What Is a Poem?

My wife, my sister-in-law, and my sister-in-law's children sleep scattered throughout my house. Dixie, the Jack Russell, barks into the distance at an unseen threat and grabs a branch from a peony bush in her muzzle, shaking it in a show of strength. Archie trots around the edge of the yard, looking to join the fray.

A firework pops in a distant yard. The neighbor's dog barks in response.

My dogs, it seems, weary. They need water. A nap. A woman walking a dog I've never seen strolls down the right-of-way that edges my yard. My dogs explode in growls and barks with as much fury as the finale of a fireworks display.

The robins chirp above the commotion of Archie's instinctual anger.

We all, I do not doubt, have a different notion of what is happening. Even my dogs, in their submissiveness, will never understand the semi-pastoral way in which I've imagined this morning. But you—who may be thousands of miles away and separated from this time by hours, days, months, or more—can.

Such is the miracle of language.



Yesterday, I took my mother to the bus station so that she could return to her home in Dallas. I waited with her for the bus to load. Behind us, an Amish (or perhaps Mennonite) family waited to board.

I've road more bussess than I'd care to admit, but I'd never seen an entire family of Amish, only young men exploring the wider world. Yesterday, I saw three generations of the same family, waiting for the bus. I'd like, of course, to know their story. If this were a poem or a story, perhaps I'd invent one after spending a few hours research ensuring that my notions where feasible. However, such speculation is beyond my purposes here.

A grandmother, I think, held an infant girl. The infant's tuft of bright blonde hair was tucked beneath a tiny black bonnet. Nestled in the crook of her grandmother's arms, she looked about with delicate blue eyes. Her dress, no larger than the slipcover for a throw pillow, was a dark, vibrant blue, unlike anything I'd ever seen. Her sisters, standing beside their luggage, looked around as if trying to take in everything, which for me must have seemed utterly banal: the neon, the video games, the people and their vast variety of skin tones, pre-manufactured t-shirts and jeans, and inflections of language. They too wore dresses that seemed to me more vivid than the most complex graphics on the latest video game. One wore a green dress, well-pressed, that might let you think you could smell pine needles rustling in a light breeze. One wore a tan dress, and despite the way we typically think of tan, I suspect that there are artists who might cut off their ear for the chance to replicate that color on canvas.

They wore, in short, familiar colors that I'd never seen.


In college, I picked up a poster from the AWP conference in Pittsburgh. I think it was an advertisement for a press, perhaps Copper Canyon or Coffee House . Poetry: The Unsayable Said.

For a long time, that seemed a fitting description of poetry to me. I hung the poster at home and in an office where I worked. I stared at it, thinking.




At this point, I could posit any number of definitions about what a poem is. But, I've spent more than a year telling you, in one way or another, how I define a poem, the process of creating one, and how to support that process. You should see, I hope, that such definitions evolve (or perhaps devolve) constantly. More, I think such definitions are deeply personal. My notion of what a poem is and what a poem should do, may not agree with your definition. Now, tell me yours. Or better, show me.

I wish you the best of luck. I hope that someday you will write poems that, like those of Robert Creeley, a young student will encounter one day and only to muse about the nature of poetry, and much, much more. I hope that your desire to write makes you a better reader. I hope that, in poetry, you can find a few moments as meaningful and fulfilling to you as a bit of affection from a pair of tiny dogs is to me.

Timeliness

My mother arrived for a bit of a surprise visit late Thursday night. I've not seen her for a while, not done the child's duty of trekking across country for a visit since moving to Ohio. There hasn't been time enough, money enough. It's good to see her, but the timing was awful: the in-laws, excepting Michelle's father, arrived Friday evening for a week-long visit.

Timing is often everything.

***

When I was on the cusp of my teenage years, I read an edition of Poe's collected works in my mother's apartment. Life would never be the same.

***

Last night, I tried to teach my nephew and my niece a little about chess. Neither is ready yet to imagine the board beyond the pieces, where lines of force matter as much as position. They are still learning to move. They have not yet grasped the importance of opportunity.

***

Goose bumps prickle the hairs on my arms. Wind sounds softly through the canopy of the sweet gum that shadows the back porch. Our dogs sniff through near-wild foliage. The rain, for the moment, is gone. A neighbor edges the sidewalk in front of his house with a weed whacker. The grapefruit-sized motor whines. I think of motorbikes dusting through slaloms, careening from beveled mounds of dirt. I always wanted one as a child. What boy doesn't?

Life will never be the same.

***

Three weeks ago, as is our custom, Michelle and I drove to Florence, Kentucky to peruse one of the enormous chain bookstores. On the two small bookshelves for poetry, I found a crime novel in verse. Others, it seems, have similar notions about what poetry can do.

Perhaps I should have worked more diligently on my verse "fictions." Perhaps, now, the seeming newness will be dulled. Perhaps those poems are not as important as I had thought. Perhaps they are not important at all.

***

Regrets can handcuff you to the past.


***

In college, I think Michelle always suspected that she was out-of-sync with the times. Perhaps her rightful place was as an ingénue in the 30s. Such disjunctions in self-image and time are not uncommon. The zeitgeist at any given moment is notoriously difficult to describe. I used to think my poems more suited to the milieu of modernism.

***

Often, I worry over my time. A conversation about amphibious cars may seem a waste. There are always more important issues to discuss, unless you are a builder of amphibious cars.

***

My mother is outside with me. She is reading her Bible. Proverbs.

***

If you give a man a book, he may read it. If you teach a man to write, what have you done?

***

Timing is everything in business. Writing is a business. Damn it.

***

I'll never be able to read everything I want to read. Volume precludes it. I'm already lucky to have read more than many, far less than a few. When life ends, I suspect, I'll still have been lucky. Regardless of what becomes of my career(s).

***

I've only scratched the surface of what poetry can mean and how it can matter. It's up to you if you want to go further. It always has been—even as a small child when you first read Shel Silverstein or Dr. Seuss.

***

The dogs are barking. Dixie howls for play. I return her invitation. She grapples with my arm. Soon, I'll head upstairs to wake my wife. This is time I would not sacrifice for anyone—even Shakespeare.

Single-Mindedness

The near rain and occasional showers of the past few days have vanished like a dream. The backyard is a quarter acre of sunlight in which Dixie lazes. Archie, doing far better now, is curled on the sofa in my office, reluctant to stir from sleep. I spent the morning shaping stray thoughts into something like a poem, and for today at least, the result pleases me. My stomach grumbles, needing sustenance. I hope to carve enough time from the march of hours to read a little, write more, and maybe watch a film. But we shall see.

Lately, with an eye toward graduate school and visions of the impending riches from my fledgling poetry career, I have in all likelihood, thrown myself into one too many projects. I suspect, sometimes, that such pluralistic obsessiveness is not uncommon. More, sometimes I think that this is just a peculiar aspect of my personality: I need, for some reason to multitask to prevent boredom while simultaneously needing a glimpse into single-mindedness to excel. Both explanations may be true, but sometimes, I wonder whether or not such constant busyness might be detrimental to those around me and how I interact with them. Or maybe, I'm simply lining up excuses for failure, as failure is, more often than not, the lot of the life's work I've chosen.

***

I have heard (and read) that the university I attended for my Bachelor's degree has one of the highest workloads anywhere in the country. Consequently, while there, I learned (quite by chance) the fine art of procrastination. Most of my friends, likewise, learned the advantages of deferring the inevitable and how to strive under an almost unimaginable level of pressure for something as risk-free as an academic curriculum. All of us discovered that we excel under deadlines. We thrived on caffeine-fueled nights, and a few us, myself included, mastered subtleties of explication when explaining to professors why, precisely, a term paper was late.

For me, this peculiar blend of procrastination and faith in my ability to wriggle my way out of any mess lingered on for years. As did my faith in my ability.

***

As a writer, there are infinite ways in which you can sabotage your own work. Tens of thousands of options allow you easy access to rationale. Don't proofread what you submit. Don’t read aloud what you submit. Don't fret about deadlines. Don't fight your tendency towards procrastination.

The list goes on longer than a 15-minute pop song.

***

Today, I got another rejection. I’m concerned that my last batch of submissions may not manage more than a single acceptance. This is disconcerting because we're so often unable to see the totality of what any single editor sees. Maybe the journal, for some reason, received an envelope stuffed with poems from Nicki Giovanni, Robert Haas, or Jorie Graham. And come on, who would you print?

Instead, I'm mired in my own context. These poems are important to me. For the most part, they are "finished." They are the core of my first book, a book that should begin to establish my reputation.

Sound familiar?

***

I've brought Dixie inside into the cool air conditioning. She's curled on a dirty blanket on the sofa in my office. Archie sleeps above her on a mound of comforter. It's funny, but those dogs don't look for ways to fail, as we do. Sometimes they do fail. They may be reprimanded, but they know, without question, even when their tails dip, that we love them. Why is it so difficult for us to offer the same courtesy to ourselves?

A Bit of a Dickensian Duality

The morning has already slipped, somehow, away from me. Archie is on the mend, aching to play again, to chase Dixie, the mighty Jack Russell, across the shaded grass. Archie and I are sitting outside, surveying the yard with our distinctly different gazes. His head swivels toward each unusual sound until he explodes from his haunches and runs to the fence to bark a warning at a passerby.

My muscles ache slightly, and my eyes feel a bit bleary. I'm regretting, ever so slightly, having jumped from bed at 7 in the morning, when Archie, having jumped down from bed for a quick sip of water was whining at the foot of the bed, unable yet to make the leap.

Yesterday, I let myself get immensely distracted by a bit of good news in the mail: an acceptance to one of the 40 submissions I mailed out. When I saw the tell-tale self-addressed stamped envelope, I simply assumed it was another speedy rejection. When I tore open the envelope, however, I didn't find my returned manuscripts. I didn't find a thin strip of colored notepaper. Instead, there was only a single sheet of colored letterhead. I opened the letter, glanced over its contents and started shivering with adrenaline. They took two poems. I phoned my wife to tell her the news, and sat outside on the front porch smoking until the dogs yelped for my attention. Even though I'm not earning a penny from that publication, my body must have felt as it would feel if I won the Kentucky Powerball and never had to work another day of my life. After taking a few moments to settle myself down and sharing the news with Michelle, I had to share it with more people. I emailed a friend in New York. I emailed a former professor.

Then, after trying, futilely, to return to the short story I had been working on, I gave up and phoned my parents. I reasoned that I would have to tell them soon, and what kind of call would it be if I waited until this Sunday, when I'm planning to phone on Father's Day? So I talked with my father and step-mother for a while, letting the conversation go where it would, letting the tingling from my scalp settle into something more sedate, letting the sudden rush dissipate back into the nothingness from which it had come.

Then, I drove down to visit my wife at her office downtown. By the time I got back, I realized I'd neglected to eat, so I stuffed myself on leftover Sloppy Joes before settling into a long nap with the puppies on the living room sofa.

Today, in contrast, the mail brought a different sort of news. Again, one of the Star Wars stamps I used for the last batch of submissions graced the exterior of an envelope. It was another SASE bearing another answer. Darth Vader's helmeted face gazed up from the corner of the envelope. The envelope, like the one from yesterday, was too thin. Could this be, I wondered, yet more surprisingly good news?

Nope.

My manuscripts weren't returned, but the envelope contained nothing more than a typed rejection slip and an envelope soliciting both subscriptions and donations. Nothing was handwritten on the note. There were no glimmers of hope to ease my maudlin mood. My work simply did not meet their editorial needs at this time. At a future time, or at some time 20 years ago, when I was on the precipice of puberty, the slip implies that my poems might have been appropriate. Of course, this is a falsehood. As an occasional editor, I've fantasized about what a wholly honest rejection slip would look like. I've imagined reading such notes: I've read this before, handled more competently; I can tell you have an MFA, but no thanks; You haven't read our magazine, have you? Please cross us off your list of future submissions; We strongly advise that you read anything other than your own work, written in the last 100 years; What? And of course, the simple, elegant, No.

I do not doubt that if conventions of politeness were not vital to the continued existence of a society as complex as ours, I would have received almost all of those rejections at least once in my life, and I expect to get far more in the future.

After spending far too much energy thinking about it, I'm taking today's rejection as a simple No. Yet, despite clear expectations that the simple No's will far outweigh those surprisingly exciting moments like yesterday, this one still stung. Perhaps, in retrospect, it stung because of the rapidity with which the response came. My wife even suggested that they hadn't read my poems. While possible, I seriously doubt that any literary magazine that takes a semblance of pride in what it does would ever make that mistake. As I've written elsewhere, there are any number of reasons why that No might have arrived in my mailbox today. But an explanation doesn't take away the fact of rejection or the vaguely disturbing notion that after almost 12 years of trying, my ego and my hopes are intimately tied to the response of an editor (or a reader) who may or may not know more about poetry than I do.

I'd like to tell you that over the years, it becomes easier. I don't know if this is true. More, I'd like to tell you that the percentage of rejections plummets as you become more and more successful, that soon enough you'll be sending out all of your poems to fulfill solicitations, and rejections will be a thing of the past. I think this is true for a tiny portion of poets. Even poets who have been nominated for the National Book Award will receive notes back from friends telling them that a particular poem isn't right for the readers of a particular journal.

I'd like to tell you that, as the rejections have piled up, my emotions have been galvanized like steel beams, that I'm no longer affected by the opinions of others, that I trust in the quality of my own work, the potential for my own genius, the certitude of my own peculiar poetic vision. Of course, like so many of those rejection notes we're all bound to see, that would be a lie.

More, I don't think you've come here for unctuous platitudes or Hallmark-inspired missives from some imagined front. You've come here, I hope, for the smallest sampling of truth.

And the truth is, sometimes, I still ask my wife to coddle me when a rejection slip arrives. Sometimes, my ambitions falter, and I let myself spiral into unwarranted negativity. The truth is we all suffer sometimes. Sometimes we are the roots of our own suffering. The world may well be an illusion.

Still, sometimes, I let myself suffer. Sometimes, I know that these infinitesimally small wounds are part of the life I've freely chosen.

Sometimes, it's good to remember that, yes, I still care and that someday is still out there, waiting for me to arrive.

Five Senses?

Feeling drowsy and slightly dizzy, I stepped outside onto the porch, and sat in the wooden swing we were given last Christmas. The soft hum of the streetlamps pouring amber light onto the sidewalks, the chirruping din of crickets, and the creak of the swing’s spring were the only sounds. I rocked back and forth, gazing at the seemingly arranged shapes of an old oak's canopy. I thought, intermittently, of poetry, of John Ashbery's singular take on language and the dialogic interplay of voice that informs his poems, of his (difficult) influence on my own poetry, of the manuscript that I reordered today, and of the near-infinite possibilities for misinterpretation our language allows. I though, too, of climbing upstairs and tumbling under the comforter to sleep, as the dogs have already done.

A black shape flew towards my face, as I sat swinging, and then veered left, its wings splayed like a butterfly, off the porch and over the driveway. It was fist-sized. It bristled the thin hairs on the nape of my neck. It was a bat.

I imagine now that the bat had pinged me with its sonar, mapped out its world of obstacles, as it circled sources of light, sounding for the buzzing insects on which it preys.

***

This afternoon, as I sat outside on the patio, moving this poem or that poem hither and thither, our dog Dixie barreled around the corner of the house, batting a prune-sized blur of gray fur between her muzzle and her paws. It was a mole. The mole, in what must have been a furious burst of adrenaline, dodged the last of Dixie's deadly blows and scurried into a gap between our air conditioner and flowerbed gravel. Dixie, aided now by Archie, the ever-loyal Italian greyhound, snorted into cracked earth, plowing her paws through yellowed grass and fallen spring leaves.

I imagine now that the she was sniffing out the crevices and gradations of soil, mapping the flight of the mole through corridors of its own burrowing.

***

Many times before today, I've stared at a manuscript contemplating the appropriate order. As a senior in college, I organized my one section of my senior thesis by focusing on the narrative arc of a first-person speaker. The second section was a very long poem (long enough for its own manuscript), and the third section was simply a handful of persona poems. At least, that's how I remember it now.

At the University of Miami, I don't recall having any trouble with organization. Like Dixie and that bat, I must have relied on some intuitive sense of order, some way to map a progression of thought.

Last year, when I attempted to gather two manuscripts worth of work, one was organized through a thematic notion of opposition, and the other was organized by the increasing potency of the pharmaceuticals from which each poem took its title. Since deciding that both manuscripts would take an enormous amount of work to complete, I decided to take my best work, and organize that, with significant rewriting into a manuscript. The initial attempt at establishing an order went well enough, but never felt quite right. I was like a bat without its sonar or a dog without its scent. I couldn't seem to map the contours of the world I wanted to convey.

In the manuscript, myriad shifts in tone, point of view, setting, and technique made the manuscript seem clumsy. Luckily, I found this article (http://www.awpwriter.org/careers/jlevine01.htm) on the AWP website. Although I tend to chafe at generalized pronouncements like "no adverbs," I found Levine's article immensely useful. Unfortunately, I noticed a few common phrases for closing poems and a tad more redundancy in imagery than I otherwise might have noticed.

But now, the cartography has begun in earnest. Perhaps, after all, being lost, at this moment, was a good thing for me. Rather than trusting my instincts completely, as Dixie would if she ever got her teeth on my manuscript, I've actually begun to think of this task as an extension of the poetic process. Here, I have the opportunity to let words interact through proximity, to echo themes, and skew them through the correlation (and occasional conflation) of the next poem's intent. Now, this is more than a mere manuscript to occupy my time, more than a thesis. It is, I hope, the prodromal phase of a work of art. Now, I am mapping the connections I see in my own work, to chart my own definition of what a volume of verse might be.

***

The bat escaped. The mole escaped. Now, I will make my escape.

A Not-So Freudian Slip

A breeze too light to cool sways leafy shadows across the patio. The sun is high, stifling, even though the sky is thick with cauliflower-shaped clouds. The dogs circle the yard, fresh-cut, slowly. The air conditioner pants, as if needing a sup from a cool spring. I walk to the edge of the patio, filling their blue plastic dish with water. The robins, all around me, twitter call and response.

I’ve accomplished much today, but little writing—yet. A thick sweetgum branch that collapsed onto the patio under the weight of icicles earlier this year has been quartered into logs. The kitchen is, at last, relatively clean. A good friend in the Czech Republic has been sent a long, rambling letter with advice on publishing (persevere). And I have slept in the muggy heat while listening to Liverpool fall behind AC Milan in the European Cup.

I love football.

Soon, my wife will be home. Soon, the garage door will swing up and open, and she will ascend the steps from the basement, clutching an iced mocha from Starbucks, to meet me, and the dogs, outside. The dogs will swarm her like hornets. Dixie's stub of a tail will beat furiously as she thrust her dust-covered paws up onto her momma's legs, leaving silver-dollar-sized prints on Michelle's slacks. Archie will prance at the edge of the fray, waiting his turn for attention, as his question-mark-shaped tail waggles back and forth with the fury of a conductor coaxing the ferocious notes of a Beethoven symphony from his orchestra. And when Michelle has settled Dixie down, my wife will lift Archie into her arms cradling him like the Madonna with Child.

I adore my dogs.

For Michelle and me, personifying our dogs is easy. Perhaps too easy. Archie, the Italian greyhound, is a mere 10 pounds. Many human infants weigh more than him at birth. Dixie, likewise, weighs about 17 pounds, maybe a little more. At the height of winter, I even torture Archie with disturbingly adorable sweaters because his fur is so thin. More, we often refer to them, jokingly, as our children, and familial terms like "Momma" and "Daddy" pepper our references to and about the dogs. We think of them as part of our family—an integral part.

Nevertheless, at times I suspect I can see that ineffable otherness in Archie’s tiny brown eyes. I'll see Dixie leap three feet into the air trying to maul a sparrow from the sky. I'll catch Archie burrowing his head into a patch of dust from which a tulip once sprouted, sniffing and snorting at the lingering scent of a mole or a chipmunk. They are, unmistakably, dogs.

Every day, I do my best to allow them access to that nature, within reason. It's why I spend so much time outside when the weather allows, and more, it's why, in this space, I've described my dogs as tiny gladiators and described their games of chase and their "fights" at length. As long as nothing is killed, neither dog is hurt, and the yard stays relatively manageable, why should I worry if their behavior diverges immensely from what I would expect of actual "children"?

Yet, yesterday, as I watched Archie bow to Dixie, I found describing their play absurdly difficult. Easy tropes like "fighting" or my teasing association of my tiny dogs with "gladiators," which I've used before, seemed contaminated by the recent news of Michael Vick's potential involvement in dog fighting. I actually wondered whether someone who doesn't know me and hasn't seen the full context of this project might misread a previous description as something similar to the felonious and deeply disturbing activities associated with Vick.

Today, such a notion disturbs me immensely, although a month ago, I wouldn't have thought twice about the language I used.

More, although I won't indulge a peculiar temptation to invoke Derrida, such concerns about the way in which meaning can shift or be interpreted differently by different readers are crucial to writing. Indeed, to my mind, poetry often functions on a connotative level, working with the penumbra of a word's meaning, the variety of associations attached to any single word, or the (de)stabilization of meaning that context makes possible. And finally, consider the power of connotation: The dogs on the Vick property fought like soldiers on a battlefield, charging toward death; my dogs fight as children at play do, meaning no harm whatsoever to the other member of their pack. I find the lack of concern over the well-being of the dogs on Vick's property reprehensible and hope those responsible face the jail time their due; whereas, my actions are based solely on concern for the well-being of my dogs.

And the word "fight" contains, in some ways, both notions.

Transformations

Dixie, our snarling Jack Russell has just rolled Archie, our prancing Italian greyhound in a patch of dust. His once off-white fur is speckled with patches of grey-tan filth. After I shout “Easy!” in an effort to protect him from her occasionally overzealous play, both dogs speed across the tall grass, veering down the slightly sloped yard into the open, spotted with morning sun, before circling back to the patio, where I am sipping weaker than normal coffee, trying to organize my day in my head.

Inside, the dishwasher is running—hot water and dish soap splashing away the crumbs of our recent lives. My wife, having woken me early because the car was low on gas, has already begun a day staving off clients who fail to read directions.

I catch myself yawning, again. Trying to take in as much air as my body will allow. No reason for such weariness.

Dixie howls a taunt at Archie. They prance about the yard again, Archie trailing Dixie by several lengths in a race he'll never come close to winning.

***

In the middle of last week, we drove four hours to the Eastern edge of Ohio, where my nephew, at the age of 10, was confirmed into the Catholic Church. Michelle was his sponsor. And although I should know better, as the bishop anointed the boy with oil, I could not help but hope for some visible, marked change. I could not help but long for the form of the ritual to enact upon him and the 60 other children who partook in this rite of passage.

Perhaps, when the Bishop placed his hand upon the boy's forehead, something more than mere formalities spoke to him. Perhaps something ineffable in him changed. But, he was still a 10-year-old boy, and at the reception that followed, he made that fact clear.

***

On Thursday, after my nephew and his siblings had long since departed for school, my wife, her sister, and I left the dogs in the care of my father-in-law, and ventured back to Pittsburgh. We began the day with coffee at an old haunt on Craig Street and ventured through several of the small shops while I waited for an appointment with Jim Daniels, a professor at Carnegie Mellon who helped with my senior thesis nearly ten years ago. It was good to be back.

After dropping me off between Schenley Park and the edge of campus, Michelle and her sister continued their tour of Pittsburgh with a jaunt to Shadyside, another series of small shops, and yet more coffee at another old haunt. Whereas I walked back into the halls where I'd studied for my undergraduate degree and explored the new facilities my alma mater has for Creative Writing.

***

Perhaps unwisely, my wife and I drove back home that night, making it to the Western Hills of Cincinnati around 1 AM the next day. Since then, I've not been sleeping well. My legs have been aching as if I had the flu. The peculiar buildup of lactic acid has finally subsided. The world is returning to normalcy after a long and lazy weekend. More chores. More writing. A single cloud in a pale blue sky.

***

While I was eating lunch with Jim last week, the conversation sprawled across topics, pausing now and then to linger on an anecdote, a snippet of work, or reflection. At one point, the conversation veered into discussions of very long poems, and he mentioned his continued interest in simultaneous narratives as a technique he'd used to compensate for a lack of metaphor in his poetry.

To me, this raises an interesting question: what, precisely, do you think of when you think of poetry? Do you think of a poet as someone who gushes similes and metaphors the way a teenage boy might gush about his girlfriend? Or do you think of someone attuned to craft, chiseling away with every technique she can muster—all to find the precise few words that make a poem? Did Basho ever use a metaphor?

***

This morning, after pumping gas, I drove my wife on her morning ritual to the nearest Starbucks. I think, though she normally uses that drive as quiet time to herself, my wife enjoyed having me along as her day began. As we approached our destination, the sun, bright orange, floated just above the horizon. I tried to point to it, hovering between two fast-food restaurants, but by the time my wife looked, a building had already obscured it from view, as happens every day, at sunrise.