No Praise, No Blame

After reading Sherry's recent posts about William Stafford, I decided it was time to read his collections about writing poetry. The library only had Crossing Unmarked Snow: Further Views on the Writer's Vocation so that's the one I'm reading. Turns out it is what I need to be reading right now. Stafford championed process over product. What Stafford espoused is summarized nicely in this statement of his:

A writer must write the bad poems in order to approach the good ones--finicky ways will dry up the sources.

Essentially the idea is to lower one's standards. Although I've heard (and tried to practice) this advice fairly regularly in my writing career, it still seems foreign to me (shall I say, un-American?). We are trained to set goals, make progress, achieve, have something outward to show for our labor (i.e., publications, awards for the writer). Certainly goals serve a purpose, but it is good to remember a writer is someone who writes, not someone who publishes, not even someone who writes well necessarily. By lowering or removing expectations (and as a result, nixxing those pesky, shaming, blaming voices when expectations aren't met), the writer writes for the sake of writing, for the sake of language and interaction with the language. Anything that might result from the writing process, say a finished product or publication, is just gravy.

On the flip side of "no blame" during the creative process is "no praise," no criticism or judgment of any sort. I've practiced this in the earliest stages of writing. This freedom from judgment is a critical component of Writing Practice, which in other circles is called free-writing or pre-writing. Whether in a group or alone, I have learned to turn off some of the censors/editors during the first stages of writing. However as drafts progress, as I become more committed to a piece, the internal editor becomes louder, more insistent, either drawing smiley faces or circling flaws in red ink. Okay, the editorial process cannot be shrugged entirely; sometimes I need to hear from the internal editor that I'm on the right track or that such and such construction is awkward. But I think the later stages of writing--at least sometimes--could benefit from a no praise/no blame philosophy and the open dialog with language it encourages. As simple as applying the philosophy, right (insert smiley face followed by #@##&!)?

Donald Hall

I finally got around to reading a Paris Review interview with Donald Hall, which I came across on the magazine's web site and bookmarked several months ago. The interview is from 1991 (so I'm further behind on my reading than I thought), but parts of the interview speak to what I've been pondering lately. I'm particularly interested in what Hall had to say about his process:

...I begin with a loose association of images, a scene, and a sense that somewhere in this material is something I don’t yet understand that wants to become a poem. I write out first drafts in prosaic language—flat, no excitement. Then very slowly, over hundreds of drafts, I begin to discover and exploit connections—between words, between images. Looking at the poem on the five-hundredth day, I will take out one word and put in another. Three days later I will discover that the new word connects with another word that joined the manuscript a year back.

Hall, a devoted reviser (hundreds of drafts!), also says:

First drafts of anything are difficult for me. I prefer revising, rewriting. I’m not the kind of writer like Richard Wilbur or Thomas Mann who finishes one segment before going on to another. Wilbur finishes the first line before he starts the second. I lack the ability to judge myself except over many drafts and usually over years. Revising, I go through a whole manuscript over and over and over. Some short prose pieces I’ve rewritten fifteen or twenty times; poems get up to two hundred fifty or three hundred drafts. I don’t recommend it, but for me it seems necessary. And I do more drafts as I get older.

And:

Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine. Why do I pick this scene or image? Within the action of kicking the leaves something was weighted, freighted, heavy with feeling—and because I kept writing, kept going back to the poem, eventually the under-feeling that unified the detail came forward in the poem. The process is discovering by revision, uncovering by persistence.

Yes! I sometimes think there's an overemphasis on creation and not enough attention to revision, which is just as magical, if not more so.

Hall also talked about the passage of time and its effect on him as a poet:

I’m more patient now. When I was in my twenties, I wanted to write many poems. I had goals; when I reached them, they turned out to be not worth reaching. When you begin, you think that if you could just publish a few poems, you’d reach your desire; then if you could publish in a good magazine; then if you could publish a book; then . . . When you’ve done these things you haven’t done anything. The desire must be, not to write another dozen poems, but to write something as good as the poems that originally brought you to love the art. It’s the only sensible reason for writing poems. You’ve got to keep your eye on what you care about: to write a poem that stands up with Walt Whitman or Andrew Marvell.

Okay, so I'm still impatient and I still desire publication of my book. However, there are moments of simplicity when the outside world (its charms and lures, its criticism and cold shoulder, its fleeting praise) falls away and I'm only concerned with the work at hand, with writing a poem that can stand up.

The River Birch Revises Its Life

Sometimes disparate parts of my life come together in surprising ways. Or maybe not so surprising, since we humans seem inherently drawn to metaphor. We want to see connections. Maybe we even need such connections to survive.

This afternoon the guy who designed and developed much of our landscaping stopped by to take a look around. We had a look at the river birch, which has a few clumps that look distinctly different from the rest of the tree. These clumps have smaller, drier, more condensed leaf clusters. Upon closer investigation, Daniel determined these clumps belong to the original tree, the one with a root ball that came from a nursery. The rest of the tree--the healthier, larger part (that looks like the main tree now)--is actually from an offshoot that grew after being planted and adjusting to the soil.

Then this evening in Leatha's revision class, she pointed out that sometimes we must abandon the original impulse of the poem to find a truer, better poem--the real poem. What a challenge for most of us! Particularly if the original impulse has some nice language or images, if it looks like a real poem. Sometimes we can develop a poem only so far using the original impulse and thus must follow the offshoot that becomes the real poem.

I tell myself: remember the river birch.

Meditation on a Meditative Form--The Villanelle

I met with a couple of the lovely and talented writers of KaPow! yesterday to discuss two villanelles I had written recently. (Poets.org gives this explanation of the form.) As we were talking about the form, I was trying to articulate why the form sometimes works so well. Because eight of the 19 lines are repeated lines and the entire poem hinges on two rhymes, it seems to me that when a villanelle works:

• The repeated lines change or deepen in meaning as the poem progresses.
  
• The variable lines support and push on the repeated lines.
• Much energy comes from the union of the repeated and variable lines.
  
• Its subject matter is usually not narrative in nature but meditative.

For me, this last point is important. In much of my poetry, particularly free-verse, I am trying to get from point A to point B in a clear and linear manner (blame my training as a technical writer). However, this is probably impossible to do with the villanelle. Its nature is to double-back and wind around an idea. So the villanelle seems an especially apt form to work in when I have a subject that I need to meditate on, a subject that feels more like prayer or song than story.

In An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Artists Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art (The University of Michigan Press), Maxine Kumin concludes about the contemporary villanelle:

It's my thesis that we don't need to ossify these ancient French forms by slavish imitation. We can enliven and enhance them with our own approximations. By resorting to the ingenuities of our own time and place, American poets in the last fifty years have turned a stultifying and restrictive form into an elastic, even gymnastic one. Perhaps in the twenty-first century others will remake the villanelle in ways as yet unthought of.

An excellent point of which I need to remind myself from time to time. When I work in form, my goal is to let the form be flexible, elastic, let the form serve the poem and not the other way around, but sometimes, particularly during the revision process, I lose this flexibility and find my allegiance has shifted from the poem to the form. I think there is a way (there must be!) to honor the spirit of the form while maintaining the integrity of the poem. Such is my quest.

Here are some of my favorite villanelles:

• One Art by Elizabeth Bishop
• Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas
• Little Miracle by Molly Peacock
• Villanelle for D.G.B. by Marilyn Hacker (scroll to end)