The Rag-Picker's Guide to Poetry: Poems, Poets, Process

by Eleanor Wilner (Editor), Maurice Manning (Editor)

Overview

The venture of this inviting collection is to look, from the many vantages that the 35 poets in this eclectic anthology chose to look, at what it was—knowing that a poem can’t be conceived in advance of its creation—that helped their poems to emerge or connected them over time. The Rag-Picker's Guide to Poetry permits an inside view of how poets outwit internal censors and habits of thought, showing how the meticulous and the spontaneous come together in the process of discovery. Within are contained the work and thoughts of:

• Betty Adcock
• Joan Aleshire
• Debra Allbery
• Elizabeth Arnold
• David Baker
• Rick Barot
• Marianne Boruch
• Karen Brennan
• Gabrielle Calvocoressi
• Michael Collier
• Carl Dennis
• Stuart Dischell
• Roger Fanning
• Chris Forhan
• Reginald Gibbons
• Linda Gregerson
• Jennifer Grotz
• Brooks Haxton
• Tony Hoagland
• Mark Jarman
• A. Van Jordan
• Laura Kasischke
• Mary Leader
• Dana Levin
• James Longenbach
• Thomas Lux
• Maurice Manning
• Heather McHugh
• Martha Rhodes
• Alan Shapiro
• Daniel Tobin
• Ellen Bryant Voigt
• Alan Williamson
• Eleanor Wilner
• C. Dale Young

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472029679
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	11/11/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	226
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Eleanor Wilner is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Tourist in Hell and The Girl with Bees in Her Hair; she has also published a verse translation of Euripides’s Medea and a book on visionary imagination. Her awards include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the Juniper Prize, Pushcart Prizes, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. A 40-year veteran of teaching, she has taught for over 20 years for the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Maurice Manning is the author of The Gone and the Going Away and The Common Man , which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010, as well as Bucolics ,A Companion for Owls, and Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions. He has been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and has held a Guggenheim Fellowship. Currently, Manning teaches at Transylvania University.

Read an Excerpt

The Rag-Picker's Guide to Poetry

Poems, Poets, Process

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By Eleanor Wilner, Maurice Manning

The University of Michigan Press

Copyright © 2013 University of Michigan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-07203-3

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CHAPTER 1

How I Escaped from the Autobiographical Narrative of Crisis and Resolution and Discovered Oscar Wilde and the Tradition of Theatrical Repartee

A TORTURED TALE OF PSYCHIATRY AND MAKEUP TIPS

Tony Hoagland

A philosophical poet, that's what I wanted to be — a concept juggler, something along the line of Wallace Stevens. I had visions I wanted to communicate. What they were, I no longer can entirely recall.

But no one understood the poems I wrote. Words scattered around the page, congested as a head cold, here; neo-ideas, rife with noncontext, there. What is the adjectival form of oblivion? The response I got from my odd few readers had the flavor of polite encouragement based on the premise that poetry is allowed to be shapeless, like a raccoon in a burlap sack.

Then one day, in Tucson, Arizona, after I had been writing and reading for five or eight years, I accidentally turned three metaphors into a sort of story. My poem was lucid! And so I drifted pragmatically toward narrative structure, driven to shore by default. It turns out that I needed story, landscape, causality, and a time signature to make a poem; I did not have much interest in stories, really, especially my own, but I had learned that if I put a car and a stop sign and a moon into a poem, people could pay attention.

Narrative: "When X happened, I felt Y; then W happened, and I understood F." Such elementary concessions gave my poems what the movie people call a "through-line." It was a big breakthrough for me.

It's true, these narratives used the first-person singular pronoun, looked like autobiography, bore a strong resemblance to products of the Confessional era that had just passed. They tried to generate an escalating emotional pressure. I was just happy to write a poem that more or less worked.

But I had a slightly faux feeling about those narratives. I felt counterfeit, like a narrative impersonator. The narratives themselves seemed secondary to me. Narrative was just the tree on which I was hanging my real linguistic stock-in-trade: jokes, images, and metaphor. That "ornament," which may have seemed secondary to the narratives, was primary for me.

I guess a typical example of such a poem is "My Country" from my first book, Sweet Ruin:

    MY COUNTRY

    When I think of what I know about America,
    I think of kissing my best friend's wife,
    in the parking lot of the zoo one afternoon,

    just over the wall from the lion's cage.
    One minute making small talk, the next
    my face was moving down to meet her

    wet and open, upturned mouth. It was a kind of patriotic act,
    pledging our allegiance to the pleasure
    and not the consequence, crossing over the border

    of what we were supposed to do,
    burning our bridges and making our bed
    to an orchestra of screaming birds

    and the smell of elephant manure. Over her shoulder
    I could see the sun, burning palely in the winter sky
    and I thought about my friend, who always tries

    to see the good in situations — how an innocence
    like that shouldn't be betrayed.
    Then she took my lower lip between her teeth,

    I slipped my hand inside her shirt and felt
    my principles blinking out behind me
    like streetlights in a town where I had never

    lived, to which I intended never
    to return. And who was left to speak of what had happened?
    And who would ever be brave, or lonely,

    or free enough to ask?

"My Country" is an extended act of analogy, with a bunch of extra images and metaphors thrown in for good measure. The imaginative fireworks are yoked to a political notion, but it would be difficult for me to say which is the corpus and which is the appendage. If the poetry customs agent looked me in the face and said, "And what is the purpose of your trip, Mr. Hoagland — business or pleasure?" what would I tell him? "I wanted to liken undressing a woman to the invasion of a country; and manifest destiny to betrayal of friendship"?

Years later, when I read the poems of Larry Levis, I recognized a similar hocus-pocus; he too was a "figurative thinker," and he made the opportunity for that "thinking" by appending metaphor to narratives. Levis's narratives seem mostly a matter of convenience — they are usually less original than the imagination attached to them. The conclusion of my poem above ("And who ...?"), which thrilled me with its profundity when I wrote it, now seems tacked on, self-important, and unearned. The metaphors in the poem, however, and some of the details, seem like the candy of creativity to me; they are still fresh, and edible.

Narrative suited me in many ways, with its mounting dramatic pressure. I still like the sensational car-crash intensity of it. Good thing, because I would be stuck with it for a long time.

Ten years later, though, I had painted myself into a corner. "The autobiographical narrative of crisis and resolution," as I now referred to it, seemed to lack credibility in a number of ways. Aesthetically, it seemed so post-Confessional, so generic and compulsory in premise. What is more, the therapeutic model that underlies Confessionalism (crisis/insight/breakthrough) no longer seemed TRUE to my experience. I had had plenty of crises, a lot of confusion, a little misfortune, lots of insights. I had survived them, but what I learned under emergency conditions did NOT change my life or transform my character. Insights were not permanent, I learned, nor were they often life-altering. The poem that promises breakthrough was false.

After my second book I knew that I needed to find a new formal paradigm, a different kind of poem. What else could I do?

So, for about two years, I gave up trying to write complete poems and simply filled pages with interesting lines and language, spoken by some imaginary speaker. My only criterion was that it be interesting on some level — verbally, conceptually, syntactically, tonally, or rhetorically. And I found that I could write an interesting sentence, attached to nothing else. With such a minimal requirement — to write an interesting sequence of words — I could manufacture the talk of characters, not of self. The mode was essentially theatrical. My goal was to amuse myself with language. The characters were invented by what they said. In that way, for me, that period of play was a kind of pure poetry.

Anyway, it was an especially happy period of time in my life: I was in love with Kathleen, I was healthy after a long period of sickness, I had a real job, and life was sweet, even if I couldn't write good poetry.

Sometimes I would fit a few lines together into a sketchy scene. My imagined model for poetry was a bitchy cocktail party with a lot of people trading repartee — vivid, wild, but aimed at no end, no resolution, no final trump card of meaning. And, importantly, on the scale of metaphysical veracity: in these "poems," every speaker gets to sound off — but no one wins. No one speaker owned the Truth; I didn't have to tell a story that was "mine" or that extracted drama from the use of the "I," because the dialectical multiple speakers and their remarks were a story. In such a scene, competing truths could be lofted without pretending that one was the final exclusive truth. The different lines were more like alternating, nonexclusive angles on actuality.

One of my more successful early exercises in multiple speakers turned into a poem called "Commercial for a Summer Night":

    We were drinking beer with the sound off,
    watching the figures on the screen — the
    bony blonds, the lean-jawed guys
    who decorate the perfume and the cars —

    the pretty ones
    the merchandise is wearing this year.
    Alex said,

    I wish they made a shooting gallery
    using people like that.
    Greg said, That woman has a PhD in Face.

    Then we saw a preview for a movie
    about a movie star who
    is having a movie made about her,
    and Boz said, This country is getting stupider every year ...

So I had found, at least, a way of writing that could entertain me and enlarge or alter the arena of the poem from the narrative.

Employing this different method also shifted my perception of craft, from Image toward the poetic device of Tone. Now that tone was a more primary element in my work, I recognized that I had been interested in it for a long time without even noticing. How a thing is being said, it turns out, is a crucial part of what. Tone insinuates volumes of experience without requiring the testimonials of narrative. As Marianne Moore says, "Superior people never make long visits, /have to be shown Longfellow's grave/or the glass flowers at Harvard."

Another large benefit to this new poetic method was that, freed from narrative obligations, or at least, from personal narrative, my poems could include all kinds of "extraneous" information. I had come to understand, after all, that identity, that life itself, was composed of concentric circle upon concentric circle of influence and fact — history, money, language, and weather. In a dialectical poem, all those ingredients could be layered in, put into a loose orbital suspension.

When I looked around the history of my reading, I found that the models and precedents for multiple "contra-dicting" speakers had been present all along. "On the Road Home," by Wallace Stevens, for example, had always been one of my favorite poems. It begins like this:

    It was when I said,
    "There is no such thing as the truth,"
    That the grapes seemed suddenly fatter.
    The fox ran out of his hole.

    You ... you said,
    "There are many truths,
    But they are not parts of a truth."
    Then the tree, at night, began to change,
    Smoking through green and smoking blue.
    We were two figures in a wood.
    We said we stood alone.....

As so often is true of Stevens, "On the Road Home" is a comical metaphysical poem, both game and serious phenomenology. Stevens is a fiend for alternating rhetorics, a pasha of the theatrical tradition, in which rhetoric is more important than truth.

Multiple speakers, playing games of speech badminton. It makes you wonder, How much of poetic pleasure is in delay, and prolongation? Surely this is the difference between two poetic types; the poet given to truth is trying to get to the payoff as quickly as possible; then there is the other type of writer, who is languorously, playfully enjoying the prelude to arrival, because that is all there is.

It's just another secret that everyone knew but me.

Of course, one's own writing is never a complete satisfaction. There are always glaring deficiencies and so much more to learn. So many remarkable poems to learn it from. As we get older as writers, we find our pleasure and curiosity in new places — if we lose some flexibility, perhaps we gain strategic skills, or we are better able to put old wine in new skins, or to see what we were aiming at all along. Every traveler is different, I suppose. Oscar Wilde may have died unhappy and written the (memorable, if melodramatic) line "Each man kills the thing he loves" in his poem "The Ballad of Reading Gaol." Bad news! But he gave himself and us so much pleasure when he wrote page after page of dialogue like these lines in The Importance of Being Earnest:

ALGERNON. Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?

LANE. I didn't think it polite to listen, sir.

ALGERNON. I'm sorry for that, for your sake. I don't play accurately — any one can play accurately — but I play with wonderful expression. As far as the piano is concerned, sentiment is my forte. I keep science for Life.

LANE. Yes, sir.

ALGERNON. And, speaking of the science of Life, have you got the cucumber sandwiches cut for Lady Bracknell?

LANE. Yes, sir. [Hands them on a salver.]

ALGERNON. [Inspects them, takes two, and sits down on the sofa.] Oh! ... by the way, Lane, I see from your book that on Thursday night, when Lord Shoreman and Mr. Worthing were dining with me, eight bottles of champagne are entered as having been consumed.

LANE. Yes, sir; eight bottles and a pint.

ALGERNON. Why is it that at a bachelor's establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne? I ask merely for information.

LANE. I attribute it to the superior quality of the wine, sir. I have often observed that in married households the champagne is rarely of a first-rate brand.

ALGERNON. Good heavens! Is marriage so demoralising as that?

LANE. I believe it IS a very pleasant state, sir. I have had very little experience of it myself up to the present. I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young person.

My long, slow apprenticeship as a poet was, I see now, "a misunderstanding between myself and a young person." Thank goodness I am done with that! I'm happy now to be married to poetry for the time being, drinking even inferior champagne. And I try to remember that accuracy is not the point.

    SUMMER SNIPER

    God moves mysterious thunderheads over the towns and office buildings,
    cracks them open like raw eggs. The north has critical humidity.
    The south plucks at its sweaty clothes. The weatherman says it's August,
    and a sniper is haunting Washington DC.

    He's picking victims at random from shopping malls and parking lots,
    touching them with bullets like blue fingertips,
    and some say he's an unemployed geek with a chip on his shoulder,
    and some say he's an agent of ancient Greek theology.

    Gibb says the sniper is a surrealist travel agent
        booking departures only
    Or he's a dada lawyer without a client
        arguing in thirty-caliber sentences.
    Robin says the sniper is what the country invented
        as a symptom of its mental illness
    and Marcia is sad because she knows the sniper could have been cured
    by a regimen of vitamins and serotonin reuptake inhibitors.

    We had fallen into one of our periodic comas
        of obesity and celebrity
    when the sniper went off like an alarm clock

    and the preacher on TV
    said that he had come according to Revelation 3:14
    to punish us for the crime of not being ready for death — but
    as Snoopy the clerk at the 7-11 said,
    What kind of crime is that?

    Meanwhile the air-conditioners are working overtime,
    the rooftops are full of SWAT teams and camera crews
    and the sky too is mobilizing:
    dark clouds without speaking, menacing millennial clouds.

    We don't know yet what the metaphysical facts are;
    we don't know if our sniper is domestic or foreign terror,
    what color the chip on his shoulder is
    or what we will do if the sniper chooses us tomorrow.

    But when we go out now, we feel our nakedness.
    Each step has a slender string attached.
    And when we move, we move more quietly,
    as we slide between the sinners and the snipers

    and the summer,
    in the simmering medicinal rain.

    WHEN DEAN YOUNG TALKS ABOUT WINE

    The worm thrashes when it enters the tequila
    The grape cries out in the wine vat crusher
    The vine bleeds when the knife cuts through the stem

    but when Dean Young talks about wine, his voice is strangely calm.
    Yet it seems that wine is rarely mentioned.

    He says, Great first chapter but no plot.
    He says, Long runway, short flight.
    He says, This one never had a secret.
    He says, You can't wear stripes with that.

    He squints as if recalling his childhood in France.
    He purses his lips and shakes his head at the glass.

    Eighty-four was a naughty year, he says,
    and for a second I worry that California has turned him
    into a sushi eater in a cravat.

    Then he says,
        This one makes clear the difference
    between a thoughtless remark
    and an unwarranted intrusion.

    Then he says, In this one the pacific last light of afternoon
    stains the wings of the seagull pink
        at the very edge of the postcard.

    But where is the Cabernet of rent checks and asthma medication?
    Where is the Burgundy of orthopedic shoes?
    Where is the Chablis of skinned knees and jelly sandwiches?
    with the aftertaste of cruel Little League coaches?
    and the undertone of rusty stationwagon?

    His mouth is purple as if from his own ventricle
    he had drunk.
    He sways like a fishing rod.

    When a beast is hurt it roars in incomprehension.
    When a bird is hurt it huddles in its nest.

    But when a man is hurt,
        he makes himself an expert.
    Then he stands there with a glass in his hand
    staring into nothing
        as if he was forming an opinion.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Rag-Picker's Guide to Poetry by Eleanor Wilner, Maurice Manning. Copyright © 2013 University of Michigan. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction - Eleanor Wilner and Maurice Manning

How I Escaped from the Autobiographical Narrative of Crisis and Resolution and Discovered Oscar Wilde and theTradition of Theatrical Repartee: A Tortured Tale of Psychiatry and Makeup Tips - Tony Hoagland

Spill - David Baker

Cadaver, Speak to Me - Marianne Boruch

The Pressure of Reality - Michael Collier

Transition: Some Thoughts on Pedogogy and the New Old Sound - Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Ambiguity's Haunted House - Roger Fanning

"Without Although, Without Because" : Syntax and Buried Memory - Chris Forhan

Going Elsewhere - Linda Gregerson

Cinematic Movement of Metropolis and Un Chien Andalou - A. Van Jordan

Lyric Stories - Karen Brennan

Place, the Personal, and the Political: Connections - Betty Adcock

Lucky's Speech - Rick Barot

The Grace of Accuracy - Debra Allbery

How Far Out It Goes - Thomas Lux

The Song Can Also Be a Story - Stuart Dischell

No Elegies - Dana Levin

Greco-Russianizing - Reginald Gibbons

Learning from Time & the Poem Itself - Joan Aleshire

Rhyme and Quantity in Free Verse - Elizabeth Arnold

Unplanned Sequences - Martha Rhodes

The Expressive Use of Landscape - Jennifer Grotz

Honky Tankas - Maurice Manning

Sonnets, Holy and Unholy - Mark Jarman

Two Public Poems - Alan Williamson

Why Prose if It's a Poem - Laura Kaischke

Point of View - Carl Dennis

Needlework Poems - Mary Leader

Process, After the Fact - Eleanor Wilner

A Romance with Information - James Longenbach

The Necessary Fiction - C. Dale Young

Public Places, Night - Alan Shapiro

The Reaches - Daniel Tobin

Five Versions - Brooks Haxton

Writing as an Act of Reading - Heather McHugh

Same Bird: New Song - Ellen Bryant Voigt

Acknowledgments

Contributors

Editorial Reviews

"An anthology can be many books in one. I must admit that I have sometimes found anthologies breathlessly unsatisfying. But I was absorbed until the very end of the two hundred and twelve pages of the engagingly named Rag-Picker's Guide to Poetry. All of the thirty-five featured poets have held residencies at Warren Wilson College 'in the mountains of North Carolina'. As a British reader with an interest in North American poetry, I found some familiar and many fresh names...

 

The Rag-Picker's Guide to Poetry is a capacious anthology, starred with insights into writing - and some very practical help. It made me want to read. It also made me want to write, and to think harder about the kind of books I want to make."

--- Alison Brackenbury, PN Review

— Alison Brackenbury, PN Review

From the Publisher