Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Poems That Keep Paintings Alive



Did you read "The Aquarium," Aleksandar Hemon's riveting first-person account of his family's loss of a very young daughter to cancer?  (The New Yorker, June 13, 2011) This powerful non-fiction is an answer to the question "How would one write adequately about such a loss?"

Hemon repeatedly alludes to W.H. Auden's ekphrastic poem about Breughel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus."  The painting's silence, translated in part by Auden's lines, shimmers anew in the light of Hemon's story.  Through Auden's poem, Hemon finds words and images to characterize the divide between those who experience grief and those who only witness it.

Such mysterious and persistent acts of translation from the visual to the verbal are the focus of "The Ekphrastic Problem," one of two courses I'm offering starting September 15th.  (The other course is called "The Difference.")  Both courses promise to be spectacular.

Monday, August 8, 2011

What Lines Sound Like


 The Kenyon Review is running an interview with U.S. Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin that takes up two important features of my upcoming course, “The Difference,” a poet’s concern with sound, and the “lineliness” of verse.

Got two minutes?  Then listen to the first 1:31 of this show. You will hear a master poet reading a contemporary poem with a strong emphasis on the line as its fundamental unit!

Notice how Merwin reads each line as a line, and lets the consistent enjambment he’s noted for do its work silently.  (Under his reading of the lines, we hear syntactical units that do not correspond to the line, like “you will be all right whether or not you know” and “long ago my mother said I am going…”)

Here’s the text:

Rain Light

All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning.

W.S. Merwin, from The Shadow of Sirius

The interview as a whole is worth hearing.  Merwin expresses his concern that today’s writers have forgotten—or haven’t realized—that poems begin in sound. 

“The Difference” will resoundingly enhance each writer's sense of what that means.

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

The Ekphrastic Problem: A Sample

How does one know when one has written enough—and well enough—about a work of art?
Consider the case of Cathy Song’s poem “Girl Powdering Her Neck,” which is addressed to Utamaro’s wonderful ukiyo-e print from the late nineteenth century, reproduced below:
           Utamaro Kitigawa (1752-1806), Musee Guimet, Paris

Song’s ekphrastic poem “Girl Powdering Her Neck,” closes with an understated and moving metaphor.  These three lines handle Japanese motifs (the chrysanthemum and the poetic form, for example) lightly.  Their account of Utamaro’s work is conveyed by evocation of an imaginary scene parallel to, but not depicted in the print. This use of indirection makes the lines especially strong with regard to the likeness and difference we perceive between the girl and her reflection, and charges the poem with mystery:  

Two chrysanthemums

touch in the middle of the lake

and drift apart.
(ll. 50-52)

Isn’t this almost-haiku an almost perfect poem?  But what, then, are we to make of the other forty-nine lines Song has written?
Welcome to the ekphrastic problem! A poetry workshop framed around such inquiries will commence in mid-September.  

Friday, July 29, 2011

Tinkering with Tinkers: A Sample Lesson from "The Difference"



The following is an example of the kinds of thinking about the line that makes “The Difference” such an exciting course.

The power of verse can be demonstrated by putting a well-made piece of prose through some changes.  (Note:  No prose was harmed in the production of the comparison below!)

Here is a vivid passage from Paul Harding’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel Tinkers.  Read it silently, sub-vocalizing if you like, and then say it aloud:

What if she breaks Daddy's mouth? George thought. Get the stick in, Georgie—the end. Get it in. Work it in. Howard's head banged the floor and banged the floor and banged the floor again. George managed to wedge the end of the stick in between his  father's teeth at the side of his mouth. Kathleen instantly took the stick and ferociously worked it deeper. Without looking, she grabbed a seat cushion from the floor and slid it under her husband's head in between bangs on the floor. Howard's feet kicked at the legs of the table. Darla stood in the doorway and shrieked. Margie gasped for breath. Joe squealed. Daddy's broken! That's it, Georgie; that's almost it, little lamb.

This crucial moment in the strange narrative told by Tinkers is alive with voices.  Its sentences are varied and intricately knit. It is the product of a hundred artful choices, very few of which feel, in the context of reading the whole novel, heavy-handed or contrived. I’d like to say that Harding’s language here is a kind of poetry.  I think many poets who publish today would be hard-pressed to come up with fourteen sentences in a row that are so interesting, so responsive to each other. But it is not verse, but prose.  As much as this passage does to your lungs and lips when you read it aloud, none of the decisions Harding made when he constructed this passage had to do with the line.

What will we learn if we find verse lines for Harding’s prose?  From the limitless linear measures we might choose to introduce, I’ve chosen two possibilities.

The first versifying of Harding’s prose, in blue, is broadly speaking, traditional, in that it seeks a strong but not rigid regularity of line length based on syllable count.

Say the passage in blue aloud. How different Harding’s language feels when it is parsed out at six, seven, or eight syllables per line!  Written (and read) as verse, purposely built of lines of a certain kind, the language of Tinkers does all that it does as prose, and—without saying that it is better in verse—we can feel that it does “more”: 

What if she breaks Daddy's mouth?
George thought. Get the stick in,
Georgie—the end. Get it in.
Work it in. Howard's head
Banged the floor and banged the floor
And banged the floor again.
George managed to wedge the end
Of the stick in between his
Father's teeth at the side
Of his mouth. Kathleen instantly
Took the stick and ferociously
Worked it deeper. Without looking,
She grabbed a seat cushion
From the floor and slid it
Under her husband's head
In between bangs on the floor.
Howard's feet kicked at the legs
Of the table. Darla stood
In the doorway and shrieked. Margie
Gasped for breath. Joe squealed. Daddy's
Broken! That's it, Georgie;
That's almost it, little lamb.

The content of the prose is preserved, but how differently the passage reads when it is lineated as verse!  This “more” than prose that verse does to readers could be expanded here for the length of a book.  But let’s defer that now and instead get a sense of how different decisions about the line will in each case produce a different “more.”
Say the following passage of “free verse” aloud, attending to its lineation. Do you recognize this as Harding’s prose?  Again it is the same words, and the same sentence syntax.  On a second or third read-through, you might begin to track the particular differences that inhere in this modern, sprawling, twin-columned structure that breathily emphasizes and contrasts the effects of one, two, three, and four syllable lines, below, in green:

What if
                                  she breaks
Daddy's
                                  mouth? George
thought.

Get the                      stick in,
Georgie—                  the end.
Get it in.

                                 Work it

in.                             Howard's
head                          banged
the floor                    and banged
the floor and
banged the floor
again.

                                  George
managed
                                  to wedge
the end
                                  of the stick
in between                  his
father's teeth
                                  at the side
of his
mouth.

                                  Kathleen
instantly                     took
the stick
and                            ferociously
worked
                                  it
deeper.
Without                      looking,
She grabbed
a seat
cushion
                                  from the floor
and slid it
under
her husband's
head
                                  in between
bangs
on the floor.
Howard's                   feet
kicked                       at the legs
of the table.

                                  Darla
stood                          in the doorway
and shrieked.          

                                  Margie
gasped                        for breath.

Joe squealed.

                                  Daddy's
broken!                    

                                  That's
it,                               Georgie;
That's                          almost
it,
                                   little lamb.

These green lines transform Harding’s language even more radically than the blue lines do—the “more” they achieve is powerfully different from that achieved by the lines in blue.  With the passage above still on your breath, try to recall the feel of the original prose.  And compare, for a moment, the particular emphases achieved by the blue and the green lineations.

Wasn’t it Frost who wrote about two roads diverging? In this comparison, we see how powerful lines are, and how the choice of one line over another line can make “all the difference.” 

Sunday, July 24, 2011

Learn More about Daniel


You can read (and in some cases, hear) Daniel’s work online at

Slate

Agni Online

Waywiser Press


Writers who have studied with Daniel Bosch have been recognized in the following poetry prize competitions:

The Poets Out Loud Prize (book publication by Fordham University Press)
The Green Rose Award (book publication from New Issues Press)
The Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award
and the Norman Hidden Prize from the Poetry Society (U.K.)
The Smith College Poetry Prize
The Leonard Milberg Poetry Prize from Princeton University
The Lieutenant Governor’s Award from the Nova Scotia Talent Trust
The Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize from Kenyon College
The Bourne Prize from the Poetry Society of America
The Ruth Berrien Fox Award from the New England Poetry Club
The Massachusetts Poetry Festival High School Poetry Prize

And a Fulbright Fellowship in Translation