Guest post by poet Richard Nester

www.ashleynorwoodcooper.com

Open House

Thanks to everybody who turned out for yesterday's jolly open house / open studio / book signing, a joint event thrown by me and painter AshleyNorwood Cooper. Take a look at her paintings!

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Guest at The Palace at 2:00 a.m.

And here's a post from poet Richard Nester. Richard has twice been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He has published poetry in many journals, including Ploughshares, Callaloo, and Seneca Review. His first collection of poetry is Buffalo Laughter. You can find a post about the book here. Richard Nester is married to poet Robbi Nester; they have one son.

Fun in the Confessional

Kelsay Books, 2014

Confessionalism was all the rage when I started writing poetry in high school. Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath had made Time magazine. As a teenager with angst to burn, how could I not be hooked? Add history and the brew became even more potent. The Russians, Akhmatova and Mandelstam especially, lived dangerously and turned their private lives into vital political critiques. One of the first books of poetry that I purchased was Voznesensky’s Anti-worlds and the list of his translators provoked even more discoveries—Kunitz and Snodgrass. 

As a southerner, history was at my fingertips (literally if you consider the local library’s stock of Civil War lit). Faulkner said that every southern boy lives Pickett’s Charge over and over, and he wasn’t far wrong. There’s nothing like losing to get under one’s skin, an itch that can jump regional boundaries. After all, the Boston Red Sox were far more interesting before they won three of five World Series.

In fact, confessionalism had been around before M.L.Rosenthal coined the term and wrote that Lowell had gone “beyond customary bounds of reticence or personal embarrassment.” Poets had been relying on home-grown experiences, tearing into their lives and reconstituting the pieces on the

Richard Nester

printed page, for a long time. It is hard to imagine poetry more intimate than Emily Dickinson’s eyeball-to-eyeball addresses or Hopkin’s “terrible sonnets.” But there is a difference between their work and the confessionalism that Lowell created, a certain “slant”ness that keeps the reader on the other side like the glass and telephones separating inmates and visitors in prison dramas. Yeats too is a precursor as he walks “among schoolchildren” or prays beside his daughter’s crib. However, Lowell takes him to task for a calculation that he thinks verges on dishonesty as no one walks and prays “for exactly one hour.” Yeats had yet to commit himself to what Lowell called “the real skinny,” the raw truth in his view.

One problem with confessionalism in the raw is that hanging one’s dirty laundry—if I may seriously mix a metaphor—can lead to hurt feelings. Lowell got into some major personal dust-ups in which he had to invoke the supreme authority of art to save his skin. It’s not an alibi that persuades everyone, ask Elizabeth Bishop, in that it merely attempts to erase the distinction between poetry and gossip. Lowell’s poem “Dolphin” is a gloss on the emotional armor it takes to be an out-and-out confessionalist (or is it out-and-outing?)

Dolphin

My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,

forgetful as Racine, the man of craft,

drawn through his maze of iron composition

by the incomparable wandering voice of Phedre.

When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body

caught in its hangman’s knot of sinking lines,

the glassy bowing and scraping of my will . . .

I have sat and listened to too many

words of the collaborating muse,

and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,

not avoiding injury to others,

not avoiding injury to myself—

to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction,

an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting—

my eyes have seen what my hand did.

Is that an allusion to Yeats “walked and prayed” I hear in Lowell’s “sat and listened”?

I felt a certain Lowellian spirit hovering over me recently as I moved toward completion of a poem that both named a name and arose as a meditation on an academic moment.

Facing Facts

My son’s Soc. text is full of strange fish,

commonplaces no less exotic for being familiar.

Take the principle of least interest. 

Now there’s a gloomy little butterfly of truth,

the plot of Alfie or Maugham’s Of Human Bondage,

alive on every teenage date I ever had. It says 

the less you love the more you run the show.

I read the postulate aloud and right away

my son said “Emily”—ouch. 

Who of us would want to live that way, 

but we do. Houdini stepping into the straitjacket

and staying there.

Richard Nester

Well, I’m not recommending my poem for inclusion in the next Norton Anthology, but perhaps you can see the similarities between its situation and Lowell’s “Dolphin.” It describes what I take to be a serious human problem, and I thought about posting it on my Facebook page. However, there’s my son and his former girlfriend to consider. I could, of course, invent a name besides “Emily,” but there’s a perfection to that name that my poor invention cannot surpass. In any case, the poem won’t appear anywhere until I’ve asked my son about it. Though I don’t plan on giving him artistic control.

Contact with younger poets has given me new perspectives on confessionalism. Denise Weuve at a “spoken word” reading said that her second book was less “confessional” than her first, a movement that had been predicted by a mentor as something that would occur naturally as she got early adolescent issues off her chest. This perspective is common, but I think demeans confessionalism as a strategy for making poetry. Confessionalism is more durable and more broadly useful than that and also less psychoanalytic.

Other perspectives have given me more fertile understandings. During a sojourn at the Los Angeles Catholic Worker, I came to know a poet who washes dishes at their skid row kitchen, Arnal Kennedy. Arnal writes poems about religious faith that have the same fire one finds in Hopkins, but he covers other subjects as well from street encounters, to battlefield memoirs, to love affairs. Astonished by the range of experience in his book You Woke Me in the Dark, I asked him “how many lifetimes” he had had. His reply was that he found first person to be the most compelling point of view and used it even when the experience wasn’t his own or had been fictionalized. I suddenly felt very naïve, a victim of Lowell’s “real skinny” dictum. “Real” might just as well mean “compellingly told.” So I now have another tool in my confessional toolkit as well as another dodge. Oh, that’s not about you, I just made it up. Or put another way, perhaps the confessional version of Yeats’ golden bird from “Sailing to Byzantium” is not keeping “a drowsy emperor awake” so much as preventing a bored priest from nodding off. Why couldn’t I have discovered lying sooner?

Lenten literary confession

Hello, friends and passers-by and Desirable Rabble from here and yon and kindly unknown people from around the world who come and go here peacefully without a whisper and also my mother--

Today is not a writing day. Today is a traveling day. This afternoon I am taking our three visitors from Bard College back to school while the rest of the family does quite nicely without me, or so I trust. It is also Sunday, and it is Lent, and so before departing I shall make another literary confession. (Feel free to make your own in the comments.)

You know those lists people are always making, the ones where poets write down their 10 Rules for Poetry to tell you what words are OFF LIMITS to poets, or should be? You know what I'm talking about--words like heart and soul and darkling and alabaster and whatever other words strike the list-maker as likely to end up in the sort of poem you will surely find on a blog page called Flowers of Inspiration Amid the Thorns of Motivation or some such.

Poets have a great fear of the smarmy. It's partly why many poets were so happy at the end of the last millenium to write drab, broken, etiolated poems and then read them in a low drone. Such practices seemed entirely to remove the dangerous possibility of smarminess and place that risk somewhere beyond the moon, which was, after all, another forbidden zone. Somehow nobody noticed that those poems were just a variant form of the smarmy. Partly it was the dearth of readers, a thing that came about because many of the poems were so very unappealing to the general populace, also known as people: those beings who used to read, love (note forbidden word love), and memorize poems.

So. You know the lists I mean. And now to confess: I find these lists both horrible and irresistible.

I feel a great desire to rush off and make my own (No use of the word NEWT! No uttering the word SPORK! Off with their pointy heads!) but usually I manage to control the Red Queen and the Dalek in me. But what I cannot, simply cannot rein in is a raging desire to use the forbidden word.

It is for this very reason that I have just written a poem featuring the word gossamer.

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Please scroll up and down to see the new videos of "The Nesting Doll" and "A Fire in Ice."

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"Billiard ball" photograph courtesy of sxc.hu and Gábor Suhajda of Budapest, Hungary.

5-Revelations Frolic

Clare Dudman, The Keeper of Snails, has tagged me with a meme asking for five things “that people don’t know about you.” I am doing it because Clare asked, and only because Clare asked! So there, Clare, have a care (or a pear, or—enough!)

1. My blood relatives all believe and frequently have reason to say that I magnetically attract crazy people who want to be my best friends. This has been going on for many years and has become a family cliché. (If you are my friend, worry not; you might not be one of the crazy ones. If you are, I love you anyway.)

2. When I was small, I ate mostly raw food—beans, black eye peas, okra, lady peas, green peas, green peanuts (being a proper Southerner, I also liked them boiled), potatoes, turnips, carrots. My skin had a beautiful orangey flush, and my nose was the little nub of a carrot. I now eat most anything. In fact, I’ve had curried antelope in the past week. How many people can say that, I wonder? I still, however, can be caught raiding the uncooked food, and my children like raw green beans and peas.

3. I also never, ever, ever drank milk as a child and may not have any bones.

4. The five people in my immediate family write fiction of various sorts (3 commit poetry!), all but little N, who is probably doomed to write in the future when he is not so little. My daughter went to Alpha this summer. The others tend to keep their scribblings a secret.

5. As a child, I could not bear tags in clothing, or any stiffness around collars, or harsh seams. I still cut the tags out of my clothes or else saw them into frayed half-moon shapes. This may be related to the potpourri of neurological weirdness in my family line, but let’s not go there, okay?

Somehow this whole meme feels familiar, though it is said to be new.

Perhaps I have done it before. And given precisely the same answers. Or weirdly similar answers. Or entirely different ones. The antelope part is definitely new, though I have now eaten antelope in so many different ways that it is beginning to seem quite ordinary, despite its pleasant tang—as of mesquite and bitter herbs.

Perhaps it is merely a passing sense of déjà vu, the sign of infinitesimal small strokes in the brain.

Or perhaps confession is just one of my recurring nightmares.

And here is the mandatory meme-plug: "PLEASE LEAVE THE FOLLOWING IN ALL ‘PEOPLE COLLECTION’ POSTS Remember that it isn’t always the sensational stuff that writers are looking for, it can just as easily be something that you take for granted like having raised twins or knowing how to grow beetroot. Mind you, if you know how to fly a helicopter or have worked as a film extra, do feel free to let the rest of us know about it ."

People Collection. Strange.

Two people I tagged have turned up with responses: "How about The Grove Palace, inhabited by one of my writing seminar students from a week at NCCAT in 2005? She hasn’t been posting, so perhaps this would inspire her… And Jarvenpa, who is a poet/bookseller beleaguered by bears and fire and wandering folk in the wilds of northern California. She’s probably digging out from a mudslide right now." All else is silence.

Oh, 6:
I file my books backward, because I’m tired of Y being down in the right-hand corner with the dust bunnies.

Credit: That picture is out of date, snagged off the SciFiction site. That's why it has the little corner missing. The hair is, all on its own, going curlier, and I requested to see the weirdest eye glasses in New Hartford and promptly bought them. Alas, the boondocks are dull--they are merely burgundy semi cat-eyes with cream and green trim. Next time I get my zany eye frippery in NYC.