mature student, a man, who writes about a miscarriage from his wife's point of view. Astonishing for that reason alone. Another mature student who uses the name of a jazz musician as a verb. Wonders if that's 'ok'.

A woman who describes the heart in such a way that it's never been described before. I cannot remove the image from my mind.

Poet and teacher Mark Doty's latest blog post inspired me to blog on this subject, here's how it begins:

Teachers have no right to pride, really, when it comes to their students' work. All I can claim to have done is ask questions and make some statements about what I saw in the poems before me. I try to be a friendly, interested advocate for what seems most alive in the work at hand. My ideal is for the writer I'm working with to feel thoroughly SEEN -- that someone (me) is looking very closely at what they've made and are trying to make, and attempting to articulate that project with them.

Yes! That absolutely is it! 'Seeing' what's there, and polishing up one's eyes to do the seeing is what takes the time and the energy. Doty goes on to express pride (after all) in three of his students who are having their collections published. I have seen a couple of my students go on to study poetry further and to continue to write it. One has joined Tuesday Poem. Who knows, one day a collection may come from a poet who never dreamed he or she would be a poet. Now that would be something.

Finally, the winners of the NZ Post Book Awards are being announced today - poets, fiction writers, the lot. Good luck to all the finalists. Two years ago, that was me. It was one of the most exciting nights of my life.

Poets on the oil spill and being outraged

Poets are bailing into the ghastly oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico declaring in different ways that we must all take some responsibility for it. Either to make sure it is cleaned up rather than sitting back and watching it get worse, or to prevent this sort of thing happening again.

US poet Mark Doty felt a physical response to what he calls the 'murder' of the gulf that he calls 'A shutdown. A rupture.'

We need to be willing to weep, to be outraged, and to ask every question we can about our endless, characteristically American sense of powerlessness. 

More here. And here's Tim Jones on where the fault lies - not just BP, he says, but all of us and our flagrant use of the not-so-good oil.

There's a useful article on the worst oil spill in US history here and an excellent article on the oil spill by numbers which was published May 3 - so the numbers may have changed since then. But the figures thrown up include this one:

25 million: Number of birds that traverse the Gulf Coast per day, and which are potentially at risk from the oil spill. According to the LA Times Greenspace Blog, "Late spring is the peak time for neo-tropical songbirds moving from the Yucatan Peninsula to make their first landfall in Louisiana," and "more than 70% of the country's waterfowl frequent the gulf's waters."

A final figure... the US government estimates the oil spill has leaked 21-45 million gallons of oil into the gulf over the past six weeks, and it continues to come. All I am is outraged. I wish I had the energy and time to be more. 

Dickinson and the power of the dash

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In one day, to find Emily Dickinson not once but twice. First, this book which promises to shed light on  the fraught life behind this elusive poet who published two handfuls of poems in her lifetime and left behind 1800 of them unseen and unheard [thanks to blogger Gondal-Girl for directing me to this]. And then I came across two illuminating posts from US poet and teacher, Mark Doty, on the way Dickinson uses dashes and ellipses instead of a host of words...

Because we're reading Dickinson, I've been thinking about the remarkable powers of wrenched or unexpected syntax, and the ways in which meaning is disrupted, complicated, and made multiple by the sheer power of ordering sentences. [Mark Doty]

He's talking about this sort of thing:

Tis this -- invites -- appalls -- endows --

Flits -- glimmers -- proves -- dissolves --

Returns -- suggests -- convicts -- enchants --

Then -- flings in Paradise --

[from Poem 285 by Emily Dickinson]

Go here for more from Doty, and then here  for a subsequent post where he quotes Heather McHugh from her book Broken English:

Where a lesser writer might try to comprehend the world by adding more and more words to his portrait of it, Dickinson allows for it, by framing in opposites or absents, directing us to what is irresoluble or unsaid, Where the addition of a word would subtract even one of the cohabitant readings in a text, she leaves the sense unsteady and the word unadded, What critics sometimes lament as cryptic or obscure in her work proceeds, I think from this characteristic reticence - a luxurious reticence, a reticence which sprouts and branches meaning in many directions, the way more exhaustive (less ambiguous) texts cannnot...

I simply need to read more Dickinson.