Handbook of Poetic Forms by Ron Padgett: Abstract Poems

Ron Padgett's edited collection of poetry forms describes and gives examples of over eighty forms presented alphabetically. As practicing forms is a way to better understand all poetry and write better in both poetry and prose, I'm planning to gradually grasp and practice each form over the next few months. I will describe the form on this blog and practice using it on Poetmouse. This may bore experienced poets familiar with all forms of poetry and I'm sorry for that but, hey, this is fun for me and you can skip this post.

Abstract Poetry is the first type described, a type of poetry based on the sound of the words, regardless of whether or not they have meaning, like skat singing in jazz. A perfect example is is found in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass.

Jabberwocky
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

My spell-checker didn't like that one at all. Some of Gertrude Stein's writing is abstract, but I don't think she had a musical sense at all. James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake has passages with an abstract poetic feel.

Edith Sitwell began the form to mirror the work of abstract painters, creating "patterns of sound."

Nobody comes to give him his rum but the
Rim of the sky hippopatomus glum

Poems can be abstract not just because of the focus on sound, but on the density of disconnected images. Here is a sample passage from Nights of Naomi by Bill Knotts

Prefrontal lightening bolt too lazy to chew the sphinx's loudest eyelash
Not even if it shushes you with a mast of sneers
Down which grateful bankvault-doors scamper
Because of a doublejointedness that glows in the dark...

Alan Ginsburg's poems venture into abstraction. You can read the book-length poem Howl here. Brief excerpt:

Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
        dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
        storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
        blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
        vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook-
        lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,

One of my favorite bloggers, GingaTao, writes poems with a great deal of abstraction of sound and images which makes them playful, compelling and confusing if you try to only follow the meaning.

Over the next few days, I will give this a shot.

Memorial Day

Today is Memorial Day in the U.S., a day that most Americans celebrate with barbecues and trips to their country or beach houses, a long weekend to relax and have fun. But for military families, it is a somber day of mourning, remembrance and appreciation for our veterans, our killed and maimed soldiers, from all our wars. There are stomach-churning graphic photographs on the internet, stories of life-long post-traumatic stress syndrome, living with severe brain injuries and amputations, heroic acts of generosity and bravery. There are anti-war sites and military family sites. There are horrifying statistics cited, but numbers don't tell stories. Since this is a Reading and Writing blog, I chose to post a poem by Walt Whitman, a dirge for two soldiers who died fighting the Civil War.


Dirge for Two Veterans
from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

1 The last sunbeam Lightly falls from the finish’d Sabbath, On the pavement here—and there beyond, it is looking, Down a new-made double grave. 2 Lo! the moon ascending! Up from the east, the silvery round moon; Beautiful over the house tops, ghastly phantom moon; Immense and silent moon. 3 I see a sad procession, And I hear the sound of coming full-key’d bugles; All the channels of the city streets they’re flooding, As with voices and with tears. 4 I hear the great drums pounding, And the small drums steady whirring; And every blow of the great convulsive drums, Strikes me through and through. 5 For the son is brought with the father; In the foremost ranks of the fierce assault they fell; Two veterans, son and father, dropt together, And the double grave awaits them. 6 Now nearer blow the bugles, And the drums strike more convulsive; And the day-light o’er the pavement quite has faded, And the strong dead-march enwraps me. 7 In the eastern sky up-buoying, The sorrowful vast phantom moves illumin’d; (’Tis some mother’s large, transparent face, In heaven brighter growing.) 8 O strong dead-march, you please me! O moon immense, with your silvery face you soothe me! O my soldiers twain! O my veterans, passing to burial! What I have I also give you. 9 The moon gives you light, And the bugles and the drums give you music; And my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans, My heart gives you love.

Franz Kafka: Representive Man by Frederick Karl

I just discovered a little, impeccably organized, used bookstore that actually has good prices on books, none of this half the original price business like a snooty other bookstore has that I never frequent. More like a quarter the price. Dangerous for a compulsive book collector who has now donated twelve shopping bags of books to two local libraries.

So, as always in used bookstores, I picked up a hardcover biography of Kafka that I never would have found or bought at a full-price store. I've just started it and though it's a bit repetitive and blathering, there are also delightful insights about Kafka's personality as well as the complex socio-political context of his life as a Jew living in Prague and speaking German.

I've just started but I tend to like to ponder books on several sequential posts. Kafka is a writer I both love and am mystified by, and I am hoping this biography will unravel for me his life and its relationship to his writing, since his writing is so unique and his attitude about it in such opposition to all other writers, wanting it to die with him.

The book opens with a quote from his diaries that he kept meticulously for most of his life:
"What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe."

The opening discusses the pained dualities in every aspect of Kafka's life and writing. The inner human in an outer insect (Metamorphosis), dog (Investigations of a Dog), or other small creature body. His ambivalence about Zionism, going back and forth, at one time considering opening a restaurant in Palestine and being a waiter. The duality of his formal job as a staid lawyer for an insurance company and his passionate and dark writing about the underside of the subconscious of humanity, just around the time that Freud was writing about such things in nearby Vienna. The duality even of his relationship with food, obsessing about the act of chewing food into a pulp, starving himself at times, and becoming a vegetarian. This food duality was express in The Hunger Artist, in which the self-starved individual seeks attention as a kind of performance artist until he's dead, not unlike the anorexics of today.

Will see where this goes eventually rereading both Kafka's work and those who influenced him, like Gustav Flaubert and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and his close contemporary, Rainer Maria Rilke. Though I tend to bite off more than I can chew, so to speak.

The French Triolet

Agence Eureka
This is nowhere near as interesting as a post on a French menage a trois. Nor a recipe for a French pastry called a triolet. Nor gardening hints on cultivating the French triolet, an exotic and rare cousin of the commonplace violet. It is not even as interesting as a You Tube performance of a concerto including the triolet, some very small version of a violin.

No, it is a form of poetry. And like all poetry forms, it is a kind of box within which the words must fit precisely, give or take a syllable, giving the poem the predictable shape of all other poems of its type, thereby requiring the poet to create uniqueness within the cookie cutter.

I think of the triolet as a type of Medieval French limerick when it is light-hearted and funny, but its refrains can also convey a sense of somber heaviness, like a dirge.

First, here are two examples of my attempts at this form:
Attic
The Triolet Trio

Notice the three characteristics:

1. Eight lines that rhyme in the following pattern: ABaAabAB
The lower-case letters denote lines that rhyme with the same upper-case versions.
Upper-case letters denote lines identical to the matched upper-cases.
The result is that the first, fourth and seventh line repeat, and the second and eighth.

2. Metrical patterns are specific, in comparison, say, to your average Haiku. I find such limitations interesting, as trying to write in such forms sensitizes the writer to meter in prose and free verse as well. The triolet form prescribes iambic tetrameter:
Tetrameter means that each line has four beats, measures, or stresses.
Iambic means a pair of syllables following the pattern of the second syllable stressed.
A line of iambic tetrameter has eight syllables with every other one stressed.
Like all poetry, variation from the expected gives an element of quirkiness and creativity. In this case, it gives the triolet less of a sing-song quality, with extra syllables, reversed stresses, or even, horrors of horrors, writing a similar or surprising line instead of a purely repeating one, as I did in the last line of my second triolet.

3. The poet makes the refrain sound natural instead of strained. This is the most difficult part, I think, as it is easy for a refrain to become cloying and annoying. Ideally, though the refrain is repeated, its meaning or emphasis changes with each repetition.

Here's an example of a Thomas Hardy triolet, the repetitions conveying profound grief:

How great my grief, my joys how few,
Since first it was my fate to know thee!
Have the slow years not brought to view
How great my grief, my joys how few,
Nor memory shaped old times anew,
Nor loving-kindness helped to show thee
How great my grief, my joys how few,
Since first it was my fate to know thee?

Writing Progress Note

Convoluted Flyovers

Each time a patient is seen by their mental health provider, a "progress note" is written for the health record which is required by law and insurance companies to confirm that the visit billed for actually took place. Of course such progress notes can be bogus, but the fictioneer would then be risking his/her livelihood.

There are writers over at Literate Kitten providing such progress notes on their writing every 'Fess Up Friday. I normally do not assess my weekly writing production, but I figured given how nonproductive I have been I'd give it a shot. Perhaps public shame might motivate me, like getting weighed in front of the whole group every week at Weight Watcher's meetings. Also, if progress notes help assess the progress or lack thereof or even regression of psychotherapy patients, why not for writing problems?

So here were my pathetic writing accomplishments this week:

I dissected a writing notebook and ripped out the useless pages and put them in the shredder at work. I then found some useful pages and turned them into poems on my poetry blog. There are a few useful pages left in the now very thin notebook which are possible short story buds, to be examined more closely before considering further shredding. There must be forty such notebooks floating around. My goal is to do the same with them all.

However, I have many uncompleted short stories to re-examine for either shredding or further development. Haven't looked at them for months. They feel emotionally toxic, like radioactive waste. Don't know how long the half-life will be.

There are several stories I want to pull together as a novella, with the very slight possibility of a novel, cough, cough. No progress on this. Also toxic, though less so.

The poems are a recent sidetrack to improve my prose, but I find myself lured into the compressed language and forms of poetry and wondering, hmmm, I really like doing this for itself. Even if you hate poems, you should go over an visit. I know most of you don't by the stats. Or maybe it's just that this blog has pictures and that one doesn't and once again the imagery seekers are visiting my blog only to look at and copy the pictures and not read content. I'd delete them all, but I'm a sucker for visuals.

I meant to read this week and as usual had no time except for the newspaper which had a lot of sad (China) and crazy (Hilary Clinton on Bobby Kennedy's asassination) news. Fiction could never come close.

Oh, and of course I watched Star Trek Enterprise on TV. I told my husband I loved him, but that I also loved Tucker too and that was OK with him. Very adorable starship engineer. Did I say very?

There is always a diagnosis and treatment plan at the end of a progress note.

Diagnosis: Lazy half-baked writer with lots of rationalization, denial, fantasy and avoidance.

Treatment Plan: Paradoxical Intervention - make no plan at all and do as little as possible and see what happens.

Deletion

I completely deleted a section of a story I was writing. I was trying to move it to another file and thought I had done that and deleted the original file. I had barely read it over so I have only the faintest memory of what it was about. I feel a little sick in my stomach, like this shouldn't happen in the age of computers.

Jen Stark
I remember a horror story in college of a Ph.D. student with her dissertation in the trunk of her car in New York City, getting the whole car stolen, never to be retrieved. She had to write the entire dissertation again. Back then, stories like that were rampant, cautionary tales to keep xeroxed copies in every relative's house.

Then with computers, it was Always Back Up Your Files, which I admit I've been lax about as well, living in an area of rampant computer geeks who can retrieve lost data out of a hairball at a cost. But I caused this myself and it was stupid and rushed. Just like I've been trying to get my house in order, I've been trying to get all my files in order, to move forward with my writing. I imagine I've probably accidentally sent off some favorite clothes to Good Will as well.

So I will need to rethink what I had been trying to say, in one spontaneous moment and it will never come out the same, but I'll be glad if it comes out at all. I'm sure that this has never happened to anyone else.

Lost in the House

fffound

A colleague this week said she was not planning to come in for a one day work "retreat" because she will be on vacation. Her last vacation was three weeks in China, the one before that, Antarctica, so I asked where she was planning to go.

"Nowhere," she whispered, with a mysterious smile.

"Oh, that's always nice, a vacation at home"

"Well, this one is special. I'm planning to reorganize my entire house so I can find several lost things."

"Like what?"

"Oh, a pair of eyeglasses, a bracelet, I know there are many other things but they have been lost so long I can't remember what they are. I'll know them when I find them."

I know I have many things lost, most of them books, but also drafts of stories, clothes I like. I'm sure there are other things and I'll know them when I see them, too. That's why I'm purging my house. Twelve bags of books to library and counting. Twenty bags of clothes to Good Will and counting.

Do you have things lost in your house?

Do Dreaming Fiction Writers Do Better With or Without Deadlines?

Three Oaks In Fog, Manresa Retreat, Louisiana
with permission of William Guion

The discussion over the previous two posts concluded that writing fiction is dreaming while awake and that introverted writers often feel forced to "act" against their temperament in an extroverted world which is extremely draining and robs energy from writing. Psychological research has actually proven quite clearly than introversion vs extroversion is an inborn temperament which is manifested in babies very early on.

So do introverted fiction writer do better with externally imposed writing deadlines or not? I tried to do NaNoWriMo and gave up midway, feeling that my pace and flow of writing did not fit well with an arbitrary deadline. Freelance deadlines are more manageable, say for Simple Blog Writer, who simply sees that as a different kind of writing. Her fiction time is dreaming time. I was able to meet deadlines for short journalistic pieces in the past, but my two-hundred page doctoral dissertation took about two years longer than the deadline because it was written with my own learning process at often four A.M. because I had a job and the dissertation had to be perfect. Nova Ren is another fiction writer who writes young adult books. She is constantly anxiously complaining, post after post, about her deadlines, but she seems to impressively meet them all, at an astounding pace.

As far as fiction goes, for me, I know for a fact that deadlines are toxic to my process. I cannot produce fiction on deadline. It has its own internal gestation period that I must respect, or nothing good comes from it. That has been true in classes, an attempted MFA program, and my own past attempts to impose on myself deadlines such as a story a month. On the other hand, the idea of accountability is intriguing, reporting to a group of fellow writers how much I did and didn't accomplish every week, whether its pages or character development or sending out stories. Anything goes as long as it's actually writing. So that's why I decided to participate in The Literate Kitten's 'Fess Up Friday, which I first heard about at Bloglily.

Anyway, for 'Fess Up Friday, any writing counts. For me, the main writing I need to be accountable for is my fiction writing. My poetry blog and this blog seem to have a life of their own, though my promises to review books is often pathetically lacking and that might be a goal too: reporting on books that impact on my ideas about writing.

But David Rochester wisely offers a caveat:

I think that a community of writers can help each other to improve craft, sometimes. But they can't motivate one another. I tend to feel that an artist who needs external motivation hasn't really understood the point of art. If it's not a compulsion, there's no reason to do it. And if it's a compulsion, it can be done in the reflective solitude of inward truth.

So you can comment and confess each Friday. Seems so Catholic to me, but whatever. Or you can glance at it and keep your accomplishments to yourself, in solitude, disconnected from the world until you are ready, like Lee River (or RiverLee).

I've stopped giving any thought to publication - a temporary state of mind, probably, since it seems to run in cycles. At the moment, my writing is essential to me. It keeps me going. What it is worth, if anything, for others, I simply don't know. Perhaps I'll care to find out again some day, perhaps not. but the courtyard and my yellow notebook? they matter. They count. They are real. And so are the physical signs I jot in the notebook; they are the verifiable physical traces of my own existence. the rest such as objective worth, saleability, and so on?

The Literate Kitten offered up this quote as inspiration:

Neil Gaiman, offering his opinion on actually getting your first draft written:

As for thinking time versus writing time, well, that's up to you. But -- and I wish it were otherwise -- books don't get written by thinking about them, they get written by writing them. And that's when you make discoveries about what you're writing. That's when you get the happy accidents.

As a dreamer, it's important for me to remember that, and put pen to paper even if I'm writing gibberish. It doesn't have to be perfect, it can be simple free-writing, but that pen to paper is essential if anything is going to get written. In my opinion, and Thomma Lynn and Simple Blog Writer, though, dreaming time is just as important. Often this time is while doing something physical: gardening, hiking, jogging, walking the dog, napping, as long as the daily rhythm includes pen to paper or typing something other than a blog, too.

What do you think about the idea of 'Fess Up Friday?