Thirteen Stereotypes about Poets

by Gary Soto
excerpted from Why I Don't Write Children's Literature (March 2015)

It’s a disappointment that I’m not invited to parties more often because I possess an extensive social armor in the form of twelve suits, including a rare Paul Smith three-piece—rare in that there is only one other like it in the United States. To my mind, it’s very close to “bespoke,” meaning that a tailor, working from my slender measurements, made it just for me. I’m disappointed because I want to be present at a party where a midlevel techie—wine glass in his right hand, cracker in his left—asks, “What do you do?”

“I’m a poet,” I would answer, nibbling on my own cracker, sipping from my own drink. “Gee, this is a nice party. Look, there’s more food coming!”

And you live where? the techie might wonder, in his semi-vegan heart. But aloud he says, “Interesting. I read a short poem about black birds once. Didn’t understand it at all.” Cracker crumbs fall from his lower lip. His cell phone lights up and I disappear from his thoughts for seconds—no, for good. He turns away.

Still, I get to mingle with others at the party. I scan the scene and sip my wine. It’s good stuff—a blend of silliness, with just a touch of hilly ravine. Got to get a case of this, I remind myself.

In short, poets are misread. We’re like others in that we have hearts and lungs, money and then no money, and places to go—even if it’s by foot. If you call with an invitation to us older poets, on a landline, we will make every effort to come.


Poets Wear Berets
We are no longer partial to berets, though we’ve all seen them tilted smartly on heads, both male and female. Admittedly, they’re attractive head coverings, but only for the generation before 1960, and only if you were European with an owl-shaped face. Still, if a contemporary poet wears a beret it should be made of wool and smell of tobacco and worry—worry for the next poem and the next meal. When we do don hats, I’m afraid it’s the dumbed-down baseball-cap look—or a beanie, like that guy in U2. People assume that’s what poets look like—like the beanie guy. But no, that’s more like a rocker with a really expensive guitar.


Poets Are Silent and Reflective Types
If drinks are free for more than two hours—and if the party extends to another venue, offering more of the same—a poet can get really loud. He might collapse to his knees, roll onto his side, and keep talking, even while the brain has given up and the eyes resemble salmon eggs. The collapsed poet does not go quietly into the night. Though crumpled on the floor, his lips are still moving slightly.

“Bush,” the poet mumbles, “George Bush started it all . . . Rosebud, rosebud . . .”

Some smarty remarked that we poets come into the world not knowing a single word. After we have honed the ancient craft, however, we won’t shut up. But we also come into the world expecting a proper drink, right away. “Where’s mommy?” the newborn poet asks, then wails.


Poets Like Flowers
Sniffing them, we think of our future funerals, when an organ moans and the mourners, other poets in out-of-style ties, are keen to the aroma of vittles in the adjacent room. Flowers, of course, are beautiful in a vase, on half-price calendars, and when presented to us with the Nobel Prize for Literature. This big daddy of all awards most likely doesn’t happen, however, and we will have no occasion to shake hands with a real king and bow to his wife, the queen, thin as a tulip. But if it should occur, we would wear a red boutonniere, the color of the blood we spilled getting there.

Poets Vote Democrat
Yes, most darken those zeros in the voting booth in favor of Democrats. But a few vote Republican. Generally, these poets iron their jeans and then re-iron them, with sharp creases. Republican poets are always men.


Poets Don’t Work
We are apt to work hard—as long as we don’t have to bend over too much. We work for figures just north of minimum wage, correcting college papers that often begin, “In today’s society,” and teaching creative writing workshops where babyish students complain, “You just want us to write like you.” We appreciate work that ends about five o’clock and committee meetings that take no longer than the time in which to eat a sandwich. We like paychecks, but fret at all the deductions on the paystub. All those taxes never benefit poets.

Gary Soto, not unbalanced.

Unbalanced, Poets Must Hang onto Things When They Walk
Sylvia Plath put her head inside an oven—we know at least this much about her. Delmore Schwartz drank himself to death, and so did Dylan Thomas. Virginia Woolf, a prose writer with a poet’s sensibility, put rocks into her apron and walked into a cold river. In short, the public thinks that we’re unbalanced and steps back to give us room. But poets are well balanced. Consider how poets start off the day. We put on our socks first, then our pants, or maybe the other way around—pants first, then socks. We’re able to dress ourselves.


Poetry Slams Are for Everyone
Poets in a slam rhyme like this: “I was a’gonna fall / before the call / but big beautiful doll / hecka pale and tall / you feel me, y’all?” After some soft clapping from the audience, the poet swings his hair from his right shoulder to his left. Then he begins another: “Skinny but mad / fruitfully glad / mom and dad / like frowned at ‘Brad’ / but my words, sugar babe, ain’t that bad.” These slams start at about 7:00 p.m. and end when we turn about twenty-five.


Poets Drink Too Much Coffee
Like the regular Joes and Josephinas of the world, wesavor our morning brew. We drink two cups, get that sweet vibe going, then head to work on BART. In our office, we’re blasted by fluorescent light bulbs, but on our desk we have a potted plant to soothe our eyes.

“How’s it going?” a workmate asks.

“I stapled my tie to the desk—that’s how it’s going,” the poet answers. “You seen the scissors?”

We don’t sit in cafes jotting down ideas for poems that may or may not happen. Poets like their coffee with lots of cream and with sugar—two spoonfuls will sweeten the day.


Poets Listen to NPR
While driving a cheapo rental, poets may cruise the radio stations, halt briefly at NPR’s “All Things Considered,” and growl, “Oh, yeah, a station for the Volvo crowd.” When a reporter begins, in an urgent voice, “Today in Australia a kangaroo was found sitting among rocks at low tide,” poets snort, “Yeah, but what about me? I sat there and no one gave a shit.” Poets search for a station with loud music.


Poets Need Sensitivity Training 
A famous poet and his semi-famous friend commiserated over a prestigious prize that neither received. It instead had gone to a very famous poet.

“Get over it,” the famous poet scolded. “Bury the hatchet.”

“Good idea!” the semi-famous poet roared. “I’ll bury in it in his forehead.”


Poets Understand Dreams
We sleep in narrow or wide beds and we dream narrowly or widely. To our analysts, we report with mild urgency dreams such as this: “When I went into the bathroom I saw a polar bear drinking from the toilet. He raised his face with little drops of water dripping from his chops, and chased me down the hallway. We both ran in slow motion, but since he was more powerful he caught me and, well, gave me a bear hug.”

Analyst (tapping pencil against his leg—so Freudian): “Were there ice cubes involved?”


Poets Live on the Top Floor of the Ivory Tower
We live in houses with lots of windows, or apartments with some windows, or shared spaces with only one window, which we climb through when we’ve forgotten the key. We live in tents when the going is hard or with our parents when the going is really hard. No poet lives too richly. We don’t shine the silver or dust the chandelier or take tally of the Royal Copenhagen china. We seldom dwell in large houses with more than two bathrooms. When we do, it’s because our wife or husband or lover is the one with money. Even then, we feel a little embarrassed when we show our guests the view from the great room.


Poets Smell
Ghastly rumor! We shower and we wash our fleshy mitts. Some solitary days we contemplate the grime under our fingernails, grime that if analyzed in a lab would reveal pencil lead. We write poems that work and poems that don’t work. When we sweat, we provide the world with an unusual odor. “What’s that?” a curious business-type might ask, as he sniffs the confines of an elevator. Dogs howl at our sides as they recall from their canine past some primordial longing that involved the first Neanderthal poets. People hurry out of the elevator before the poet can say, “It’s me! I’ve just finished a poetry manuscript. The perfume is called ‘Essence of Limited Edition.’”




Why I Don't Write Children's Literature, by Gary Soto, is available from ForeEdge on March 3rd.

The Value of Time Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur

By Nicholas A. Tonelli from Pennsylvania, USA

In her new book from Brandeis University Press, The Days Between: Blessings, Poems, and Directions of the Heart for the Jewish High Holiday Season, poet Marcia Falk casts a contemplative light on these most important days of the Jewish year, beginning today with Rosh Hashanah and culminating with Yom Kippur on October 4.

While it may be easier to channel one's focus toward each of the bookend days, Falk says that it is "more accurate, and truer to the spirit of the season, to view the High Holidays as a span of time, a continuous progression that begins at the onset of Rosh Hashanah and concludes at the close of Yom Kippur..."

This "between" time—between past and future, night and day, birth and death—she calls liminal time. And in fact, liminal time comprises that moment, all too fleeting, when one thing, such as light, changes into another, the dark. And depending on your level of attention to it, either nothing happens in that space of time or everything does.

The High Holidays, Falk goes on, are "ten days of meeting oneself face-to-face, opening the heart to change."

So in the universal spirit of taking the time and opening oneself to the unimaginable potential of liminality, as autumn passes from fiery hues to cool smolder, make the next ten days count.

From the book:

Opening the Heart

At the year's turn
in the days between

we step away
from what we know

        wall and window
        roof and road

into the spaces
we cannot name

        cloud and sky
        cloud and wings

Slowly the edges
begin to yield

the hard places
soften

        wind and clover
        reed and river

The gate to forgiveness
opens

This Poetry Month, Enter the Sestina Arena

by Tom Haushalter

Here we are again, a week into April, a.k.a National Poetry Month, the de facto period of time for everyone who's generally not that excited about poetry to be inordinately, often uncomfortably excited about poetry.

Honestly, it has done a lot of good for poetry education and dissemination. 

But while National Poetry Month is busy turning the masses into poetry enthusiasts, what's really in it for, you know, actual poets? If every month is poetry month to us, what can we usefully make of April's magnifying glass on our craft? How do we up our own ante?

One off-shoot initiative is National Poem Writing Month (hashtaggably #NaPoWriMo), a challenge to anyone bold enough to write a new poem every day of April, which everyone (and I don't mean everyone) should try once. For the slightly less insane, I recommend trying your hand at a poetic form that is as far from contemporary fashion as can be. If you think I'm talking about a villanelle or a pantoum, you're getting warm.

I dared myself to write a sestina. Not wanting to go down this road alone, I dared a friend to write one with me. Nor was I ashamed to keep close at my side a copy of the newly published collection and celebration of the form, Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Carolyn Beard Whitlow and Marilyn Krysl. With this book, along with Daniel Nester's own clarion call for more sestinas, The Incredible Sestina Anthology, the form felt suddenly less intimidating—and new, not so twelfth century (when it first appeared).

One way to entice a friend to write a sestina with you (take note) is to appeal to his classic sensibilities. I shot an email to Adam L. Dressler: "Have you what it takes to step inside the Sestina Arena and subdue the beast?"

Dressler didn't flinch.

The sestina takes its unique form by employing the same six end-words (teleutons is the technical term) in each of six six-line stanzas, in a pre-set rotational pattern. But the kicker is that the final three-line stanza, called the envoi, must use all six end-words—two per line, with one in the middle of the line, the other on the end. These six teleutons act as the scaffolding by which you build the poem.

Dressler and I each submitted three words that, put together, would be our teleutons. I can't speak for his source material, but I scanned my copy of French poet St.-John Perse's Collected Poems; here are the six words that paved our way to the Sestina Arena:

battle
stone
sway
sleep
music
angels

Not what you'd call the breeziest set of words, but there they are.

Keep in mind: Dressler and I were not competing against one another. The adversary is the sestina, the punishing and unrelenting form itself. We were in this together. As two gladiators in the hold prior to combat, we fired drafts back and forth, rewrote whole stanzas, sharpened syntax, upgraded some verbs. A few screenshots of our late-night text messages:

When finally it's just you and the poem—and whatever attendant god or muse—a quiet spreads over the page, as it would over a crowd in that moment the animal emerges from the cage. 

First challenger:

Unanswered
by Adam L. Dressler

Of what use now to us are angels
when each must hide a heart of stone
that nothing save perhaps for sleep
might pierce enough for us to battle
this locust hum in which we sway
and drift apart like broken music?

We cannot grasp the distance music
or groping fingertips of angels
that, briefly brushing, fail to sway
our desolating faith in stone,
the ramparts we erect to battle
the scenes that seek us in our sleep.

We stir, we wake, and yet we sleep,
as deaf to silence as to music
though either could abate the battle
we will not cease against the angels
until we lift the veil of stone
that over every sense holds sway.

From tepid task to task we sway,
entangled in the hope that sleep
will wash, as water hollows stone,
away the slightest trace of music
so we might wade, immune as angels
into the mindless press of battle.

Let others, younger, stronger battle
daylong against the daily sway
while they can still recall the angels
who sang them out of and to sleep
and hid them safe in waves of music
like ancient leaves preserved in stone.

No miracle will loose from stone
or set beyond the breach of battle
those slivers of ourselves that music
might still possess the strength to sway,
no vision resurrect from sleep
our interactions with the angels.

Are angels locked, like us, in stone,
sleep drowning out our useless battle,
or do you sway to mortal music?

Hold your applause. The second challenger (moi), as night falls, enters:

Nocturne
by Tom Haushalter

We are none to observe the rites of sleep
who pursue an instrument, whose music—
like the map the architect does battle
with nightly, lines drawn and redrawn to sway
outcomes of form for beauty—leaves angels
in the design. Cathedral begun, stone

cut from white hillsides, hewn, heaved upon stone,
will never be done. To succumb to sleep
is really to guarantee that angels
bear us off on the unwritten music
that would have killed us anyhow, the sway
that would have drawn us to battle.

That's not to say I fled the battle
when midnight's arrows, dense as stone,
persuaded me I could hold sway
over provinces less averse to sleep.
Had I never struck those chords of music
that drew from nimbuses the angels

toting their brasses and strings, what angels
would bother? What cries go up in battle
for a cause long absent, for music
without form? In the middle of a stone
between here and the core of the earth sleep
dark records of potential no god can sway.

You can see as well as I how sway
the wintered wildflowers, pale as angels
surrendering themselves to sleep
in their husks, discarded artifacts of battle.
Mere sight of such austerity is a stone
thrown whining through the field—that old music.

We are prone to call a mind for music
apotheosis (a means to sway
secrets from lovers as from stone
the hammer can give breath to angels),
a priestly craft. Not quite—this battle
lays no laurels. To hope to wring from sleep

music's lost chord, that phantom of angels,
to sharper sway the tide of battle,
set your cornerstone on the edge of sleep.

And now, those so inclined should throw thumbs up or down in the comments section. But in doing so, realize that you accept the dare to wrangle your own sestina and share it with us. This is not a democracy.

Stray Thoughts on Writing a Sestina

1. While writing in a metered line isn't required of a sestina (not anymore, anyway), clearly Dressler's found a home in iambic tetrameter. And mine tends toward syllabic uniformity—typically ten syllables in each line. It might seem like an added restriction, with the teleutons, to work around, but consider how a metered line complements the form—the patterned repetition, the echoing progression of each stanza. It felt, to me, natural to the sestina.
2. I think one of the challenges of a successful sestina is to proceed as if the teleutons aren't actually repeating themselves each stanza, such that by using them in all their parts of speech or embedding them in compound words, etc., their brow-beating effect is quieted. This is especially the case as a stanza's last end-word immediately becomes the next stanza's first end-word.
3. Just about anything can spark the start of a poem, but there's a good chance that one or more of your six teleutons will begin to guide what it is you're trying to say in the sestina, to be the thematic driver(s). The rest of the end-words: mere accomplices!
4. And you may find, as I did, the sixth stanza incredibly difficult to write—if not the whole poem increasingly difficult. After five stanzas pounding out every variation on battle, angel, stone, sleep...you may wonder what the hell there is left to say. Which of course is followed by that action-packed, buzzer-beating, three-line envoi. The kind-of irony is that, as those six fixed coordinates are compressed at the poem's close, you're expected to send it toward that unseen horizon—to liberate the sestina from itself! Good luck with that.

ALSO OF INTEREST:

The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, by Lewis Turco

The Book of Literary Terms, by Lewis Turco











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