Stuart Dybek: "Windy City"

I always enjoy observing writers whose work I have long appreciated and admired receive recognition or rewards for their efforts. Therefore, I was pleased to see Stuart Dybek honored this week with a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called “genius grant,” which carries a prize of $500,000. The announcement of Dybek’s selection came just as my students and I reached his poetry in our anthology for discussion. I particularly like discussing Dybek’s poetry and short fiction in my courses because Valparaiso University is located so close to Chicago, a city that serves as the focus for much of Stuart Dybek’s writing.

Indeed, Dybek is noted for his ties to Chicago, the Windy City, and his writing cannot be separated from this location or its people that have inspired him. Since many of my students are from the Chicago area or now feel it is a second home, they find Dybek’s settings and characters in short stories, as well as his poems’ personae, familiar or fascinating. Once, when Dybek came to campus as a visiting writer, the students responded to his stories or poems and his personality as they would to a friend telling tales from a neighboring community.

For Stuart Dybek, place is important. As he notes in his comments from Contemporary American Poetry: Behind the Scenes, an anthology we are examining in class: “In fiction it’s a given that a sense of place can be a significant element in the makeup of a writer’s voice, and, to my taste, a recognizable voice, whether in poetry or prose, is important. It’s impossible to imagine the unique voices of, say, Eudora Welty or James Joyce without summoning up the places that each writer made on the page—words made from voice, yet from which voice in turn seems to spring. In such writers place informs style as well as content. The same relation between place and individual voice is no less true of poets like Yeats and Frost. Poets—Homer and Dante, being two rather sturdy examples—have always been world makers.”

On this day when the Chicago Cubs have won the Central Division title as they again make one of their rare efforts to enter and win the fall classic, I offer an appropriate example of Stuart Dybek’s images from fall in the city with which he is so closely associated:

WINDY CITY

The garments worn in flying dreams
were fashioned there—
overcoats that swooped like kites,
scarves streaming like vapor trails,
gowns ballooning into spinnakers.

In a city like that one might sail
through life led by a runaway hat.
The young scattered in whatever directions
their wild hair pointed, and gusting
into one another, they fell in love.

At night, wind rippled the saxophones
that hung like windchimes
in pawnshop windows, hooting through
each horn so that the streets seemed haunted
not by nighthawks, but by doves.

Pinwheels whirred from steeples
in place of crosses. At the pinnacles
of public buildings, snagged underclothes—
the only flag—flapped majestically.
And when it came to disappear

one simply chose a thoroughfare
devoid of memories, raised a collar,
and turned one’s back on the wind.
I remember closing my eyes as I stepped
into a swirl of scuttling leaves.

I have noticed a number of news items regarding Dybek’s selection as a MacArthur fellow, but none has directed readers to the Lannan Foundation site where one can listen to an interview and a reading by Stuart Dybek. I recommend that readers visit this site and revisit the Windy City in Dybek’s prose and poetry.

James Dickey: "The Firebombing"

Like nearly 20 million other Americans (according to the television ratings numbers of an overnight tracking poll by Nielsen), I have been watching The War, the fascinating and riveting Ken Burns documentary of events and individuals during World War II. Most of the focus in the series has concentrated on the war experiences abroad and at home by people in four towns representing various geographical regions or sociological groups across the United States.

Some of the descriptions and observations come from contemporaneous newspaper reports or letters home from soldiers; however, Burns also relies heavily on recent interviews with a number of the remaining participants in the historical incidents. Consequently, much of the narrative is provided by current recollections of survivors remembering their actions and emotions at the time, as well as relating the physical or psychological after-effects felt by many for years and decades, or for some now even more than a half century later. Ken Burns repeatedly has summarized the reactions of those soldiers interviewed as common to all wars: “I was scared, I was bored, I was cold, I was hot, I did bad things, I saw bad things, I lost good friends, they didn’t give me the right equipment, my officers didn’t know what they were doing. That’s it.”

Still, as indicated by the accompanying video clip showing one of those interviewed, a former fighter pilot, among the most difficult occurrences in any war are those circumstances that concern the necessity to kill during a military maneuver even while considering personal regard for the value of life. For those who killed enemy soldiers in combat, as well as citizens caught in the crossfire, a conflict of conscience often arose, particularly as one tried to justify his assigned duties to kill others, which were contrary to moral teachings or religious beliefs previously held. As the piece of film here demonstrates, the documentary frequently revisits this inner conflict that continued to trouble some long after the war had ended.

Viewing segments of the documentary where old soldiers addressed the emotional turmoil involved in their actions, as well as the need to deal with elements of guilt, sometimes by making efforts to not allow or recognize that emotion, I recalled James Dickey’s “The Firebombing,” one of the more powerful and more controversial poems written about World War II. This long poem opened Dickey’s 1965 collection, Buckdancer’s Choice, which won the National Book Award. In addition to its length and its position in the book, “The Firebombing” received a great deal of attention for its subject matter, particularly since it appeared during the Vietnam War era of the mid-Sixties.

Although the poem achieved its fair share of praise from critics, one essay by Robert Bly, “The Collapse of James Dickey,” published in the spring of 1967 attacked Dickey’s poem—as well as the book’s long closing poem, “Slave Quarters”—as “repulsive.” Perhaps blinded by his own political fervor and apparently angered by Dickey’s support of the Vietnam War, Bly accused Dickey of being a militarist, a racist, and a sadist. Bly perceived “a gloating about power over others” in his reading of the book.

Of course, some of Bly’s reaction to the poetry seems fueled by Dickey’s public persona as an individual who enjoyed prodding others with overly broad comments and braggadocio. Especially when drinking, James Dickey’s reputation included an ability to be rude and insulting, as well as a penchant for attempting to shock listeners. As I mentioned in a previous post, I once shared a publication party with James Dickey when he and I both had new books of poems released at the same time by BOA Editions. As we sat side-by-side at the book-signing event, I witnessed firsthand Dickey’s easy charm as well as his tendency to provoke with outlandish statements or rude remarks. Nevertheless, Bly’s commentary on “The Firebombing” appears too heavily influenced by a personal view of Dickey as an adversary with an opposing political position on the Vietnam War.

Indeed, in “The Firebombing” Dickey presents a persona conflicted by the excitement and sense of power experienced when flying missions high above his targets, detached from the destruction and death below. The poem’s speaker also includes an acknowledgment that he suffers from confusion still felt decades later about a lack of guilt or remorse for his actions, though readers certainly should not deem this as an attitude of indifference. Dickey once commented: “To have guilt you've got to earn guilt, but sometimes when you earn it, you don't feel the guilt you ought to have. And that's what ‘The Firebombing’ is about.”

In her book about the visionary in literature, Joyce Carol Oates devotes a chapter to James Dickey and regards “The Firebombing” as a crucial poem: “It is unforgettable, and seems to me an important achievement in our contemporary literature, a masterpiece that could only have been written by an American, and only by Dickey. Having shown us so convincingly in his poetry how natural, how inevitable, is man's love for all things, Dickey now shows us what happens when man is forced to destroy, forced to step down into history and be an American ('and proud of it'). In so doing he enters a tragic dimension in which few poets indeed have operated.”

Perhaps James Dickey has written more powerful poems about World War II than any other American poet. He was a decorated aviator who had acknowledged dropping napalm and phosphorous at times, although in demonstration runs evidence indicates, and who had observed the horrible images of decomposing bodies on the battlefield when he was stationed in Okinawa. But he apparently did not participate in the sort of extensive firebombing of populated areas as the persona in his poem. Yet, through first-person narrative he assumed the role in the poem and identified with its persona.

In a 1990 Contemporary Literature interview as reported in Henry Hart’s excellent biography of the poet, Dickey explains “the guilt at the inability to feel guilty.” He continues: “You’ve been given medals for doing this. Your country has honored you—but there are those doubts that stay with you. You feel as a family man what all those unseen, forever unseen, people felt that you dropped those bombs on. You did it. The detachment one senses when dropping the bombs is the worst evil of all—yet it doesn’t seem so at the time.” In “The Firebombing” his persona lives in an average American suburb two decades after the war and still seems haunted by the Japanese living in the homes of neighborhoods beneath his plane during those bombing runs so long ago.

James Dickey’s son, journalist Christopher Dickey, reports in a 2003 lecture paper delivered at Clemson University: “It was only in his poem ‘The Firebombing’ that he found, at last, the perfect voice to address his confused and conflicted emotions as an American survivor of the war living in a well-mowed quarter-acre housing development twenty years afterward, trying to comprehend what he had wrought on other human beings whom he did not know, and never saw.”

An excerpt from James Dickey’s “The Firebombing”:

Gun down
The engines, the eight blades sighing
For the moment when the roofs will connect
Their flames, and make a town burning with all
American fire.
Reflections of houses catch;
Fire shuttles from pond to pond
In every direction, till hundreds flash with one death.
With this in the dark of the mind,
Death will not be what it should;
Will not, even now, even when
My exhaled face in the mirror
Of bars, dilates in a cloud like Japan.
The death of children is ponds
Shutter-flashing; responding mirrors; it climbs
The terraces of hills
Smaller and smaller, a mote of red dust
At a hundred feet; at a hundred and one it goes out.
That is what should have got in
To my eye
And shown the insides of houses, the low tables
Catch fire from the floor mats,
Blaze up in gas around their heads
Like a dream of suddenly growing
Too intense for war. Ah, under one’s dark arms
Something strange-scented falls—when those on earth
Die, there is not even sound;
One is cool and enthralled in the cockpit,
Turned blue by the power of beauty,
In a pale treasure-hole of soft light
Deep in aesthetic contemplation,
Seeing the ponds catch fire
And cast it through ring after ring
Of land: O death in the middle
Of acres of inch-deep water!

Charles Fishman: "Passing September"

The Poem of the Week is “Passing September” by Charles Fishman, which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2003 issue (Volume IV, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Fishman’s books include The Firewalkers (Avisson Press, 1996), Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust (Texas Tech University Press, 1991), Country of Memory (Uccelli Press, 2004), 5,000 Bells (Cross-Cultural Communications, 2004), and The Death Mazurka (Texas Tech, 1989). His other books include Catlives (1991), a translation of Sarah Kirsch’s Katzenleben. His most recent collection, Chopin’s Piano, was published by Time Being Books in 2006. Fishman’s poems, essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Georgia Review, New England Review, New Letters, Nimrod, Salmagundi, and Verse.

Charles Fishman created the Visiting Writers Program at the State University of New York at Farmingdale in 1979 and served as director until 1997. Currently, he is a poetry consultant to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, Poetry Editor of New Works Review, and Director of the Distinguished Speakers Program at Farmingdale State.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an exceptional work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

Galway Kinnell: "The Book of Nightmares"

When I came across this engaging and moving video by Nicholas S. Kritter, which includes Galway Kinnell reading a section from his book-length poem The Book of Nightmares (1971), I was reminded of the first time I’d heard Kinnell present the work. Shortly after the book was published, I attended a reading of it by Kinnell at the Donnell Library Center auditorium in New York City. At the time, I was an undergraduate taking my first courses in creative writing and discovering a passion for poetry.

Kinnell’s magnificently dramatic reading, during which he offered the entire book-length piece mostly from memory, proved compelling and persuasive as I realized how powerful a poem could be. Kinnell based material in The Book of Nightmares upon his antiwar activism during the Vietnam era and his experiences as a volunteer for the Congress of Racial Equality in the South, as well as his efforts in support of integration and voter registration during the sixties in Louisiana, a location now again in the news for more racial conflict in the city of Jena. However, alongside the death and pain inherent in those subjects of war and racism, Kinnell’s poem is framed by images of life and joy, the births of his two children, Maud and Fergus.

As I mentioned in a recent entry, the visiting writers series for this academic year already has begun at Valparaiso University, and I hope my students are fortunate enough to be rewarded by witnessing an inspiring presentation by one of our guest poets the way I was influenced, and continue to be, by my attendance at Kinnell’s reading so long ago.

Galway Kinnell’s most recent collection of poems, Strong Is Your Hold, was published at the end of 2006, only a few months before he turned 80 earlier this year. Kinnell has received the Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Frost Medal, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Kinnell’s volumes of poetry include Strong Is Your Hold; A New Selected Poems; Imperfect Thirst; When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone; Selected Poems; The Past; Mortal Acts, Mortal Words; The Book of Nightmares; Body Rags; Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock; and What a Kingdom It Was. He is the editor of The Essential Whitman. He has also published translations of works by Yves Bonnefoy, Yvan Goll, and François Villon, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

One can examine online the text of The Book of Nightmares, including the excerpt Kinnell reads in Kritter’s video. For more complete information on Galway Kinnell, I suggest his web page at the Poetry Foundation.

Barry Ballard: "Autumn"

As we move from summer to autumn this week, the VPR Poem of the Week is “Autumn” by Barry Ballard, which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2002 issue (Volume III, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Barry Ballard’s poetry has appeared in American Literary Review, Chariton Review, Connecticut Review, Florida Review, Midwest Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. His collections of poems include Green Tombs to Jupiter (Snail’s Pace Press), A Time to Reinvent (Creative Ash Press), and Plowing to the End of the Road (Finishing Line Press).

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an exceptional work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

Visiting Writer: Julia Kasdorf

For almost thirty years Valparaiso University’s Department of English has sponsored a visiting writers program that has brought nearly 100 writers of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and drama to campus for public readings and class conversations or individual meetings with students interested in creative writing. The program’s title, Wordfest, existed long before the fine 1997 Michael Chabon novel, Wonder Boys, and the subsequent 2000 movie version starring Michael Douglas and Tobey Maguire that included a visiting writers series with the same title.

Although the program began before I arrived at Valparaiso University, marvelously directed in its initial stage by Kathleen Mullen, I have been fortunate to be involved in its planning the past twenty-three years, most of that time as chair of the committee inviting writers each year. I now continue as co-chair by assisting the energetic and enthusiastic Allison Schuette-Hoffman. Among the writers who have visited campus the last couple of decades are a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, a Poet Laureate of the United States, and various authors who have been recipients of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and other distinguished honors for their writing. Examining the roster of visiting poets alone, one would find Agha Shahid Ali, John Balaban, Sharon Bryan, Amy Clampitt, Patricia Clark, Reginald Gibbons, Nikki Giovanni, Laurence Lieberman, Heather McHugh, Paul Muldoon, Sherod Santos, Dave Smith, Mark Strand, Richard Tillinghast, Daniel Tobin, Catherine Tufariello, Derek Walcott, Bruce Weigl, Charles Wright, and many more.

I have always believed the opportunities for students, especially those in poetry writing courses, to hear poets read their work and for students to engage in conversations with these poets have provided a benefit difficult to measure. An apple remains the clichéd gift brought to a teacher’s classroom; however, considering the numerous writers who have been kind enough to visit and speak with my creative writing students about the process of composition or the difficulties and rewards of publication, I feel I have been blessed with many gifts, a full bowl of golden apples over the years.

Often, one only encounters poems on the page, usually brief samples in anthologies where any biographical information seems merely to contain factual items that might just as easily be listed in a resumé. These details lack most of the personality and emotional attachment a poet brings to his or her reading or reveals in casual conversations. Rather than read the poets on the anthology pages simply as generic literary figures distant from the students, names in a table of contents or index without a great deal of individual identity, students are able now to associate flesh and blood human beings and their distinctive voices with the particularly effective language readers detect in the works they face.

Indeed, frequently my students have had their understanding of the literature under consideration, as well as its inception, enhanced by their meetings with the authors who created the work. Students suddenly appreciate more fully the physical and emotional investment made by authors in order to achieve a complete rendition of experiences and observations in their writings. At the same time, when poets or other authors share their early experiments with writing and the explorations, or even various mistakes, they may have made during their apprentice years—as well as their initial lack of confidence that readers would understand their efforts—my creative writing students appear to identify with these thoughts and tend to attain a greater appreciation of the need to forge ahead even as they are struggling with those words they place on their pages, or as they harbor doubts about the responses their writings might evoke in readers.

When a writer visits with a class, the students have a chance to ask questions directly to the author and find out for themselves the inspirations, intentions, and incidents of revision during the process of composition that led to the work’s final form. Instead of relying upon the interpretations or inferences offered by critics’ commentaries, the students can come to their own conclusions based upon personal interrogation and evaluation of the author’s shared words. As well, the students discover or define their singular concerns about writing by the content and tone of the questions they raise, and they can be helped immensely by an author’s words of advice or encouragement.

This past week we opened the 2007-2008 visiting writers series with a lecture, a reading, and in-class conversations by Julia Kasdorf, a poet and nonfiction writer who also teaches creative writing at Penn State University. In her lecture titled “Making Martyrs: Thoughts on the Radical Reformation, Memory, and Identity after 9/11,” Kasdorf—author of a collection of essays, The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life, and a biography, Fixing Traditions: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American—referenced her upbringing among Amish and Mennonite communities as she spoke about the history of martyrdom in Anabaptist religions. Her engaging comments moved forward through centuries of religious thought about martyrdom to a comparison and contrast with the controversial contemporary depiction of martyrs by some in Islamic communities post-9/11.

Kasdorf’s personal background, as well as the unique challenges or difficulties it presented to her as a writer, added another fascinating facet to her classroom discussions with students as she spoke not only about the composition of individual poems and the organization of book-length collections, but also related the sharp responses her self-revelatory poems received in her hometown community. In doing so, Kasdorf’s observations confronted an issue of reader response students sometimes do not realize, particularly how a poem’s frank language might affect those close to the poet, yet how words almost certainly must remain honest and exact for greatest impact.

In her public poetry reading held in the magnificent surroundings of the university art museum’s main gallery, Kasdorf presented poems from each of her two collections published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Sleeping Preacher and Eve’s Striptease, as well as newer poems from a working manuscript she hopes to complete in the upcoming year. Her performance involved important commentary about the composition process or allusions included in each of the works she read. As one might expect, the poet’s personality, displaying a sense of self-effacement and some very good humor, more fully developed a compelling portrait of the writer that contributed to the listeners’ appreciation for the poetry they heard.

For a little taste of Julia Kasdorf’s reading and to find out a bit more about her, I suggest beginning at a Penn State University web page that includes a brief interview and an audio clip of Kasdorf reading “Bat Boy, Break a Leg,” one of the poems she offered in her presentation at Valparaiso this past week.

Stanley Plumly: "'The Morning America Changed'"

On this commemoration of 9/11 the VPR Poem of the Week is “‘The Morning America Changed’” by Stanley Plumly, which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2002-2003 issue (Volume IV, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Stanley Plumly is the author of ten books of poetry, including the just released Old Heart (W.W. Norton, 2007), which includes “‘The Morning America Changed.’” His first collection, In the Outer Dark, received the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award; his third poetry volume, Out-of-the-Body Travel, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the William Carlos Williams Award. In 2002 he received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Other honors include the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram-Merrill Foundation Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant.

Plumly also has published a collection of essays on poetry, poetics, and art titled Argument & Song: Sources & Silences in Poetry (2003). Another work of nonfiction, Posthumous Keats: A Meditation on Immortality, is forthcoming in 2008. His work has appeared widely in magazines and literary journals, such as American Poetry Review, Atlantic Monthly, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, Poetry, and Yale Review.

In the past, Stanley Plumly has served as editor of Iowa Review and Ohio Review. He has taught at various universities, including the University of Iowa, the University of Houston, Columbia, and Princeton. He is currently a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, where he has been since 1985.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an exceptional work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

Poetry Writing Advice: C.K. Williams and Walt McDonald

As another academic term begins, I am again reminded of questions about issues I consider every time I open my poetry writing course. Most of my thoughts target the type of guidance I might provide that would direct young writers toward more careful consideration of poetry as an art form requiring acquired knowledge and a honed skill developed slowly over time rather than a mere therapeutic outlet for instantaneous or unfiltered composition filled with intimate emotional revelations and personal opinion.

Indeed, much of the lesson to be learned in a poetry writing workshop appears to involve not just a fostering of inspiration or how to arrange initial expressions in lines on the page, but the instilling of a willingness to work diligently at revision, an understanding that the process of rewriting may be as important as the original act of invention in order to produce more effective poetry from which readers will attain a sense of enrichment as well as entertainment.

Although I may have shared some of the same observations and recommendations in workshops each year the past two decades or so, I must remind myself the suggestions spoken to this semester’s students might sound new, supply useful words of advice they had not heard before. Nevertheless, I am always seeking additional helpful sources of information for my poetry writing class. Consequently, I found a number of interesting tidbits in a recent article, “A Letter to a Workshop” by C.K. Williams, which appeared in this summer’s July/August issue of American Poetry Review and was reprinted as a Poetry Daily Prose Feature.

Among the wise advice offered to aspiring writers by Williams, he suggests: “ideally the poet would strive for the curiosity of the ethnographer, the precision of the philosopher, the moral flexibility of the social theorist, the scrupulousness of the scientist . . ..” However, he also speaks of forming an “actual functioning consciousness” and a poet’s mentality, something difficult to define, but an attitude that arrives gradually over time and trial.

Despite Williams’ comment that his workshops in the past have been “mostly in graduate programs, now undergraduate,” much of the advice appears geared more for the graduate students or experienced and sophisticated writers, particularly since he seems to allow a lot of leeway in his recommendations. Frequently, Williams will qualify or temper his suggestions by repeatedly phrasing his advice with words that equivocate—such as “on the other hand” or “at the same time”—or language that wavers between opinions, perhaps reflecting one of Williams’ statements: “Along with the right not to concentrate goes a corollary: the right to vacillate, to wobble, to shillyshally, be indecisive in one’s labors.”

Further, Williams correctly communicates that aspiring poets should read poetry, “as much of it as possible; there’s always something to be learned from reading poems, poems you don’t know, and those you already know and love.” However, when Williams remarks that many young poets “should also have the right not to read poems, or even more to the point, sometimes the obligation to not read them, at least some poems, at least particularly poems by your contemporaries,” he seems to be under the assumption that beginning poets are overwhelmed by their reading of poems. He states: “too much reading of those whose language and history and vision is by definition close to one’s own can seem to overload the world with poems, dilute it, pollute it with poems: poems, poems, poems. It’s happened to us all.” I must confess I have never encountered this problem in any of my undergraduate creative writing courses.

Additionally, when Williams appears to minimize the most basic advice to beginning poets that they ought to hesitate when writing abstractions, he again seems to be speaking to more experienced writers than one would find in an undergraduate writing course. Williams offers: “Abstractions are a useful implement for clarifying the usually muddled impressions which inform our vision of experience, and they’re just as useful in poems. In other words, the old workshop maxim has to be revised from ‘Don’t tell, show,’ to, ‘Tell: everything you can.’”

For these reasons, as I begin the new semester, I have returned once more to an essay by Walt McDonald, “Advice I Wish I’d Been Told,” which appeared in the premiere issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review and I have used to begin poetry writing courses every year since then. In his list of recommendations, McDonald opens with advice apparently in opposition to what Williams presents, and perhaps more suitable for undergraduates or others just starting to write poetry.

McDonald recommends young poets resist abstractions: “General and abstract statements are easy to say, and usually flat. They don’t show; they tell.” Unlike interesting abstract paintings—for example, works by Kandinsky or others—filled with specific geometric shapes and exciting color combinations that appeal to the eye and mind, abstract words or phrases frequently fail because they are bland and tedious to read. One may include abstractions in first drafts as thoughts come together; however, they usually should be replaced during the revision process. Of course, McDonald does not completely outlaw abstractions: “No one I know says ‘Don’t ever use abstractions,’ but simply ‘Go in fear of abstractions.’” I have discovered such a warning provides exactly the cautionary note undergraduate poets need.

McDonald also emphasizes the significance inherent in rigorous revision, the search for exact and vivid language that communicates clearly yet evokes emotions and produces enough ambiguity to invite repeated readings: “Creative writing is hard work; but it’s fun enough, or you wouldn’t do it. You sacrifice time, and you get back a handful of poems.” He also points out distinctions necessary for undergraduates and other young poets to realize: “Poetry is not autobiography, but art; not merely facts of your actual life, but invention; not confession, but creation.”

Whether one is teaching poetry writing or aspiring to write poetry seriously, I recommend reading both of these essays as a starting point, a pair of useful pieces one can regard almost as opening addresses or first day lectures delivered in a workshop by two of our finest poets.

Rachel Loden: "Reconstructed Face"

The Poem of the Week is “Reconstructed Face” by Rachel Loden, which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2000 issue (Volume I, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Rachel Loden is the author of four chapbooks of poetry, including The Last Campaign, winner of the Hudson Valley Writers' Center / Slapering Hol Press Prize for Poetry. Her full-length collection of poems, Hotel Imperium, was chosen a winner of the University of Georgia Press’s Contemporary Poetry Series Competition. (Additionally, a review of Hotel Imperium written by H. Palmer Hall appears in Volume I, Number 2 of VPR.) Loden’s work has also been included in the 1995 and 2005 Best American Poetry anthologies, as well as various journals, including Antioch Review, Boulevard, Jacket, New American Writing, and Paris Review.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an exceptional work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

Best of the Web Nominations

Dzanc Books has requested nominations of poems published in online journals during the last twelve months for its initial collection of the Best of the Web, which the publisher plans as an annual anthology “representing in book form the best literary writing online magazines have to offer.” The editors have asked me to nominate three works from the two issues of Valparaiso Poetry Review that have appeared in 2007. As mentioned in a previous post about nominating work from the journal for special distinction, I have a high regard for every poem selected to be in VPR, and I am uncomfortable—as the editor who accepted all the poetry—choosing some pieces to be honored over others.

I value all the poems and depend on all the poets in Valparaiso Poetry Review. Yet, I welcome the admirable efforts of the anthology’s editors to bring attention to the growing number of fine works being published in online journals. Also, I am pleased when an opportunity arises for a few of VPR’s splendid poets to reach a larger audience and find the greater recognition they deserve through possible inclusion in the anthology.

Therefore, once again, I have relied on the numerous comments concerning poems appearing in VPR’s most recent issues that I have received in correspondence from readers throughout the past year. In this way, I obtained a sense of readers’ response to the poetry in VPR’s pair of issues in Volume VIII (Fall/Winter 2006-2007 and Spring/Summer 2007), which are eligible for the upcoming anthology by Dzanc Books. Based upon a compilation of those observations by VPR’s readers, I have been able to offer the editors three poems for consideration from Valparaiso Poetry Review, and I am pleased to announce the following nominations:

Jared Carter: “Prophet Township”

Frannie Lindsay: “Walking an Old Woman into the Sea”

Diane Lockward: “Temptation by Water”

I congratulate the nominated poets. At the same time, as I have in the past, I wish to express my appreciation to all the contributors whose works have appeared in VPR this last year, as well as in past years. I also hope this post encourages readers to continue communicating their feedback on writings in the journal, commentary I always enjoy receiving. In addition, I am grateful for all the ongoing support Valparaiso Poetry Review has received from contributors and readers during its eight years of publication, and I look forward to much more good poetry in the future from other contributors I hope readers will find equally as entertaining, engaging, and enlightening as those they have chosen to compliment in their past correspondence.