Slant Apology

William Carlos Williams

This is Just to Say

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

***

Click here for 100 variations of this poem by Stephen Wentworth Arndt

***

Write your own ambivalent apology for something you really enjoyed. Write in short, rhythmic lines with simple, direct, vivid language. Try to maintain a matter-of-fact tone. (Any other ideas? Or, are any of these ideas odious?)

What is Poetry?

What is Poetry anyway?

A Mosaic of Responses

Ezra Pound, early twentieth century USAmerican poet

Here’s my paraphrase of what Ez sez:

It’s useful to think about all poetry as having three aspects though some poems emphasize one aspect more so than others:

Phanopoeia = description = the poem throws images on the mind

Melopoeia = musicality = the poem’s sounds & rhythms evoke emotional correlations

Logopoeia = mindfulness = the poem stimulates thought (and feeling) in relation to the poem’s words & word groups

W’ei T’ai, 11^th century Chinese poet

Whaddya say W’ei?

“Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling, for as soon as the mind responds and connects with the thing the feeling shows in the words.

“This is how poetry enters deeply into us. If the poet presents directly feelings which overwhelm him and keeps nothing back to linger as an aftertaste, he stirs us superficially; he cannot start the hands and feet involuntarily waving and tapping in time, far less strengthen morality and refine culture, set heaven and earth in motion and call up the spirits.”

Louis Zukofsky, twentieth century US American poet

What’s the news, Lou?

“I'll tell you. / About my poetics— / music / speech / An integral / Lower limit speech / Upper limit music.”

(from “A12” a poem)

Like this:

     Music

     Speech

In a poem called “City Midnight Junk Strains” Allen Ginsberg, twentieth century USAmerican poet, says that Frank O’Hara, another twentieth century USAmerican poet, has a “a common ear for our deep gossip.”

In a book called Quote Poet Unquote someone named Liam Rector is credited with the statement “Poetry is deep gossip.” Sadly neither Ginsberg nor O’Hara is mentioned by Rector or the book’s editor, Dennis O’Driscoll.

Here are several more statements about what poetry is from Quote Poet Unquote book:

DAVID GASCOYNE, Stand, Spring 1992

Poetry is like a substance, the words stick together as though they were magnetized to each other.

SEAMUS HEANEY, Sunday Independent, 25 September 1994

Poetry is language in orbit.

YVES BONNEFOY, Times Literary Supplement, 12 August 2005

Poetry is an act by which the relation of words to reality is renewed.

MARK DOTY, The Cortland Review, October 2000

Poetry is an investigation, not an expression, of what you know.

LEONARD COHEN, The Sunday Times

Poetry is a verdict that others give to language that is charged with music and rhythm and authority.

UMBERTO ECO, The Independent, 6 October 1995

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

CHRISTOPHER MIDDLETON, PN Review, March-April 1993

Poetry is language wrought by feeling and imagination to such a pitch that it enacts and embodies the thing it says.

DAVE SMITH, Local Assays, 1985

Poetry is a dialect of the language we speak, possessed of metaphorical density, coded with resonant meaning, engaging us with narrative's pleasures, enhancing and sustaining our pleasure with enlarged awareness.

JOSEPH BRODSKY, The New Yorker, 26 September 1994

Poetry is a dame with a huge pedigree, and every word comes practically barnacled with allusions and associations.

CAL BEDIENT, Denver Quarterly 39, no. 2, 2004

Poetry is the eroticization of thought—psychic vitality.

MATTHEW HOLLIS, Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Spring 2004

Poetry is... a kind of leaving of notes for another to find, and a willingness to have them fall into the wrong hands.

CHARLES WRIGHT, Quarter Notes, 1995

Poetry is language that sounds better and means more.

ANNE ROUSE, The Sunday Times, 28 January 2001

Poetry is about the intensity at the centre of life, and about intricacy of expression. Without any appreciation of those, people are condemned to simplistic emotions and crude expressions.

FRIEDA HUGHES, The Guardian, 3 October 2001

Poetry is a way of communicating a vast array of thoughts and feelings by concentrating them into minimal, or even single, points which describe the whole.

JOHN SIMON, Dreamers of Dreams, 2001

Poetry is the meeting point of parallel lines—in infinity, but also in the here and now. It is where the patent and incontrovertible intersects with the ineffable and incommensurable.

DON McKAY, The Toronto Star, 4 June 2007

Poetry is language pointing beyond its own capacities.

HAROLD BLOOM, The Art of Reading Poetry, 2006

Poetry essentially is figurative language, concentrated so that its form is both expressive and evocative.

PETER FALLON, The Poetry Paper, no. 3, 2006

A poem is words at work, on us and for us.

ÁGNES NEMES NAGY, A Hungarian Perspective, 1998

A poem is partly grace, partly discovery, and partly a struggle to squeeze out a little bit more, to conquer another foot of territory from the unconscious.

P.J. KAVANAGH, BBC Radio 3, December 1990

A poem is an attempt to find the music in the words describing an intuition.

NUALA NÍ DHOMHNAILL, RTÉ I television, July 1995

A poem is a smuggling of something back from the otherworld, a prime bit of shoplifting where you get something out the door before the buzzer goes off.

WILLIAM H. GASS, The Georgia Review, Spring 2004

A poem is like a ghost seeking substantiality, a soul in search of body more appealing than the bare bones mere verses rattle.

CAROL ANN DUFFY, Out of Fashion, 2004

A poem... is the attire of feeling: the literary form where words seem tailor-made for memory or desire.

JAMIE McKENDRICK, The South Bank Show, October 1994

Every poem is an answer to the question what poetry is for.

After I thought I’d finished this collection I found this statement from Audre Lorde’s Power, Oppression and the Politics of Culture: a lesbian/feminist perspective:

“For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”

Paul Celan*

“The poem is the detour from you

to you; it is the route. It is also the

route of language toward itself, 

its becoming visible and 

mortal: wherewith the poem 

becomes the raison d’être of language.”

*Celan was a German-speaking Jew in Eastern Europe. He survived World War II. His town in a place called Burkovina that was then Romanian and now Ukrainian was first occupied by the Soviets and later by the Nazis. He spent much of the war in Nazi-run labor camp. His parents were handed over to the Germans and killed.

Fiction Reflection

Share the following with me.
* Seven (7) completed fiction exercises.
* Two (2) typed, revised, proofread exercises. (Highlight one story in yellow, so I know which one you want to workshop.
* Answer the reflection questions below:
1. Reflect on which exercises worked well for you. Be specific. Give details. Think about why they worked.
2. Reflect on which exercises did not work as well for you. Be specific. Give details. Think about why they didn't work.
3. Reflect on the two stories you've revised and shared. What do you like about them? What needs work? What would you like feedback on?
Share your reflections with me in paper or electronic (Google Doc) form.

#7 "Continuity of Parks" by Julio Cortázar

Continuity of Parks

Julio Cortázar

                He had begun to read the novel a few days before. He had put it down because of some urgent business conferences, opened it again on his way back to the estate by train; he permitted himself a slowly growing interest in the plot, in the characterizations. That afternoon, after writing a letter giving his power of attorney and discussing a matter of joint ownership with the manager of his estate, he returned to the book in the tranquility of his study which looked out upon the park with its oaks. Sprawled in his favorite armchair, its back toward the door—even the possibility of an intrusion would have irritated him, had he thought of it—he let his left hand caress repeatedly the green velvet upholstery and set to reading the final chapters. He remembered effortlessly the names and his mental image of the characters; the novel spread its glamour over him almost at once. He tasted the almost perverse pleasure of disengaging himself line by line from the things around him, and at the same time feeling his head rest comfortably on the green velvet of the chair with its high back, sensing that the cigarettes rested within reach of his hand, that beyond the great windows the air of afternoon danced under the oak trees in the park. Word by word, licked up by the sordid dilemma of the hero and heroine, letting himself be absorbed to the point where the images settled down and took on color and movement, he was witness to the final encounter in the mountain cabin. The woman arrived first, apprehensive; now the lover came in, his face cut by the backlash of a branch. Admirably, she stanched the blood with her kisses, but he rebuffed her caresses, he had not come to perform again the ceremonies of a secret passion, protected by a world of dry leaves and furtive paths through the forest. The dagger warmed itself against his chest, and underneath liberty pounded, hidden close. A lustful, panting dialogue raced down the pages like a rivulet of snakes, and one felt it had all been decided from eternity. Even to those caresses which writhed about the lover’s body, as though wishing to keep him there, to dissuade him from it; they sketched abominably the frame of that other body it was necessary to destroy. Nothing had been forgotten: alibis, unforeseen hazards, possible mistakes. From this hour on, each instant had its use minutely assigned. The cold-blooded, twice-gone-over re-examination of the details was barely broken off so that a hand could caress a cheek. It was beginning to get dark.

                Not looking at one another now, rigidly fixed upon the task which awaited them, they separated at the cabin door. She was to follow the trail that led north. On the path leading in the opposite direction, he turned for a moment to watch her running, her hair loosened and flying. He ran in turn, crouching among the trees and hedges until, in the yellowish fog of dusk, he could distinguish the avenue of trees which led up to the house. The dogs were not supposed to bark, they did not bark. The estate manager would not be there at this hour, and he was not there. He went up the three porch steps and entered. The woman’s words reached him over the thudding of blood in his ears: first a blue chamber, then a hall, then a carpeted stairway. At the top, two doors. No one in the first room, no one in the second. The door of the salon, and then, the knife in hand, the light from the great windows, the high back of an armchair covered in green velvet, the head of the man in the chair reading a novel.

#6: "The Fifth Story" / Playing with variations

“The Fifth Story” by Clarice Lispector
Write a story about dealing with or coping with something you are afraid of. Create a controlling image (or images) that embody the fear and/or how it is coped or dealt with. (If you'd rather not deal (or cope) with fear, deal with another strong emotion like love or joy or sadness or worry.) Then write at least four variations of that story that do not contradict the first story: add on, take away, focus on different aspects of the story (writing style, perspectives, tone, pacing, psychological detail, suggestive imagery, symbolic imagery, setting…). Give the overall story and the variations different titles. (The titles can be incorporated in the story.)

Exercise #4 and #5: "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place"

#4 (Friday)

Read the following story. 

Then, with Hemingway's story in mind create an exercise that has at least three "rules." When creating rules think about what Hemingway does in the story. How does he use language? Words? Sentences? What's the narrator like? How does he use dialogue? What's the conflict? How does he create characters? Observing characters? Characters who are observed? What else do you notice?

Then, a write a short-short story (200-1000) words using that exercise.

#5 (Monday)

After writing a story using your own prompt. Swap prompts with someone else in the class. Write a short-short story using someone else's prompt.

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

BY ERNEST HEMINGWAY

It was very late and everyone had left the cafe except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light. In the day time the street was dusty, but at night the dew settled the dust and the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night it was quiet and he felt the difference. The two waiters inside the cafe knew that the old man was a little drunk, and while he was a good client they knew that if he became too drunk he would leave without paying, so they kept watch on him.

"Last week he tried to commit suicide," one waiter said.

"Why?"

"He was in despair."

"What about?"

"Nothing."

"How do you know it was nothing?"

"He has plenty of money."

They sat together at a table that was close against the wall near the door of the cafe and looked at the terrace where the tables were all empty except where the old man sat in the shadow of the leaves of the tree that moved slightly in the wind. A girl and a soldier went by in the street. The street light shone on the brass number on his collar. The girl wore no head covering and hurried beside him.

"The guard will pick him up," one waiter said.

"What does it matter if he gets what he's after?"

"He had better get off the street now. The guard will get him. They went by five minutes ago."

The old man sitting in the shadow rapped on his saucer with his glass. The younger waiter went over to him.

"What do you want?"

The old man looked at him. "Another brandy," he said.

"You'll be drunk," the waiter said. The old man looked at him. The waiter went away.

"He'll stay all night," he said to his colleague. "I'm sleepy now. I never get into bed before three o'clock. He should have killed himself last week."

The waiter took the brandy bottle and another saucer from the counter inside the cafe and marched out to the old man's table. He put down the saucer and poured the glass full of brandy.

"You should have killed yourself last week," he said to the deaf man. The old man motioned with his finger. "A little more," he said. The waiter poured on into the glass so that the brandy slopped over and ran down the stem into the top saucer of the pile. "Thank you," the old man said. The waiter took the bottle back inside the cafe. He sat down at the table with his colleague again.

"He's drunk now," he said.

"He's drunk every night."

"What did he want to kill himself for?"

"How should I know."

"How did he do it?"

"He hung himself with a rope."

"Who cut him down?"

"His niece."

"Why did they do it?"

"Fear for his soul."

"How much money has he got?" "He's got plenty."

"He must be eighty years old."

"Anyway I should say he was eighty."

"I wish he would go home. I never get to bed before three o'clock. What kind of hour is that to go to bed?"

"He stays up because he likes it."

"He's lonely. I'm not lonely. I have a wife waiting in bed for me."

"He had a wife once too."

"A wife would be no good to him now."

"You can't tell. He might be better with a wife."

"His niece looks after him. You said she cut him down."

"I know." "I wouldn't want to be that old. An old man is a nasty thing."

"Not always. This old man is clean. He drinks without spilling. Even now, drunk. Look at him."

"I don't want to look at him. I wish he would go home. He has no regard for those who must work."

The old man looked from his glass across the square, then over at the waiters.

"Another brandy," he said, pointing to his glass. The waiter who was in a hurry came over.

"Finished," he said, speaking with that omission of syntax stupid people employ when talking to drunken people or foreigners. "No more tonight. Close now."

"Another," said the old man.

"No. Finished." The waiter wiped the edge of the table with a towel and shook his head.

The old man stood up, slowly counted the saucers, took a leather coin purse from his pocket and paid for the drinks, leaving half a peseta tip. The waiter watched him go down the street, a very old man walking unsteadily but with dignity.

"Why didn't you let him stay and drink?" the unhurried waiter asked. They were putting up the shutters. "It is not half-past two."

"I want to go home to bed."

"What is an hour?"

"More to me than to him."

"An hour is the same."

"You talk like an old man yourself. He can buy a bottle and drink at home."

"It's not the same."

"No, it is not," agreed the waiter with a wife. He did not wish to be unjust. He was only in a hurry.

"And you? You have no fear of going home before your usual hour?"

"Are you trying to insult me?"

"No, hombre, only to make a joke."

"No," the waiter who was in a hurry said, rising from pulling down the metal shutters. "I have confidence. I am all confidence."

"You have youth, confidence, and a job," the older waiter said. "You have everything."

"And what do you lack?"

"Everything but work."

"You have everything I have."

"No. I have never had confidence and I am not young."

"Come on. Stop talking nonsense and lock up."

"I am of those who like to stay late at the cafe," the older waiter said.

"With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night."

"I want to go home and into bed."

"We are of two different kinds," the older waiter said. He was now dressed to go home. "It is not only a question of youth and confidence although those things are very beautiful. Each night I am reluctant to close up because there may be some one who needs the cafe."

"Hombre, there are bodegas open all night long."

"You do not understand. This is a clean and pleasant cafe. It is well lighted. The light is very good and also, now, there are shadows of the leaves."

"Good night," said the younger waiter.

"Good night," the other said. Turning off the electric light he continued the conversation with himself, It was the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You do not want music. Certainly you do not want music. Nor can you stand before a bar with dignity although that is all that is provided for these hours. What did he fear? It was not a fear or dread, It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was a nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived init and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee. He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine.

"What's yours?" asked the barman.

"Nada."

"Otro loco mas," said the barman and turned away.

"A little cup," said the waiter.

The barman poured it for him.

"The light is very bright and pleasant but the bar is unpolished, "the waiter said.

The barman looked at him but did not answer. It was too late at night for conversation.

"You want another copita?" the barman asked.

"No, thank you," said the waiter and went out. He disliked bars and bodegas. A clean, well-lighted cafe was a very different thing. Now, without thinking further, he would go home to his room. He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it's probably only insomnia. Many must have it.

Microfiction exercises (#1, #2, & #3)

# 3 Read this. Then, do the writing exercise below.

Waiting

by Peggy McNally

Five days a week the lowest-paid substitute teacher in the district drives her father’s used Mercury to Hough and 79^th, where she eases it, mud flaps and all, down the ramp into the garage of Patrick Henry Junior High, a school where she’ll teach back-to-back classes without so much as a coffee break and all of this depressing her until she remembers her date last night, and hopes it might lead to bigger things, maybe love, so she quickens her pace towards the main office to pick up her class lists with the names of students she’ll never know as well as she has come to know the specials in the cafeteria, where she hopes the coffee will be perking and someone will have brought in those doughnuts she’s come to love so much, loves more than the idea of teaching seventh-graders the meaning of a poem, because after all she’s a sub who’ll finish her day, head south to her father’s house, and at dinner, he’ll ask her how her job is going, and she’ll say okay, and he’ll remind her that it might lead to a full-time position with benefits but she knows what teaching in that school is like, and her date from last night calls to ask if she’s busy and she says yes because she’s promised her father she’d wash his car and promises to her father are sacred since her mother died, besides it’s the least she can do now that he lets her drive his car five days a week toward the big lake, to the NE corner of Hough and 79^th and you know the rest.

***

Write a single sentence story about a day in the life of one of your characters. Give the character conflicting desires. (In "Waiting," she wants to take care of her father and she wants a romantic relationship. These desires are in conflict.) Put the character into what for him or her is a normal, ordinary situation, but make it vivid with lots of detail. Using one sentence write about the day. Try to stretch the sentence out without violating rules about grammar and punctuation. 
**********************

#2
Turn your #1 story into six six-word stories. 

#1
Pre-writing
Think of someone you've seen in school whom you don't know well but are intrigued by.
Think of someone you've seen outside of school whom you don't know well but are intrigued by.
(You might want to describe the characters before starting to write your story. You might not.)

Think of something--tangible or intangible--that the school character wants. 
Think of something--tangible or intangible--that the outside of school character wants.
(You might want to write down what each character wants before starting to write your story. You might want to discover this as you write your story.) 

Put the two into a situation in which the two desires are directly or indirectly, explicitly or implicitly in conflict.
(You might want to describe the situation and setting before starting to write your story. You might not.)

Writing
Write a short short story (200 - 1000 words) about what happens with the characters in the situation.