Wednesday, July 6, 2016: Poetry homework

 

Wednesday. July 6, 2016: Homework

Frustrated by lack of vision on my memoir, I decided to do the homework for next week’s poetry class with Janice Fuller. She asked us to read a long essay by poet Tony Hoagland titled “On Disproportion.” He discusses the difference between poems that lean toward “well-wrought” and “shapely, as opposed to those more “admirably lopsided, zany and subversive.” (I love thinking of the word “subversive” in terms of “verse.” What lies beneath the verse?)

Hoagland refers to poet Susan Mitchell’s book Rapture, and its tension between “Mitchell’s desire to be consumed by experience and the guarded indifference required by life in the material world.”

It is that “desire to be consumed by experience” that seems to be motivating me in my need to go off on adventures, to ride my motorcycle alone for 2,000 miles and to jump into an icy mountain waterfall.

The next essay was “Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry” by Greg Orr. He concludes that, “the goal will always be to have all four temperaments [story, structure, music, imagination] present, though some will arrive as guests and others must be learned and labored for.”

A third essay, “Writing Off the Subject,” by Richard Hugs urges poets to let go of the triggering subject of a poem and let the music of the words take over.

(About the book: I was thrilled to come up with my new organizational structure, but when I got around to cutting and pasting words, it felt like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. But I feel now like I really must complete that process and see how the whole thing turns out. I might be pleasantly surprised. I ended up copying a list of chapters from version 2 and listing where each part should go in my newest, which I’ll call version 4.)

In the evening I read the invocation I had written for the interfaith service after Orlando. I added in references to Zimbabwe and Nepal, and the next morning, the man from Zimbabwe and the man from Nepal both thanked me.

Later, Will and I sat on the porch of the guest house and watched a beautiful lightning storm.