MESOSTIC

So Then Order is Round, or…
The Dwindled Supposing And

     disGrace

     carElessness

      noR

         iT

     moRe

 box oUt

     kinDness

   comEs

         So

         Then

    ordEr

         Is

   rouNd

   imaGe

    splEndor

      diRty

    noT

        Resemblance

    amUsing

      siDe

      thE

             iS

             The

   dwindlEd

   supposIng

           aNd

For this project I made a mesostic using Gertrude Stein’s “Tender Buttons” as the source text and the author’s name as the seed text.  Instead of doing it by hand, I used an online mesostic generator.

In the first stanza, the awkward syntax of the lines mirrors Stein’s language play. It starts with two negative traits, “disgrace” and “carelessness,” which seem to be magnified by “nor it more.” If one can “box out” that negativity, kindness can come in. This makes me think about Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter where Hester’s shame and disgrace gets her boxed out of society. Interestingly, though, The “A” boxed on her chest for all to see eventually gives her the gift of both strength and kindness.

The second stanza makes complete sense syntactically as well as poetically: “So then order is round.” Although we think of order as being a straight line, it always bends and twists, circling back on its self. This idea seems to complement Gertrude Stein’s poetic style.

The third stanza tells us that while the images we use in our poetry might seem to be full of splendor, Stein is no imagist. Instead, she recognizes that in reality the image is “dirty” and not an expression of true resemblance at all. The poem is suggesting that it is through experimental language, not some naïve goal of the exact image, that poetry can come alive.

One of the most interesting parts of the third stanza is the sixth line. Although the word chosen by the mesostic generator is “amusing,” the capitalization of the “U” (from GERTRUDE) gives the word an additional meaning: “am using.” Perhaps this is Stein speaking through the mesostic to tell us again that language gathers new meanings by sounds and space rather than mere meaning. I’m sure she’d find it “amusing” that I “am using” her sounds to generate new sounds, her language to generate new language.

The final stanza concludes with “the dwindled supposing and.” We imagine what is to come, what is to be added, but our suppositions become limited even as we try to expand them. We circle back in our round order to that initial cycle of disgrace to kindness.  I love the slant-rhyme words that end the two STEIN stanzas: "round" and "and." This happy accident joins together the ends of the circle.

What's for Lunch? Sardines and Oranges

 

Frank O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not a Painter” displays many of the features of New York School poetry. First, it uses a modified “I-do-this, I-do-that” style. It is not a list of daily behavior but the poem does have a conversational, even improvisational tone suggesting the poet is sharing his thoughts as they occur to him. In addition, “Why I Am Not a Painter” is exclusively in present tense, adding to its immediacy. This approach allows O’Hara to use the NYS’s classic wit.

NYS poems often make use of references. Here, O’Hara refers to modern artist Mike Goldberg, whose work hung in the MOMA where O'Hara worked. The fact that O’Hara talks about a museum in New York City illustrates the movement’s reliance on both the both the urban and urbane. The intellectual quality combined with the casual tone adds to the humor of the poem.

O’Hara makes use of the NYS technique of pastiche as he plays off of the work of painter Michael Goldberg. He combines the two meanings of pastiche as ironic stylistic copying and as jumble. Goldberg’s sardines and O’Hara’s oranges are both simple everyday unromantic objects, both words which become dissociated from their meanings, and both ideas that motivate the production of creative art.

It is this dissociation between letters and art that leads O’Hara to explore the concept of palimpsests. O’Hara watches Goldberg paint sardines (both the object and the painting), then sees him remove the object in order to complete the painting. The echo is heard in the painting by leaving the visual “letters” of the word “sardine” in the work. And if one views the actual painting, one sees that O’Hara means quite literally that the letters remain. For the poet, the color orange works in a similar way. The idea of the color orange allows him to write multiple poems, poems about subjects as deep as life itself, even though the poet finished without ever actually discussing the color orange itself. His use of palimpsest is to use the plural “Oranges” to title the collection of poems inspired by the color. Interestingly, the pluralization of his inspiration implies a shift in meaning: the food (oranges) rather than the color (orange). In a sense, this is an example of the traditional use of polyptoton (use of repeated versions of the same word), another feature of NYS poetry.

Perhaps the most obvious NYS style used in this poem is parataxis. While the title of the poem promises an explanation of why O’Hara is not a painter, or perhaps a direct statement explaining why he does not paint, we never get a straightforward answer. Instead, we get two images, that of the painter and that of the poet, that we have to work to reconcile. Although O’Hara makes it clear that he is making a comparison between the two, his argument is unclear. The two seem similar in their usage of palimpsests and in their reliance of words in their art. The two seem different since the painter has to remove from his work while the poet simply stops adding. Unlike the limit the painter felt when he removed the original sardine (“It was too much”), the poet has infinite freedom to write with no restrictions on how much to put into his poems.

I love that the poet best known for his “lunch poems” writes about sardines and oranges even when his bigger theme is the analysis of different approaches to creativity and art.

Free Verse: Flat and Hard upon the Page

(Comparing Two Versions of a William Carlos Williams poem)

The second version of William Carlos Williams’s poem “Young Woman at a Window” is an excellent example of imagism, employing many of the movement’s techniques and goals. The first version of the same poem fails to meet the requirements of the Imagist Manifesto and explores other poetic techniques instead.

Although both versions of the poem employ free verse, the cadence in the second version disrupts conventional speech more than it does in the first. For example, Williams uses line breaks to emphasize his breaking up of prepositional phrases. In both versions, he breaks after the preposition “on”: “tears on” and “her cheek on.” In the second, he brings this new speech further even more by beginning with a similar break: “she sits with.” At the end, the poet allows “in her lap” and “to the glass” to be presented together, nevertheless continuing his emphasis on the importance of prepositional phrases.

In the second version of the poem, Williams relies exclusively on a static visual image to convey his meaning. In the first poem, the boy acts and moves, rubbing his nose. But in the second, the image is utterly still and unmoving. Here the boy’s nose is pressed against the window, not dynamic and not in flux. The intense use of the prepositions of placement (such as "on" and "to" and "in") further emphasizes the staticness of the description by pointing out that everything is already placed in physical space. Similarly, the first poem assigns the active very “robs” to the subject of the boy, while in the second version the verb assigned to him is both passive and subsumed in an adjectival clause.

The static image the second version of the poem presents uses language and imagery that is never indefinite. While the interpretation of the poem as a whole might be open, the way the words describe the image itself is quite specific and closed. The image can easily be imagined as a painting hanging in a museum. The first version, on the other hand, states that the boy “who robs her knows nothing of his theft,” a claim that does not refer to a specific fact or image but instead to an abstraction. This phrase is highly open, and therefore the poem contradicts the goals of the Manifesto. Interestingly, at least in my view, the closed, definite image of the second version creates a poem with a more open meaning.

Finally, while both poems are condensed and concentrated, the second version is tighter than the first. Williams cuts his word count from twenty-nine words to twenty-three. He cuts the number of stanzas from six to five. In addition, in the second version but not in the first, no word is more than one syllable.

Dadaist Poetry

From an online dadaist poetry generator:


Dada Barack
One Barack: On blue dogmas
on elected states and end to,
and most was end. Promises, politics
of the Obama’s We states.
Recriminations, dogmas
of the a, the far a was
have been of our politics.


Dada Barack 2
Barack on, and address strangled states.
In inaugural to promises,
worn out long most the elected,
We too.
One previous address, the an that have
appealing things, its dogmas.
Barack was collection states,
Was his have.


(Text from The Economist: "One of the most appealing things about Barack Obama’s previous campaign was its promise of bipartisanship. On the night he was elected, he insisted: “We have never been a collection of red states and blue states.” In his inaugural address, he declared “an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics”.)

*

The idea for this poem came from Tristan Tzara's "How to Make a Dadaist Poem":

To make a Dadaist poem:

• Take a newspaper.
• Take a pair of scissors.
• Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
• Cut out the article.
• Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
• Shake it gently.
• Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
• Copy conscientiously.
• The poem will be like you.
• And here are you a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.

 

Onegin Dines at the New Japanese Restaurant

I recently read Alexander Pushkin's novel in verse, Eugene Onegin.  The style the author uses for his poetry is fascinating, similar to Shakespeare's but more convoluted because of the combination of masculine and feminine endings as well as the fact that each stanza uses a different rhyme scheme.   Overall, Pushkin uses iambic (da-DUM) tetrameter (four beats).  He uses 3 quatrains followed by a couplet, similar to Shakespeare.  The whole thing, with unstressed endings denoted by lowercase letters, is as follows:  aBaB-ccDD-eFFe-GG.  Since I love writing Shakespearean sonnets, I thought I should give this style a go.

When you are hungry, think of sushi:

Ginger, soy sauce, bits of fish,

Wrapped inside some nori seaweed.

It makes for such a tasty dish.

If you’re a vegan, try some tofu--

Or carrot, cuke, and avocado.

Wasabi adds a twist of spice

Then set upon the sticky rice.

Sushi is divine in flavor;

The food of gods, I do attest.

Sushi is indeed the best;

A plate of pleasure meant to savor.

When I am done, please bring to me

Some mochi and a cup of tea.

The Transubstantiation of Nature

(I'm so glad I've been studying the Bible and religion this year!)

Emily Dickinson’s poem “I taste a liquor never brewed” articulates the poet’s experience of inebriation, not from alcohol but from the natural world. With her abundant use of dashes, she recreates the experience of drunken stumbling as well as the slurred speech of a drunkard. Nevertheless, I would argue that her metaphorical drunkenness here is not as much a comment on the joy of enjoying nature as it is an expression of the poet’s connection with the spiritual.

The foxgloves that we might normally see as flowers in a field are recreated by Emily Dickenson almost like the name of pub for bees. When the bee gets too drunk, the proprietors (or “landlords”) of the Foxgloves inn kick him out. The butterfly, on the other hand, realizes his drunkenness himself (as do so many people who have realized they had become too inebriated) and swears off drink forever. The poet, however, has no plans to sober up. Instead, she bellies up to a bar serving the metaphorical liquid of the molten blue sky. Instead of the “fine Rhine wine” alluded to in the first stanza, and instead of the nectar of the insects described in the second, the poet becomes drunk on air and dew--that is, on nature. She will imbibe summer’s exuberance until the snow falls from angels’ hats.

With her use of the reference to the Rhine, the poet suggests that her inebriant is a replacement not just for alcohol but specifically for wine. Writing in an era when Christianity was central to the experience of community, Emily Dickinson would have been keenly aware of the religious resonance of images of wine as the transubstantiated blood of Christ. She chooses to end the poem “leaning against the--Sun--” suggesting perhaps that she was leaning against the core of her religious faith, or Jesus. The Sun, set off by the poet with dashes perhaps to indicate its deep significance, becomes the Son.

Although she appears to be alluding to Christianity in this poem, Dickinson utterly rejects the more formulaic religious practices of her time. While the saints inside their churches look out the windows at her (perhaps in surprise or shock), the poet experiences religion directly and personally outdoors in nature, unencumbered by the formal beliefs, rituals, and hierarchy of the church. Here she seems to support the almost Whitmanian trust in nature, freedom, and direct experience.

Rather than the eucharist's communion wine turning into the blood of Christ, nature here transubstantiates into the spiritual. The poet drinks deeply, filled with a uniquely modern kind of religious experience. The lack of a final period perhaps suggest the openness and inclusivity of her kind of faith as well as, perhaps, the eternal nature of Christ.