Throw Them Out

So yesterday I was throwing out drafts of poems, and not sonnets or any other fixed form, either. Straight up poems. The kind I usually write.

It was fun. I've read poetry and written at it for so long now that I can almost never fool myself. Those opening lines really were irremediably stupid and loose, the similes strained, the endings predictable. The prognosis? Hopeless.

I'm very tender with these failures, but I don't do what some of my poet-friends do, which is save the best parts. They claim that sometimes, anyway, these scraps come together and make a kind of quilt. Maybe, but it's likely my scraps would come together and look like Viggo Mortensen's pants in "The Road."

What a blessing, really, to be able to spend four or five hours afloat in the medium of my choice. Did I fail? In a way; the poems will never amount to much. Was I successful? Sure, because just by showing up there was always the chance language would step forward and take me with it as it lifted off and landed far from this city or any other city. Somewhere, if I was lucky, absolutely angelesque.

70 and sunny after 2 days of rain. Buddy, as usual, prowling around and playing Lord of the Carpet.

RK

Guy Davenport

Guy Davenport has got to be the smartest guy in Lexington, Kentucky, and probably in all of Kentucky and many adjoining states. I hope he ambles over to Keeneland, one of the most beautiful race tracks in the country, but if he wants to stay home to think and write, that's okay too.

Here's a quote from one of his books. ("The Hunter Gracchus," for the record.) "Without desire, the imagination would atrophy. And without imagination, the mind itself would atrophy, preferring regularity to turbulence, habit to risk, prejudice to reason, sameness to variety."

Aren't those lovely words -- turbulence, risk, reason, variety? Especially turbulence and risk. Sameness can be wonderfully narcotic. And then there's his soporific pal -- safety: the craft book opening to a novel with one quirky character and two-and-a-half similes, the clever poem like a dozen other clever poems. Sometimes it just makes me want to drink the Kool Aid. And I'm talking about my work. Though I know I'm not the only one.

I remember chatting with a talented young writer in my community college night class and asking him what he was ashamed of. "Oh, man," he said, "I can't tell you that." Even without the specifies, I suggested that there was an energy to shame that really shouldn't be denied. His prose was serviceable and he knew the rules-of-writing. But his work didn't make my heart beat fast. It didn't take me hostage and make me want a tattoo. There was too much reason, frankly, but not enough turbulence and risk.

I know -- easy to say. But Christmas is coming, friends. You're never going to get that pony, anyway, and if turbulence and risk aren't to your taste, ask for something seraphic. Guy Davenport quotes a stanza from a Shaker hymn that just kills:

Love repays the lovely lover,

And in lovely ranks above

Lovely love shall live forever.

Loving lovely lov`ed love.

Rain yesterday in South Pasadena. Sun today.

RK

Thanks a Lot!

Pete and I are going off to his cousin's house for Thanksgiving. He's in the kitchen at the moment, cutting up vegetables for his Bagna Cauda. Besides trying to find the perfect title for his next YA book all of last week, he's been trying to figure out how to keep this dip warm without having a chafing dish. No one seems to have chafing dishes any more. They've gone out of style. He was balancing a ceramic bowl on top of a flower pot with a lit can of sterno in it and I was sure he was going to burn down the whole house. But I think he has figured out something safer--he went out and bought the smallest crock pot in existence. It would barely heat up a cup of coffee--but I think it will work.

But before we leave I wanted to wish you all a happy Thanksgiving and offer a poem.

THANKS

Giving thanks isn't done
to have another piece of pie.

I don't give thanks so that the gods
won't take it all away next year.

Thanks isn't for the people around me
to think I'm swell. I give thanks

so that once in a while all the good
that is in me has a place to go.

One more...

One more incident from Asilomar, where my wife caught a ripper of a cold.

The students and I had nearly two days together, so we got to know each other pretty well. The members of the Cambria Writing Group are all friends, but they don't cut each other much slack when it comes to analysis. One of the topics that came up was the difference between an autobiographical poem that stuck to the so-called facts and one that took liberties for the health of the poem.

Who'd really argue for the former, right? That goes in a diary. But a couple of the folks were pretty adamant about truth: if in fact somebody went to Walmart he or she shouldn't say Piggly Wiggly Market even though the market has better reverb in the poem.

Here's the interesting part -- one of the gals who strongly favored taking liberties brought in a poem with some guttural-sounding words, and when somebody pointed out that they were at odds with the tone of the piece she said, "But that's what really happened." Of course her friends jumped all over her.

She had a hard time letting go, though, and after dinner took me aside and asked if she couldn't keep those grating consonants. Tongue in cheek, I told her she could keep one. So the next morning there was a revised poem -- a veritable field of daffodils except for the single aloe plant.

RK

Workshop stories

So I did go north to, essentially, Pacific Grove, for that workshop. And I used every suggestion I could get from my friends and most of the ones I rely on. The students at Asilomar were a lovely group who'd been meeting off and on for more than 30 years. They knew a lot, but the ghazal seemed new. And the "talismanic word" exercise from a summer ago at Hamline really propelled some interesting dialogue.

We were together for a day and a half, including meals, so we got to talk a lot. One of the things that came up was the number of workshops all over the country. At least a few of these folks had been in others in different parts of the U.S.

That led us into writing poems about workshops (Billy Collins has a beauty) and overnight a few people kept working on theirs. The best one had a very cool image: in a AAA office, the woman had seen a map of America with a little light for every major tourist attraction. So the poet wanted another kind of map, one that had a light for every poetry writing workshop. She said that every time a group met, the light would go on. So that on some nights, the light from the map alone would be bright enough read by.

RK