Edward Byrne: Responses at Nic Sebastian's Q&A

Poet Nic Sebastian, who blogs over at “Very Like a Whale,” has been conducting an ongoing series of interviews about poetry and poetics. The current series, her second, concerns issues related to publication for poets. Every installment in the series consists of the same ten questions posed to each subject. Nic honored me by asking that I participate, and my responses to her questions have just been published at the web site. I am particularly pleased by my company in the sequence of interviews: Kristy Bowen, Reginald Shepherd, Carolyn Guinzio, Nate Pritts, Sam Byfield, Neil Aitken, Rachel Bunting, Brent Fisk, Ivy Alvarez, Michaela Gabriel, Reb Livingston, and Ron Silliman. I encourage readers to examine their answers to the common questions as well.

As a sampling of the questions and my replies, I offer the first few in the Q&A list:


1. Describe your publishing trajectory. Where did it start? Where is it now? How long have you been at it?

I was fortunate at the outset of my publishing career. While I was a graduate student in an MFA program a few of my poems came to the attention of Al Poulin, the publisher of BOA Editions. He apparently liked what he read. He contacted me and asked if I had a manuscript available; therefore, I mailed him the MFA thesis I had been developing, and he accepted it for publication. After its release and some good reviews, the collection, Along the Dark Shore, was selected as a finalist for the Elliston Book Award. The book also included a foreword with introductory words by John Ashbery. Consequently, the volume received some additional attention.

Over the years, I have had five collections published. My sixth book, Seeded Light, is forthcoming from Turning Point Books with a scheduled release early next year. I have just finished another manuscript of poems, all of which already have appeared in journals; therefore, I will look to find a press for it.


2. What would you do differently if you had to start all over again?

When BOA Editions published my first book and it received the good reviews, as well as the recognition as an Elliston Book Award finalist, I hadn’t thought ahead to what comes next. Al Poulin asked me to send him another manuscript when I had one in which my confidence was complete. Unfortunately, I was young and continually doubted I had a finished manuscript, even though I now feel I did. I kept thinking I surely had to surpass the first book’s work before I could submit a second manuscript. I dawdled and delayed, and I got distracted pursuing other types of writing projects in prose. By the time I finally felt secure with a manuscript I believed I would be pleased to show Al, he had become very ill and died. I wish I had created a second manuscript for him more quickly, and I regret not doing so.


3. Why did you start seeking publication? Why do you continue?

I have never been one devoted to publication. I admire the way some poets are so dedicated and persistent in submitting work for publication. When it comes to submissions, I confess to being lackadaisical. Indeed, half the poems I publish in magazines are the result of editors soliciting material, and I am thankful to them. I usually dislike the paperwork process of mailing and tracking submissions, even with the ease permitted by journals that accept email submissions. I know this sounds odd coming from an editor who reads others’ submissions daily and a poet who has had more than 250 publications in journals over the years.

Nevertheless, I continue to seek publication because I like sharing my work with readers. As I always advise my students, our written words are meant for communication with others. Additionally, I especially enjoy engaging in the ongoing community of authors appearing in literary journals. In fact, I usually submit to magazines in which I have seen work by writers I admire, and upon acceptance I am pleased to be invited to join their group . . ..


I request readers visit “Very Like a Whale” for the rest of the interview. In addition, if anyone has other questions I can answer, please feel free to ask. Again, I thank Nic Sebastian for thinking of me as a participant in this series of interviews.

Johnny Depp, Bill Clinton, and Mary Oliver: Popularity and Poetry

As I ate breakfast and read the morning newspaper, I noticed the front page and a couple of subsequent pages were filled with information about Johnny Depp’s visit to the area for filming of his next movie, Public Enemies. Depp depicts John Dillinger in this film, including a central scene involving Dillinger’s appearance at a local courthouse, for charges concerning a bank robbery during which a security guard had been killed, and eventual escape from the town jail in 1934. Because of a desire for authenticity, the film’s cast and crew will be on location nearby for the next week. Stories within the paper report how scores of fans had found spots for themselves behind barricades overnight as they awaited morning light and the anticipated arrival of Johnny Depp. Apparently, Depp finally appeared on the set for the first day of filming at about 11 a.m., stepping out of a black SUV to the crowd’s applause and cheers of approval. Additional pictures of Depp and the day’s events filled a newspaper centerfold.

Indeed, the only other news story competing for attention seemed to be a visit to the region by Bill Clinton as he stumped for his wife’s candidacy in advance of the state’s upcoming presidential primary. Although the newspaper did not include as many photographs of Clinton, a prominent article noted the popularity of the former president, who also was greeted by scores of supporters.

In both instances, the front-page importance of the news items and the extensive coverage given seemed to me determined by the personality of the individuals involved, their compelling celebrity charisma and uniquely attractive appeal to an audience of followers concerned with identifiable characteristics perceived as charming, as much as by the men’s particular accomplishments or the overall newsworthiness of the stories.

Coincidentally, after browsing through the rest of the newspaper, I picked up a copy of Mary Oliver’s American Primitive and her New and Selected Poems to review as I prepared for a conference discussion later in the day with a graduate student engaged in an independent project this semester on contemporary American women poets for which I have been advising her. Somehow, this week’s selection of Mary Oliver appeared appropriate today because of the recent level of celebrity Oliver has achieved, almost reluctantly, in literary circles.

Indeed, just last month newspapers reported the unusual phenomenon of Oliver’s popularity as a poet, so much so that her appearances in large facilities—like Seattle’s Benaroya Hall, which seats 2,500, and Portland’s Schnitzer Concert Hall, which seats 2,700—were selling out in record time. Tickets for Oliver’s readings were offered for sale online at prices up to $100, as one might find tickets for music or sporting events being scalped for sold-out events. For this reason, my student and others intending to attend Mary Oliver’s upcoming reading at the Art Institute of Chicago, benefiting the Poetry Center of Chicago, on April 2 purchased their tickets more than a month in advance.

According to the Poetry Foundation’s current contemporary best sellers list, Mary Oliver’s Red Bird sits atop at number one. Five other Oliver volumes—Thirst, New and Selected Poems: Volume One, New and Selected Poems: Volume Two, Why I Wake Early, and Blue Iris—also appear on the list of top thirty books.

Certainly, the seventy-two year old author has earned her status as the nation’s most popular poet. Her work has been recognized with numerous honors, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, throughout the forty-five years since her first publication, No Voyage and Other Poems, was released in 1963. However, perceptions of her poetry as continuing in the Romantic tradition—like that of her favorite poet, Walt Whitman—especially with its meditative focus on nature, have led readers to believe she represents a figure for whom personal expression in lyrical yet plain-spoken language can connect with a wider audience, perhaps almost in the manner Robert Frost once spoke so well to so many average American readers.

Oddly, throughout her career, Mary Oliver has offered her observations on nature most often in poems from which she excludes intimate information about herself, maintaining a fair amount of privacy. Stephen Dobyns once wrote: “Although few poets have fewer human beings in their poems than Mary Oliver, it is ironic that few poets also go so far to help us forward.” She surely has not methodically sought celebrity by opening up herself publicly. In fact, over the years Oliver has been regarded by readers as something of a recluse who rarely grants interviews.

Only recently has Oliver been more outgoing and turned toward more overtly personal subject matter. As Susan Salter Reynolds commented in the Los Angeles Times a couple months ago in her review and profile of Oliver: “It is astonishing that she has been able to maintain such distance from her readers . . . It’s a quiet cult but widespread and fervid: Her poems pop up at many of life’s turning points, including death. Readers go to her for solace, regeneration and inspiration. Her name is passed between generations, with a knowing look.”

Just two weeks ago, eight of Mary Oliver’s poems were set to music by Ronald Perera for performance by a chorus accompanied by string quartet and piano at the Church of the Holy Trinity in New York City. As the New York Times reported: “Ms. Oliver’s poetry, which has drawn comparisons to the work of Emerson and Thoreau, reveals an awestruck regard of nature that verges on the religious: ‘What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven,’ she writes in ‘I Looked Up,’ the fifth poem in Mr. Perera’s cycle. Her work also demonstrates a discerning eye and an ability to render vivid images with a few deft strokes.”

Critical evaluations of Oliver’s poems sometimes differ in their opinion of a distracting presence of sentimentality in some pieces or a seeming repetition due to a sameness of subject matter from one to another. Nevertheless, the work frequently rewards reading, and the general readership for her poetry appears to surpass that of any other contemporary poet. Audiences’ admiration for Mary Oliver may not compete with the widespread popularity of personalities like Johnny Depp and Bill Clinton in the number of followers or newspaper headlines generated; however, one must marvel at the affection for Oliver among many readers of poetry. On this spring morning, I cheerfully turned from those familiar stories about celebrities from film or politics in my local newspaper toward the delightful poetry of Mary Oliver, including the following concerning spring and the imagination:

SPRING AZURES

In spring the blue azures bow down
at the edges of shallow puddles
to drink the black rain water.
Then they rise and float away into the fields.

Sometimes the great bones of my life feel so heavy,
and all the tricks my body knows—
the opposable thumbs, the kneecaps,
and the mind clicking and clicking—

don’t seem enough to carry me through the world
and I think: how I would like

to have wings—
blue ones—
ribbons of flame.

How I would like to open them, and rise
from the black rain water.

And then I think of Blake, in the dirt and sweat of London—a boy
staring through the window, when God came
fluttering up.

Of course, he screamed,
seeing the bobbin of God’s blue body
leaning on the sill,
and the thousand-faceted eyes.

Well, who knows.
Who knows what hung, fluttering, at the window
between him and the darkness.

Anyway, Blake the hosier’s son stood up
and turned away from the sooty sill and the dark city—
turned away forever
from the factories, the personal strivings,

to a life of the imagination.

Audio of a reading by Mary Oliver and an interview with her by Coleman Barks conducted in August of 2001 can be found at the Lannan Foundation website. At a separate web page, readers can find another Lannan Foundation audio of an October, 2006 reading by Oliver, as well as her conversation with Joseph Parisi.

Carol Coffee Reposa: "Lines Composed in the Computer Classroom"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Carol Coffee Reposa’s “Lines Composed in the Computer Classroom,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2004 issue (Volume V, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Carol Coffee Reposa’s poems have appeared in various journals, including Amarillo Bay, Blue Mesa Review, Blue Unicorn, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Concho River Review, Descant, The Formalist, Southwestern American Literature, and The Texas Observer. Reposa’s books of poetry include The Green Room and At the Border, Winter Lights (both published by Pecan Grove Press), and Facts of Life (Browder Spring Books). She has received Fulbright/Hays Fellowships for study in Russia, Peru, and Ecuador. Carol Coffee Reposa teaches English at San Antonio College.

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.

T.S. Eliot's "East Coker" at Easter

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.


[Excerpt from the “East Coker” section of Four Quartets]

Thomas Stearns Eliot is buried at St. Michael’s Church, East Coker, Somerset, England. His ashes were interred on Easter Sunday of 1965 below a memorial plaque: “in my beginning is my end ... in my end is my beginning.”

Mark Strand: "Poem After the Seven Last Words"

As I mentioned last year in my review of Mark Strand’s collection of poetry, Man and Camel, the volume includes as its culmination an extended piece concerning the crucifixion of Christ. “Poem After the Seven Last Words,” commissioned by the Brentano String Quartet, originally was written to accompany a performance of Haydn’s quartet opus 51, titled “The Seven Last Words of Christ.” The poet’s contribution contains seven sections, designed so that each part would be read between the music’s movements. In Strand’s notes on the poem, he also reports the content “relies heavily on the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas.”

Certainly, if one considers poets who produce work associated with religious themes or theological philosophy, Mark Strand’s name does not naturally rise to the top of such a list. Indeed, even in this instance, the poet’s approach to his subject matter appears reverent but appropriately distant, continually controlled by an apparent attempt at gathering together a series of scenes or statements that evoke emotion and initiate thought, but which avoid any of the overly wrought language one might expect in some religious verse or the intense imagery of a vivid Mel Gibson movie version.

“Poem After the Seven Last Words,” which fills the final of this book’s three sections, displays some of the subtly lyrical and restrained meditative language Strand has demonstrated in previous volumes, although in those instances the persona spoke of incidents or relationships mostly provided by personal experience. In this piece, the poet shows readers narrative moments or dramatic situations the way a painter might set colors and shapes beside one another, arranging elements separately on a canvas then standing back to contemplate their cumulative impact. In fact, at times the imagery even seems cinematic, as if a camera has panned across a fictional landscape: “a dreamt-of place / where the muttering wind shifts over the white lawns / and riffles the leaves of trees, the high trees / that are streaked with gold and line the walkways there.”

However, the speaker concedes such scenery sometimes supplies false hope, especially in “the days of spring when the sky is filled / with the odor of lilac, when darkness becomes desire.” The poet knows nature’s beauty combined with human nature can act to conceal harsh realities, particularly our own mortality: “the world’s great gift for fiction gilds even / the dirt we walk on, and we feel we could live forever / while knowing of course that we can’t.” Indeed, although this long poem addresses the death of Christ, it also serves as a reminder to everyone of the inevitability of an end for all: “No one escapes. / Not even the man who believed he was chosen to do so.”

Therefore, in a certain sense, the narrative of this poem leads to one conclusion, already suggested in the poem’s opening lines: “The story of the end, of the last word / of the end, when told, is a story that never ends.” Although spoken about the sacrifice of Christ, Strand’s poem more importantly forces each of us to examine our own fate in the face of an uncertainty we all encounter. “Such is our plight,” the narrator declares, as we are left with the realization, “at last that nothing is more real than nothing.” By the last lines of the final section, the closing sentences of the collection, Strand’s narrator acknowledges and accepts his destined end, “what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, what no hand / has touched, what has not arisen in the human heart. / To that place, to the keeper of that place, I commit myself.”

On this Good Friday, I present one of the most compelling sections, number six from “Poem After the Seven Last Words,” that I did not include specifically in my previous commentary:

“It is finished,” he said. You could hear him say it,
the words almost a whisper, then not even that,
but an echo so faint it seemed no longer to come
from him, but from elsewhere. This was the moment,
his final moment. “It is finished,” he said into a vastness
that led to an even greater vastness, and yet all of it
within him. He contained it all. That was the miracle,
to be both large and small in the same instant, to be like us, but more so, then finally to give up the ghost,
which is what happened. And from the storm that swirled
in his wake a formal nakedness took shape, the truth
of disguise and the mask of belief were joined forever.

Readers are invited to visit my complete review of Mark Strand’s Man and Camel.

Bob Dylan's Beginning

A few years ago when Bob Dylan wrote his book of memoirs, Chronicles (Simon & Schuster, 2004), he recalled hospital visits he had made to meet with his musical role model, Woody Guthrie. He also had met Guthrie at the home of Bob Gleason, a friend with whom Woody would be on weekends before his illness had become too severe to travel. Many have spoken of these contacts as symbolic of Guthrie’s passing the torch of folk music to this young singer representing another generation, as if a mentor were conferring approval upon his protégé. Some even claim Guthrie expressed admiration for Dylan’s singing. Although, as Howard Sounes suggests in Down the Highway, his biography of Dylan, Guthrie’s health had deteriorated because of Huntington’s chorea to the point that he could not really respond with language to visitors, and some even doubted whether he recognized those who came to see him: “The truth was that the meetings were much more significant to Bob than they were to Guthrie, who was very sick indeed. He may have laughed and twinkled when Bob sang for him . . . but that did not mean he recognized the boy.”

No matter what the extent of Guthrie’s recognition or the relationship between the two may have been, in retrospect critics sometimes consider this crossing of singing careers as a grand passage in American music and culture, a transition to be treasured. However, in his description of the moments spent with Guthrie, Dylan seems to equally emphasize a blended sense of frustration and emotional exhaustion felt at the time because the most notable voice in American folk music had faded away into silence without much notice by those in the nation that had shaped his song lyrics.

Bob Dylan relates his memory: “I had tried to visit Woody regularly, but now it was getting harder to do. Woody had been confined to Greystone Hospital in Morristown, New Jersey, and I would usually take the bus there from the Port Authority terminal, make the hour-and-a-half ride and then walk the rest of the half mile up the hill to the hospital, a gloomy and threatening granite building—looked like a medieval fortress. Woody always asked me to bring him cigarettes, Raleigh cigarettes. Usually I’d play him his songs during the afternoon. Sometimes he’d ask for specific ones—‘Rangers Command,’ ‘Do Re Me,’ ‘Dust Bowl Blues,’ ‘Pretty Boy Floyd,’ ‘Tom Joad,’ the song he’d written after seeing the movie The Grapes of Wrath. I knew all those songs and many more. Woody was not celebrated at this place, and it was a strange environment to meet anybody, least of all the true voice of the American spirit.”

A bit further into his book of memoirs, Dylan confides his state of mind when he observed the depressing conditions in which Guthrie found himself confined in that psychiatric institution: “The scene was frightful, but Woody Guthrie was oblivious to all of it. A male nurse would usually bring him out to see me and then after I’d been there a while, would lead him away. The experience was sobering and psychologically draining.”

Considering this situation, one may not be surprised that Bob Dylan’s initial self-titled album, released on March 19, 1962, which consisted almost totally of covers for classic folk songs or traditional blues numbers, offers an original Dylan tune, “Song to Woody,” included as a tribute and a toast to his hero. Dylan apparently had played the song for Woody during his visits, and he believed it pleased his hero. The lyrics of this piece clearly exhibit Woody Guthrie’s influence and even echo the rhythm or distinct words from his well-known songs.

SONG TO WOODY

I’m out here a thousand miles from my home,
Walkin’ a road other men have gone down.
I'm seein’ your world of people and things,
Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings.

Hey, hey Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song
’Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along.
Seems sick an’ it’s hungry, it’s tired an’ it’s torn,
It looks like it’s a-dyin’ an’ it’s hardly been born.

Hey, Woody Guthrie, but I know that you know
All the things that I’m a-sayin’ an’ a-many times more.
I’m a-singin’ you the song, but I can’t sing enough,
’Cause there’s not many men that done the things that you’ve done.

Here’s to Cisco an’ Sonny an’ Leadbelly too,
An’ to all the good people that traveled with you.
Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind.

I’m a-leavin’ tomorrow, but I could leave today,
Somewhere down the road someday.
The very last thing that I’d want to do
Is to say I’ve been hittin’ some hard travelin’ too.

With his first album and this particular song Bob Dylan began traveling his own musical road, a path that has involved a number of interesting twists and turns. Along his evolving journey the past half-century, Bob Dylan has proven to be an enduring and formidable figure in American culture, perhaps the most influential singer-songwriter in the nation’s musical history. Indeed, I frequently have heard fellow poets remark upon the subtle way in which language or rhythm in Dylan’s lyrics has swayed them somewhat in their own writings.

As I have written previously, when I offered in 1999 an “Inaugural Lecture” at my university, a presentation traditionally delivered to the community upon attaining full academic rank (and later published as an article titled “Writing Poetry: Art, Artifacts, and Articles of Faith”), I commented in one excerpt: “three writers who have greatly influenced my writing of poetry are Robert Frost, Robert Penn Warren, and Robert Lowell—my literary trinity. The three ‘Bobs’ I like to call them. (My wife insists that if I were complete in my list, I would add Bob Dylan as well.)”

I remember how Bob Dylan’s presence, musically and physically, could be felt during his early years in New York City. Indeed, when in high school, a few friends and I spent much of our time in Greenwich Village, often sitting in a diner on one corner of the block where Dylan lived, watching for him on days he might walk by our window table. Later, as a graduate student and apprentice poet I would sometimes attend parties, book signings, or gallery openings where literary celebrities or visual artists and musicians could be found, at times including folks like Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, and even Bob Dylan.

Certainly, Dylan regarded poets as significant reflections of the American voice and some seemed to exert influence on the texture in his voice. In fact, Allen Ginsberg occasionally accompanied Dylan on stage during touring and famously appeared in the “Subterranean Homesick Blues” music video. In Chronicles Dylan begins one of his chapters with the following observations: “I had just returned to Woodstock from the Midwest—from my father’s funeral. There was a letter from Archibald MacLeish waiting for me on the table. MacLeish, Poet Laureate of America—one of them. Carl Sandburg, poet of the prairie and the city, and Robert Frost, the poet of dark meditations were the others. MacLeish was the poet of night stones and the quick earth. These three, the Yeats, Browning and Shelley of the New World, were gigantic figures, had defined the landscape of twentieth-century America. They put everything in perspective.”

Some have suggested Bob Dylan should be regarded as a poet as well. In fact, as British Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion expressed his fondness for Dylan’s poetic language, with “Visions of Johanna” containing his favorite lyrics. Dylan is quoted as considering himself “a poet first and a musician second.” I don’t go so far as to label Dylan a poet because I consider the words in his lyrics already as valuable as any poems when regarded simply as sensational songs, each one existing just as Dylan designed it for his listeners. Moreover, since he often changes the ways he presents the songs in concert and sometimes alters the lyrics, one might contend the songs are meant to be experienced differently every time they are performed, and the static words on a page would not fully represent them. The power and the persuasion of his language can best be experienced with the rhythm and melody contributed by his music, as well as the unique cadence and phrasing placed upon the words by Dylan’s singing.

Supposedly, Bob Dylan’s first album was taped in a few hours on a cold day in November of 1961, and the recording cost less than $500 for Columbia producer John Hammond. Over the decades since that album was released on March 19, 1962, Bob Dylan has continually produced music that has transformed much of American music and had an impact on other areas of American culture, as many were reminded recently with the release of I’m Not There, the Academy Award-nominated film inspired by Dylan’s life and the various stages during his ever-developing career.

Now nearly 67, eighteen years older than the age of Woody when they first met, Dylan also has engaged in some hard traveling down the roads almost constantly in his “never-ending tour” that usually includes concerts worldwide throughout most of every year. One could not have known how appropriate, perhaps prophetic, the words in that first lyric written to Woody Guthrie by a young and enthusiastic beginning singer-songwriter named Bob Dylan would appear to be so many years later.

Roger Pfingston: "Parking, 1958"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Roger Pfingston’s “Parking, 1958,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2001-2002 issue (Volume III, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Roger Pfingston is the author of various publications, including Earthbound (Pudding House Press) and Singing to the Garden (Parallel Press). His poems have appeared in anthologies, such as Say This of Horses and 75 Poems on Retirement, both published by the University of Iowa Press, and Intimate Kisses: Poetry of Sexual Pleasure (New World Library). His poems also have appeared widely in literary journals, including Adirondack Review, Ellipsis, Innisfree Poetry Journal, The Ledge, Louisville Review, The MacGuffin, Pedestal Magazine, Poems Niederngasse, Poetry Midwest, Quarterly West, Snowy Egret, Texas Poetry Journal, Wisconsin Review, and Yankee Magazine.

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.

Irish American Poetry

The recent release of The Book of Irish American Poetry: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, edited by Daniel Tobin and published by the University of Notre Dame Press (2007), supplies the most comprehensive collection of poetry concerning this topic thus far. The volume of more than 900 pages presents work by over two hundred poets.

This collection intends to address a question that opens Tobin’s introductory note: “What does it mean to be an Irish American poet?” As the book jacket copy contributes, the anthology “answers this question by drawing together the best and most representative poetry by Irish Americans and about Irish America that has been written over the past three hundred years.”

Further, Tobin comments: “The question is not just rhetorical, for it raises to consciousness the issue of a certain kind of imaginative identity that rarely, if ever, has been adequately explored. In fact, the question is so fundamental that we might want to rephrase it in such a way that something of what is at stake behind the question enters into its form: Does the experience of being Irish American predispose the Irish American poet to embrace any characteristic themes, subjects, or styles? Is there in such poetry something that might be identified as uniquely Irish American sensibility, in the same way one might identify Jewish American poetry or African American Poetry? And, if not, is it worth even using the appellation ‘Irish American Poetry,’ as though such a thing existed in any artistically commendable form?”

Today, on St. Patrick’s Day, these questions seem timely or appear more appropriate, and I recommend readers examine the anthology. The poems selected for inclusion vary greatly in style and subject matter. In addition, since the book explores Irish American poetry rather than just Irish American poets, Tobin’s editorial reach is extensive, as one finds within the volume’s covers a wide array of poets who claim Irish ancestry or who write pieces about Ireland and the Irish: Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Robinson Jeffers, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, John Berryman, Thomas McGrath, Robert Creeley, Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, Charles Olson, Galway Kinnell, X.J. Kennedy, Jean Valentine, Alan Dugan, Maureen Stanton, Brendan Galvin, Billy Collins, Susan Howe, Michael Ryan, Irene McKinney, James Schuyler, Maureen Owen, John Logan, Joan Houlihan, Walt McDonald, Eavan Boland, and many others.

I am pleased that a couple of my poems also are included in the anthology, and I offer one of them here:

HOMECOMING

I have a feeling for those ships
Each worn and ancient one . . .
—Herman Melville


Often I think of those lost and luring
evenings I’d walk along the wharves

where the charter ships were rooted:
Virginia II, Susanna B, Princess Ellen . . ..

The workers would still be there, hosing
down the decks, storing supplies, sometimes

scraping paint from the blistered hulls.
After a while I knew their names too.

Slattery was my favorite. He understood
what a boy wanted to hear, wanted to see.

Once, pointing to a lagoon where scows
lay at anchor in the offshore shallows,

each darkening the green water-light
like a brush stroke too thickly applied,

he spoke of their owners, men he’d known
since he was a boy, and how they lived

the way their fathers had before them,
unchanged, like the long, straight skyline

of the sea. Daily, in all weather,
they cruised those waters, indistinguishable

as driftwood. In the pre-dawn they’d cross
against the slow pull of the tide,

their lamps burning through the frost-smoke
that rose over the black bay, then linger

along the point in the first wink of sun.
When the ships returned in the late afternoon,

each with an elongated shadow trailing
beside the whiteness of its wake, I’d watch

until I could see every man’s face,
each one sun-puffed, imprinted with squint marks.

Overhead, the flowering sky would clutter
with gulls following indiscernible clouds

of fish scent, as if in a homecoming.
Soon, the constellations, too, would collect

far above the darkened harbor, and I,
too young to know any better, would leave

for home, believing everything would remain
the same, that even I would never change.

[“Homecoming” previously appeared in my third book of poems, Words Spoken, Words Unspoken (Chimney Hill Press, 1995).]

Pi Day and the Nobel Prize Poet

For fans of numerical information or the history of mathematical discoveries, March 14 represents a day of celebration. Since the date may be written as 3-14, the digits correspond with 3.14, the opening series of digits associated with “pi.” (The pi moment during the day is at 1:59:26, more fully reflecting the start of pi: 3.1415926.) This irrational number—one that never can be stated exactly because its decimal sequence continues to infinity—always has amazed mathematicians and held a primary position of curiosity for many non-mathematicians.

Perhaps the best known and most fascinating of figures for those concerned with calculations, pi has been a center of attention for centuries. Indeed, the computation for pi is implied in a passage of the Old Testament. Its exact determination has been a riddle for all civilizations, including the Babylonians, the Egyptians, and the Greeks of ancient eras. Not until the sixteenth century were European scholars able to compute pi to as many as a couple dozen decimal places.

In fact, only in recent decades has pi been calculated with great precision, as the mid-twentieth century invention of computers took over for humans, at first figuring pi to thousands of digits. By the 1980s calculations of pi extended to hundreds of thousands of digits. Now, super computers have stretched the stated sequence of known digits to millions, then to billions, and on to more than a trillion decimal places. Beyond serving as a source of trivia and fascination, pi has contributed greatly to solving a profusion of previously puzzling problems in mathematics and science, enabling the contemporary understanding of many various scientific equations, including those explaining the DNA double helix.

A multitude of pi enthusiasts, mathematicians and non-mathematicians alike, maintain an ongoing interest in the properties of pi. Some study its long history and show their devotion by memorizing pi to as many decimal places as they can. I know this because my own son, with a collection of books about pi in his personal library, can be counted among the fans of pi, many of which have created organizations or web sites on the topic. In addition, tests sometimes are conducted to measure one’s memorization of the number’s digits.

When he was twelve, my son decided to express his interest by memorizing the first 1500 digits of pi, which he was able to accomplish. When he was prepared to recite the 1500 digits, which would have stood as a world record for memorization in the early 1970s, he succeeded by reeling off the decimal place numbers in approximately 20 minutes. Although the extraordinary feat may seem admirable, even if extreme, my son’s status has not approached that of the current world record holder for such memorization of pi, whose achievement is a standard presently set at 100,000 decimal places.

Readers will discover Wislawa Szymborska, the 1996 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, among those who have been inspired in some way by pi. Born in Poland in 1923, Szymborska studied literature and sociology as a university student, but she has displayed interest in a wide array of topics within the nearly twenty collections of poetry she has published since 1945, when her first poem appeared in print. As well, she has discussed numerous subjects in her prose pieces. Among the topics about which she has written, science and scientists have been a focus at times. Those individuals, compelled to discovery or invention by a desire to clarify the confusing and chart the unknown, have intrigued her.

In her acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, Szymborska commented: “inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners— and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’”

Later in her acceptance presentation, Szymborska went on to say: “This is why I value that little phrase ‘I don’t know’ so highly. It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself ‘I don’t know,’ the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself ‘I don’t know,’ she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families, and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying ‘I don’t know,’ and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize.

From these observations, Szymborska drew a conclusion: “Poets, if they're genuine, must also keep repeating ‘I don’t know.’” She suggests the poet needs to follow the lead of scientists and mathematicians who seek to brighten the path of understanding for others and who use enlightenment to eliminate ignorance. However, she also has been known to discuss her complex subjects with a sharp sense of skepticism or biting wit and delightful humor, delivered with the creativity of language a poet can contribute.

Therefore, I offer here one of Wislawa Szymborska’s poems, an example that exhibits her humor and inventive employment of language, and a poem that seems most appropriate for March 14 (3-14), Pi Day:

PI

The admirable number pi:
three point one four one.
All the following digits are also just a start,
five nine two because it never ends.
It can’t be grasped, six five three five, at a glance,
eight nine, by calculation,
seven nine, through imagination,
or even three two three eight in jest, or by comparison
four six to anything
two six four three in the world.
The longest snake on earth ends at thirty-odd feet.
Same goes for fairy tale snakes, though they make it a little longer.
The caravan of digits that is pi
does not stop at the edge of the page,
but runs off the table and into the air,
over the wall, a leaf, a bird’s nest, the clouds, straight into the sky,
through all the bloatedness and bottomlessness.
Oh how short, all but mouse-like is the comet’s tail!
How frail is a ray of starlight, bending in any old space!
Meanwhile two three fifteen three hundred nineteen
my phone number your shirt size
the year nineteen hundred and seventy-three sixth floor
number of inhabitants sixty-five cents
hip measurement two fingers a charade and a code,
in which we find how blithe the trostle sings!
and please remain calm,
and heaven and earth shall pass away,
but not pi, that won’t happen,
it still has an okay five,
and quite a fine eight,
and all but final seven,
prodding and prodding a plodding eternity
to last.

— Wislawa Szymborska

Ann Fisher-Wirth: "Sweetgum Country"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Ann Fisher-Wirth’s “Sweetgum Country,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2003 issue (Volume IV, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Ann Fisher-Wirth is the author of two volumes of poetry, Blue Window (Archer Books, 2003) and Five Terraces (Wind Publications, 2005), as well as William Carlos Williams and Autobiography: The Woods of His Own Nature (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989). A third book of poems, Carta Marina, is forthcoming in 2009 from Wings Press. Diane Lockward’s review of Blue Window appeared in the Fall/Winter 2004-2005 issue (Volume VI, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review. Fisher-Wirth has also published two chapbook collections: The Trinket Poems (Wind Publications, 2003) and Walking Wu Wei’s Scroll (Drunken Boat, 2005).

In 2004, Fisher-Wirth won the Rita Dove Poetry Award from the Salem College Center for Women Writers. She also received the Poetry Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, as well as a poetry fellowship from the Mississippi Arts Commission. Her poems have appeared in many literary magazines, including Connecticut Review, Georgia Review, and Kenyon Review. Ann Fisher-Wirth teaches poetry and environmental literature at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi.

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.

Donald Justice: "Time and the Weather"

This weekend, while the year is yet early and blowing snow continues to fill the bay window beside me, and as many have adjusted their clocks for the shift to U.S. Daylight Saving Time—once done after the drift into spring rather than while still in winter drifts—that occurred between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m., I am once again mindful of Donald Justice, a poet whose work repeatedly exhibited an exquisite sense of time, both in content and in style. An interest in the passage of time, including its positive and negative influences on people or places, frequently was pronounced among Justice’s favorite themes. In addition, although he demonstrated an ability to write wonderfully lyrical and evocative free verse, Justice often displayed his finely trained poetic ear with rhyming and metered poems that presented exact timing.

As I mentioned in my Valparaiso Poetry Review commentary on Donald Justice’s Collected Poems in the Fall/Winter 2005-2006 issue (Volume VII, Number 1), Justice’s love for music held a prominent place throughout his life and contributed to his poetry as content material. Despite his occasional claim to the contrary, apparently his musical skill and perfect pitch also served to guide him when writing with rhythm and meter. Justice began his college career as a music student at the University of Miami, where he studied under the guidance of famed composer Carl Ruggles, a figure who, according to Justice, left a powerful and lasting impression that continued throughout his whole life.

After graduating from the University of Miami with a B.A. in English, Justice was encouraged by Ruggles to pursue his education in musical composition at Yale; however, Justice chose to continue in English and creative writing by attending a progression of graduate programs at various universities—the University of North Carolina, Stanford University, and the University of Iowa. In a Dana Gioia interview with the poet, Justice sums it up: “My composition teacher, Carl Ruggles, wanted me to go to Yale to study with Paul Hindemith. I was faced with a decision. Not only did my family have very little money, but I suspected that I might have more talent as a writer than as a composer, much as I would have liked to go on writing music.”

Although Justice gave up a formal music education, his poetic patterns frequently followed closely or proceeded from forms approaching the organizational mode of musical composition as he penned a number of sonatinas, songs, improvisations, or variations on themes. The following appears to be an appropriate poem for today with some rhyme and rhythm. The work was published in Night Light, Donald Justice’s collection released in 1967:

TIME AND THE WEATHER

Time and the weather wear away
The houses that our fathers built.
Their ghostly furniture remains—
All the sad sofas we have stained
With tears of boredom and of guilt,

The fraying mottoes, the stopped clocks . . .
And still sometimes these tired shapes
Haunt the damp parlors of the heart.
What Sunday prisons they recall!
And what miraculous escapes!

The accompanying video at the top of this post offers an impression of Donald Justice’s “Poem To Be Read at Three A.M.” This free-verse piece is one of the two parts to “American Sketches,” a poem which also appeared in Night Light and that Justice dedicated to William Carlos Williams, an obvious influence:

POEM TO BE READ AT 3 A.M.

Excepting the diner
On the outskirts
The town of Ladora
At 3 A.M.
Was dark but
For my headlights
And up in
One second-story room
A single light
Where someone
Was sick or
Perhaps reading
As I drove past
At seventy
Not thinking
This poem
Is for whoever
Had the light on

Over the years, I have met a number of poets who had fond memories of Donald Justice: some recalled him as an excellent teacher, while others remembered him as a good friend. Often, he was considered both. My favorite memory involves my first meeting with him. As a graduate student assisting in the visiting writers series at the University of Utah, I sometimes was asked to escort visiting poets during their stay in Salt Lake City. When Don came to town, he was to be around campus for a few days to meet with students in the creative writing program and to deliver a reading.

However, Donald Justice was someone who enjoyed gambling, as many who knew him will confirm. Therefore, one day during his stay, he suggested a road trip across the state line into Nevada, where he could try his luck and wager much of his honorarium at the casinos. Consequently, along with a couple of other doctoral candidates in creative writing who already knew Don from their days as his students in the MFA program at Iowa, he and I slipped away from the university to travel a highway across the desert and into Nevada.

We moved through one casino and then another, playing blackjack, poker, and craps, the game which Don seemed to enjoy the most, partially because he was again assuming the role of the good teacher, instructing me about the rules and odds as he participated. He appeared to appreciate the thrill of the adventure and the friendship with the other two and myself as much as he liked the idea of possibly winning some money. Indeed, by the close of action he’d actually lost a couple hundred dollars, but the ride back was even more delightful as he told tales of past gambling events and other amusing stories, all the while also explaining his views on poets and poetry he admired, and I discovered an admiration for him beyond that I already held for his poetry.

Somewhat later, when I had written a review of Don’s book of Selected Poems in which I detailed how he’d revised many of the pieces from their original forms in past individual collections, I received a kind letter from him, thanking me for taking the research time to note even the smallest changes and for offering such a close reading of his work because such detail mattered to him. He also recalled our road trip to Nevada, sending thanks again for the great day he had with me and the other two students. In fact, the couple of times I saw him after then, each meeting he remarked about how the road trip and our day at the casinos had been highlights of his visit.

I admit the experience had been a highlight for me as well. Today, about a quarter century since then, I still see a pair of dice tumbling across a felt table, and I continue to hear the friendly words about gambling or about poetry that Don shared that day. Especially on this snowy morning as we manipulate time by turning our clocks ahead, I turn back once more to the western desert scene in my memory, which itself manipulates time, and I again listen to Don voicing poetic advice even as I take a turn at the craps table, confiding to me that one always must try to roll the dice with a winning rhythm.

Pink Floyd: "Time"

Just a timely and lyrical reminder to all of us living in regions that observe U.S. Daylight Saving Time that on Saturday night – Sunday morning clocks should be moved ahead an hour. “Time” is one of the timeless pieces from Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (1973):

TIME

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you’re older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter; never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone; the song is over, thought I’d something more to say

Home, home again
I like to be here when I can
And when I come home cold and tired
It’s good to warm my bones beside the fire
Far away across the fields
The tolling of the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
To hear the softly spoken magic spells

Creative Writing Programs: Brief Observations and Advice

The other evening while attending a first-round post-season conference tournament game for my university’s basketball team, I was reminded how much I enjoy the excitement of March Madness. Every year, I look forward to the announcement of the teams selected to compete for the national championship, as well as the process of elimination that winnows the teams down to two in a final game. However, during halftime as I spoke with one of my student advisees, a senior looking forward to attending graduate school, I also realized once more how March represents the month when many students receive from graduate programs notification of whether or not they have been accepted for the following fall semester.

Because of my background, the courses I teach, and my position as an advisor to senior English majors, students seeking entrance into graduate creative writing programs frequently consult with me. In addition to offering a letter of recommendation, I usually supply the students with information on specific schools, their faculty, and assorted other details about the graduate programs, items I feel one ought to consider when filing an application. Contributing factors unique to each student’s hopes and goals, as well as various personal preferences, can complicate the process. However, all the applicants share an anxiety while they await word of acceptance or rejection. As Tom Petty once sang: “The waiting is the hardest part.”

Nevertheless, the decision-making process—based upon so many available options and an array of criteria that may differentiate, even slightly, one program from another—appears almost as difficult for most students. Indeed, an explosion of growth in the number of creative writing programs during the last few decades has created a wealth of opportunities for young writers; still, the multitude of choices also can cause some confusion or uncertainty. Moreover, although many creative writing programs exist, the pool of applicants to these programs has increased over the years as well. Therefore, the acceptance rate for each program remains quite low and only adds to the anxiety experienced by those anticipating responses.

For example, according to articles at Seth Abramson’s illuminating blog page that offers extensive statistical information about the process of applying to MFA programs in creative writing, the most selective schools accept less than two percent of their applicants, while even “the easiest ‘top’ schools” accept no more than ten to fifteen percent of their applicants. Abramson helpfully supplies an assortment of sources for overall rankings of MFA programs in creative writing, as well as separate statistics for the genres of fiction and poetry. He also includes a readers’ poll ranking of the PhD programs allowing creative dissertations, admittedly much more limited in number and obviously even more competitive.

In addition to the individual websites for each university, other locations exist online where students may be assisted in their search for a graduate program in creative writing. The Association of Writers and Writing Programs recently made accessible online its official guide to writing programs, which for years had been available only through purchase in book form. The AWP Official Guide to Writing Programs includes all sorts of categories for consideration when choosing a school, most of which I advise my seniors to consider when weighing the advantages or disadvantages of particular graduate creative writing programs. Some great practical advice shared by those engaged in the process of applying to graduate programs and awaiting responses can be found at the MFA Blog.

First thoughts for most students looking at such programs ought to be directed toward the individuals on the faculty who would be teaching the genre for which they are interested in pursuing. I recommend students read extensively the works of these authors, perhaps seeking to discover someone whose writing they admire and whose style or content might be complementary to their own inclination. One also wants to find faculty who have a reputation for reading students’ drafts closely and working well with their advisees, rather than figures that might maintain a distant attitude. For this reason, faculty with the most famous names or more awards to their credit may not necessarily be the wisest choice as a mentor. Along with their publishing success, these writers sometimes have less time to devote to their students, tend to travel more frequently, might likely be on leave any given semester, and could be less available for meeting with students.

Indeed, one should check for certain that faculty would be present on campus and display an allegiance to their university. Obviously, the preferred method would be a personal visit to the campus. However, for most this would be impractical, especially when applying to half dozen or more programs. Phone calls or email messages might resolve some questions. One cannot always rely solely upon reference material; for instance, reading the AWP catalog I noticed a few prominent writers listed for certain creative writing programs even though I know they are no longer on the faculty at the university mentioned. One also should attempt to learn as much as possible from current or former students about the faculty, including their willingness when possible to assist students seeking publication opportunities or teaching positions. With electronic communications, this option for obtaining information seems even more viable than in the past.

Occasionally, programs are known for identifiable styles or a dominant school of writing, and prospective students would be wise to acquaint themselves with these in order to determine if their work would be complemented by such an influence. Awareness of faculty outside of creative writing and the overall reputation of the English department can aid applicants, especially when degree requirements include significant coursework in literature or literary theory courses. If the scholars on the faculty are as well respected as the writers, students whose interests drift more toward a balance of creative writing and critical commentary will be benefited. In fact, students often ask me whether they should attend a program with an MFA in creative writing or one offering an MA with creative thesis. My response depends upon the specifics in each program and the intentions of the student applying for entry.

If a student desires to continue toward a teaching career at a university, I recommend a program with more concentration on literature courses rather than a studio type program that leans heavily on workshops. Also, since the possibility of an MFA grad obtaining a tenure-track position at a four-year university is very much less likely than someone who has completed a PhD, I will recommend an MA or an MFA with strong literature content that will prepare the student for a PhD program. Alternatively, I will suggest an MFA studio program to the student who may merely be looking to develop his or her writing skills under the guidance of an experienced writer. Although, I repeatedly point out that earning an MFA, or any other degree, does not guarantee someone is a better writer than another who worked with equal dedication at his or her writing in a non-degree atmosphere.

An examination of any publishing achievement by a creative writing program’s alums or the placement of its former students in tenure-track teaching positions could reveal a couple of ways to measure a program’s success. When considering PhD programs with a creative dissertation, I guide students toward programs that present opportunities for teaching experience in as many kinds of courses as possible, making the individual more attractive as a candidate for entry-level jobs that almost always require teaching additional classes in subjects other than creative writing. When I pursued my PhD as a teaching fellow, I had the good fortune to be given courses in composition, introduction to creative writing, advanced poetry, introduction to literature, business writing, and film studies. I even served as a teaching assistant in a legal writing course. This variety enhanced my value to any university English department at the beginning of my career.

Writing programs range in size from fairly large to somewhat more intimate. The bigger ones usually have some advantages, such as a markedly greater budget for visiting writers or publication of a nationally recognized literary journal, as well as a more significant network of sympathetic alumni who might someday support someone from their former program. Students can obtain positive experience helping to host public readings or serving on the staff of a university sponsored literary journal. However, students at smaller programs sometimes report more frequent personal conferences with their advisors and increased attention to the individual’s writing. Some students thrive when among many others enrolled in a large class where participants assist and influence one another. Others prefer smaller groups with increased familiarity in which one might identify more closely with a fellow classmate’s condition and concerns.

Funding always stands as a primary issue for most students. An applicant must investigate the terms of acceptance, including any means of tuition reduction or elimination, possibility of assistantships or fellowships, as well as additional scholarships, and whether or not the amounts offered for such positions are appropriate to the student’s needs, especially since the cost of living can vary widely from one campus location to another. For this reason, potential applicants ought to research the price of housing and availability of university owned residences rented to students, as well as the general cost of other necessities.

Beyond a remarkable variation in the cost of living at a university town in a rural region contrasted with a campus situated in the center of a large urban area, one should regard other characteristics associated with such situations. Certainly, one may easily understand the lure of a large city that also acts as a cultural center and contains numerous social contacts or artistic experiences. However, in addition to the expenses involved, some might find the lifestyle distracting, eating away time one might better put toward more writing.

On the other hand, the relative isolation of a campus town provides a buffer that might compel some student writers to mingle among themselves, creating a unique and supportive community while focusing more closely on the task of writing well. Moreover, inspiring natural landscapes with nearby rivers or ski slopes that offer delightful physical activities surround some rural universities. Potential applicants studying the location of any university are likely to uncover each place has its own personality that fits some more than others.

Of course, before applying to any university, one should be knowledgeable of expectations for graduation, including such items as needed proficiency in a foreign language (perhaps two), and guidelines for a thesis or dissertation that would prepare one for possibly producing a publishable manuscript. As well, although demands and standards vary from university to university, a student seeking a spot at a creative writing program must already have the qualifications necessary for a successful application. These might include good test scores, high undergraduate grades, a well-written personal statement of objectives, a strong sample of creative work, an analytical scholarly essay, and evidence of interest in extracurricular activities involving literature or creative writing. Some students might have the start of a publishing record in journals that displays dedication to writing or have demonstrated skills in online publishing.

When the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (originally the Associated Writing Programs) was instituted about forty years ago, the organization included only thirteen universities with creative writing programs. Today, there are more than 400 programs of some level noted by the organization. Nevertheless, the growth in popularity of creative writing courses also can be estimated by the degree of difficulty still experienced by applicants seeking to enroll in particular programs.

When advising my students I remind them of this fact, linking such difficulty to future complications they might face when attempting to publish a book or obtain a tenure-track teaching position. I try to impress my students with the long odds often encountered in such an endeavor, and I urge them not to undertake the task unless they possess a lasting love for language and a deep desire to write well, along with a willingness to sustain some rejection and certain aspects of failure along the way. After all, as all of us who enjoy March Madness know, few who start the march toward the finals make it all the way to the end of the road, and only the rare ones achieve everything they had hoped. However, if the writing remains what truly matters, as in the sports metaphor, enough excitement exists in the process that many will preserve treasured memories.

Catherine Daly: "Buttercup"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Catherine Daly’s “Buttercup,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2002 issue (Volume III, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Catherine Daly is the author of a number of poetry collections, including DaDaDa (Salt Publishing, 2003), Locket (Tupelo Press, 2005), Secret Kitty (Ahadada Press, 2006), Paper Craft (Moria Press, 2006), To Delite and Instruct (blue lion books, 2006), Chanteuse/Cantatrice (factory school, 2007), and the forthcoming Vauxhall (Shearsman Press, 2008). She is a teacher and software developer of online business applications for various clients, such as Fox, Goldman Sachs, NASA, and Universal. She has been teaching on and off since an undergraduate teacher’s assistantship in the History of Mathematics. Daly taught the first online poetry workshops in the UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program in addition to critical theory, women’s studies, and literature courses at UCLA Extension, Antioch LA, West LA College, LA Southwest College, and elsewhere. She has written a longtime blog titled “A List, A Misc.” Catherine Daly also has authored a review of Maggie Anderson’s selected poetry for Valparaiso Poetry 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.

Robert Lowell's Legacy: LIFE STUDIES

Robert Lowell was born in Boston on March 1, 1917 to a Massachusetts family well positioned in New England society and already rich in literary tradition, including two prominent authors among his ancestors—Amy Lowell and James Russell Lowell. Robert Lowell’s personal heritage as a writer was enhanced when upon the recommendation of Allen Tate he appeared as a young man at Kenyon College eagerly seeking to learn the poetic craft from John Crowe Ransom, Tate’s one-time teacher. Following his graduation from Kenyon in 1940, Lowell pursued graduate work at Louisiana State University under the guidance of two other highly regarded literary personalities associated with the New Critics and their notions about how a poem’s composition or its reception by readers should be discerned: Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren.

Clearly, Robert Lowell’s first couple of poetry collections, Land of Unlikeness (1944) along with the subsequent volume titled Lord Weary’s Castle (1946), display characteristics developed under the direction of those formidable figures who helped shape his early writing. As Frank Bidart explains in his introduction to Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems: “What most people think of as his first book, Lord Weary’s Castle, is not a ‘revision’ of Land of Unlikeness—less than a quarter of it transforms material from the earlier book—but it is, I think, the book that Land of Unlikeness wanted to be.” Lord Weary’s Castle quickly achieved critical praise and proved a successful introduction into the literary world for Robert Lowell when that volume was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1947.

The young poet was lauded for his precisely wrought formal poems, heavily metrical lines with meaty language often presented in a tightly wound syntax that seemed knotted by metaphors or similes. Already, some critics began to view Lowell as an ascending star, perhaps a major poet whose style would solidify an approach to poetry they appreciated. However, when his follow-up book of poetry, The Mills of the Kavanaughs, appeared in 1951 to a mixed reception by critics, some of whom had held higher expectations for the new work, Lowell’s disappointment may have caused him to pause for reconsideration of his writing style. Indeed, for various reasons, eight years would pass before Lowell’s next collection, Life Studies, was published in 1959.

During the 1950s Lowell experienced traumatic personal incidents and impacting professional instances forcing self-reflection. Both of his parents died during this decade. The poet was troubled by a series of mental breakdowns, which at times required hospitalization and therapy, including an exercise in which he conducted a review of his life through the writing of a prose narrative exploring his childhood and submerged feelings about family members. In addition, his marriage to second wife Elizabeth Hardwick, whom he had married in 1949, had undergone difficulties.

At the same time, when Lowell looked at the evolving poetry scene in the United States during the 1950s, he began to recognize some changes that intrigued him. He heard the poetry of Allen Ginsberg—whose forceful poem, “Howl,” had been published in 1956. Lowell also observed the new emotionally open poetry of one of his students, W.D. Snodgrass—whose wonderful manuscript, Heart’s Needle, would be published in 1959 and beat out Lowell’s Life Studies for the Pulitzer Prize. Adding these influences to his admittedly increased admiration for the work of William Carlos Williams and his growing friendship with Elizabeth Bishop, as well as Lowell’s own enjoyment when reading autobiographical poems that were more readily accessible to audiences, Robert Lowell chose to revise his poetic voice, remaking the style with which he’d achieved so much success.

Throughout the 1950s, in letters to fellow writers—such as Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Peter Taylor—Robert Lowell expressed confidence in his conscious effort to separate from the old style of poetry that readers recognized, and he suggested he was convinced the new work would surpass what he had previously produced. In his biography of the poet, Ian Hamilton quotes a note Lowell wrote to Taylor in 1958: “I’m in the fine mood of an author with a new style and feel nothing else I’ve ever done counts.”

Although a few of the poems eventually released in Life Studies were begun in drafts as formal verse, Lowell transformed his poetry before the book’s appearance, and an altered voice—more autobiographical, loosely lyrical, intimate, vulnerable, and plain spoken—signaled a new beginning. In fact, Lowell seemed to borrow effective elements evident in his reflective prose memoir, “91 Revere Street,” which he included among the poems of Life Studies. Initial reactions to the poet’s dramatic transition in style varied; however, a number of critics—including his former guide, Allen Tate—felt somewhat betrayed by Lowell’s shift.

After its release, much discussion and some mounting debate about the pieces in Life Studies created a split among readers of American poetry. Responses ranged from a welcoming of this novel tack in contemporary poetry to calls of outrage from some who were surprised, even shocked, by its content and presentation. Among those who decried Lowell’s new direction, M.L. Rosenthal declared the transparent style “confessional,” which he meant to be read as a disparaging label.

Nevertheless, Life Studies was awarded the National Book Award in 1960. Within his acceptance speech Robert Lowell acknowledged the ongoing evolution of American poetry, which he felt lent energy to it, and the conflicting views with which it may now be characterized by suggesting two categories or schools of thought, “a cooked and a raw”:

Our modern American poetry has a snarl on its hands. Something earth-shaking was started about fifty years ago by the generation of Eliot, Frost, and William Carlos Williams. We have had a run of poetry as inspired, and perhaps as important and sadly brief as that of Baudelaire and his successors, or that of the dying Roman Republic and early Empire. Two poetries are now competing, a cooked and a raw. The cooked, marvelously expert, often seems laboriously concocted to be tasted and digested by a graduate seminar. The raw, huge blood-dripping gobbets of unseasoned experience are dished up for midnight listeners. There is a poetry that can only be studied, and a poetry that can only be declaimed, a poetry of pedantry, and a poetry of scandal. I exaggerate, of course. Randall Jarrell has said that the modern world has destroyed the intelligent poet’s audience and given him students. James Baldwin has said that many of the beat writers are as inarticulate as our statesmen.

Writing is neither transport nor technique. My own owes everything to a few of our poets who have tried to write directly about what mattered to them, and yet to keep faith with their calling’s tricky, specialized, unpopular possibilities for good workmanship. When I finished Life Studies, I was left hanging on a question mark. I am still hanging there. I don’t know whether it is a death-rope or a life-line.

With the awarding of a National Book Award to Lowell for Life Studies and a Pulitzer Prize to Snodgrass for Heart’s Needle in 1960, the start of this fresh decade also may have marked a new beginning for many American poets. Scores of young authors soon sought to emulate Lowell’s style in their writing. Even a number of other poets whose paths had originated with traditional writing in formal patterns eventually followed Lowell’s example by drifting toward free verse with more loosely arranged language and more obviously autobiographical content.

The publication of Life Studies—what Robert Lowell considered a great gamble, not knowing “whether it is a death-rope or a life-line”—has resulted in his signature contribution, perhaps the single most persuasive book of poetry in the last half of the twentieth century, one that has at least partially identified an entire literary age of American poetry. In Robert Lowell’s Life and Work: Damaged Grandeur, Richard Tillinghast’s compelling analysis of the poet’s work, he describes the artistic accomplishment of Life Studies: “He demonstrated a command of literary architectonics that would put most writers to shame. At the same time, he achieved a readable style unlike that of any other poet. While taking advantage of the spontaneity and resourcefulness of free verse, his poems retain the resonance and memorability of rhyme and meter. Life Studies remains his highest achievement.”

Next year, on the occasion representing the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Life Studies, when numerous articles surely will be published that pay homage to Robert Lowell and his influence (for better or, as some still might argue, for worse) over the last half century of American poetry, we again will witness the legacy Lowell has left us when he chose to move in a different direction. We will once more remember how this decision has affected generations of Americans who have written poetry since then.

For previous commentary about Robert Lowell on “One Poet’s Notes” and links to audio presentations of his poetry, I invite readers to visit the following posts: “Robert Lowell’s Voice” and “Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick.”

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With this article, “One Poet’s Notes” begins a new series of posts that periodically will examine those volumes of poetry published in the last half century that have had significant influence upon the current condition of American poetry. The purpose will be to recommend a collection of these “contemporary classics” in American poetry to new readers of poems or young writers of poetry—like those visitors who may browse through the pages of VPR or those aspiring authors beginning to discover contemporary poetry, including many among my own creative writing students. The selected books in this series will include volumes one might regard as essential primary sources of poetry from recent literary history. I welcome suggestions for the “contemporary classics” series from readers, who are urged to include in this article’s comments section books they would nominate for mention.

[For updates whenever future entries in this series are published, as well as other news items, I again recommend readers add their names to the VPR facebook mailing list as described in the “One Poet’s Notes” sidebar.]