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Coming soon..... 2014 will be an interesting year.....

Poetry and... Idle Time

If "Character is what (we) are in the dark" (as has been proposed by Dwight Moody and Lord John Whorfin), then it is also what we are when no one is looking and we are completely free to manage our own time.

Are you reading this from the northeastern United States? If so (and my statistics say it's highly likely that you are), you have likely spent some portion of the past 24 hours pinned to your house due to Stormystorm* Nemo.

Are you a writer, either professional or hobbyist? If so (and my statistics say it's highly likely you are, unless you're my mother. Hi there, Mom!), you have therefore had an opportunity spend some time with your craft. How you used that time may be a good indication of where you are in your current project, in your writing process, or even in your progression (career?) as a writer. How did you make use of this bonus time?

Did you write? Though it may be the choice for many people, it may not be as obvious as you might think. There are writers who insist that inspiration has to strike to make writing time productive in the least; pinned to your house, wondering if you were stocked up enough on milk and eggs to last you through the weekend, may not be conducive to inspiration. Other folks are regimented in their writing to the point where it is difficult to make ready quickly enough to use unplanned time productively. If you are able to open the spigot on demand, this could have been a great opportunity for you.

Was this prime editing time for you? Editing is traditionally the third-least favorite activity** for a writer. Are you the kind who sees bonus time as a "sign" to get to this distasteful task? The kind to gird yourself with a grunt of "Well, now I have no excuse not to..." and break out the red pen? Interestingly, I find people are very generous applying energy to editing other people's work, but are reluctant to spend it on their own. Partly, I suppose, this is because the task feels like looking backwards, when we tend to want to put the "finished" work behind us and move on to new work. But it's also that the task is much, much harder for us to do ourselves (Faulkner warned us we must delete what we like most in our writings). So how can we use this time to improve our work?

Technology + time = connection. As long as you had power, did you reach out into the great online poetry community to find kindred writers to commiserate with and support you in your efforts? Post to some poets' Facebook Timelines? Respond to some overdue correspondence tasks? Writing is an isolating experience - it's just you and the words - and sometimes we need a reminder that our poems mean nothing in a drawer on on a thumb drive, and that we need the context of other artists to bring out the best in ourselves (and if you're lucky, to find a good proofreader and an honest mentor).

Research comes more naturally to some of us, especially in a rare bit of unstrcutured time. With the plethora of places and ways to publish available today, I think some poets have gotten a little spoiled (careless?) in their submission practice. It wasn't all that long ago that finding and sibmitting to a new publisher was a week's-long process and a long wait for response - find a journal, order a sample copy by postal mail, wait for it, study it when it arrives, craft and send a submission by postal mail, wait 6 months, repeat. With Submittable and such, there's a tendency to rush a submission in because it's so easy, and feedback is so quick from newer journals. Not surprisingly, this is where my energy drifted (pardon the snow-pun***). I searched my twitter feed for journals new to me, read some online archives , ordered a couple of copies, and prepped a submission.

Of course, for so many of us the greatest luxury in found time is to use it to read. I don't know a poet who doesn't have a stack of journals and books awaiting an opportunity to dig into them. If you're like me, you have a book on your nightstand, one in your briefcase, two on the coffee table, one by the television, and two in your "in case of emergency" overnight bag. And three in the cloud. With this extra time, did you invest in an unknown author? Crack the spine on a new book you've been aching to read? Revisit an old classic? You can file this activity under any of the above, by the way.

So what did you do with this time? Ask yourself this: Was the activity you gravitated to someplace you needed to spend some time? Or was it where you were comfortable working? If it was both, well, God bless. But if it didn't serve your needs as a writer, well.... think about what that's trying to tell you.

While these unexpected pauses are great and let us (if we are disciplined enough!) capitalize with a little bolus of output, they usually ends in a rapid ramp-up in the work we have been freed from by the distraction. As for me, I'm off to shovel.

I hope you enjoy your time this weekend.





* - I'm fed up with Megastorm! Superstorm! Snowmageddon! How about you?
** - just ahead of multiple molar extraction and appearing before the IRS.
*** - I promised myself no more than one in any communication I make today.

Poetry and.... Change

By now you've of course read Washington Post writer Alexandra Petri's column "Is Poetry Dead?" There has already been sufficient vitriolic response to that column (as there always is when the question is asked - which I find is just about biennially, timed perfectly out of phase with the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival). David Bespiel's response was the best I've read, other than Petri's own excellent follow-up column.  I trust (hope?*) the flap is behind us, but now that our adrenaline has subsided and our patella tendons returned to their rest state, we have an an opportunity to look again at what Ms. Petri was saying. And as is usually the case when someone raises this prickly question, she makes some excellent observations. Fellow poetry practitioners, let's take a look at what she had to say.

Petri posits that "You can tell that a medium is still vital by posing the question: Can it change anything?" That seems pretty reasonable to me. She acknowledges her own medium - print journalism - has a suspect future, saying that "(if) poetry is dead, we are in the next ward over, wheezing noisily, with our family gathered around looking concerned and asking about our stereos." In the past few months, we've seen Newsweek give up its print edition, and here in NJ the largest daily newspaper just announced another prince increase/content decrease combination. If print journalism is losing out to online journalism, it's not unreasonable to speculate poetry should be feeling the same pain.

But there is a key flaw in the comparison: Newsweek lost its traditional audience to other sources of similar content. People who had been turning to the magazine for news commentary were turning other places, and Newsweek decided, sensibly, to focus its energy on competing more directly with those other places. But has poetry been losing its audience? Actually, technology has done just the opposite for poetry: online publication has created more opportunity to read poetry and enabled innovations like the Motion Poem. Additionally, the performance poetry scene continues to thrive and attract investment from nontraditional places (for example, the New York Knicks Poetry Slam Program).

Now, I'm not saying all these poetry interactions are necessarily good poetry, but I think it proves the audience is there, even growing into places it wasn't reaching (or didn't exist) 30 years ago, so the analogy to print media doesn't work. Petri continues, proposing that a plethora of bad poetry (or a low percentage of meaningful poetry) might also suggest the death of the form. She says "I think what we mean by poetry is a limp and fangless thing. Poetry has gone from being something that you did in order to Write Your Name Large Across the Sky and sound your barbaric yawp and generally Shake Things Up to a very carefully gated medium that requires years of study and apprenticeship in order to produce meticulous, perfect, golden lines that up to ten people will ever voluntarily read."

Well, yes. I think she has a good point here, one that has been debated for at least as long as I've been writing and collecting my poems. Much of what people pass off as poetry is weakly constructed, confessional fluff, and most credible poets agree on that. And there is a fairly well known divide between those who think an academic credential is necessary to poetry and those who think that same credential is a creativity-killing assimilation process. Both are right. In poetry (or biology, or economics), extra years of study and vetting by those skilled in the art provides peer review, practica, and understanding you could not get on your own. And that is likely to homogenize the field, exposing more poets to more "recognized" poets, creating more poems which call upon similar theory history - in a completely self-aware way, if the process has worked. But the alternative is more poets continuing to explore the same space that other poets have explored before; you risk eliminating the infrequent outlier genius but raise the overall quality of output. My analogy is this: If we didn't teach physics in college, at least one scientist a day would attempt to publish Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation. People would work hard and to great personal satisfaction and the flow of the science would dry up. Teaching the science to all who practice means we're free to explore other spaces within it - if we are creative enough to do so.

One of the arguments made against Petri (and whenever this topic is debated) is that with so many people writing poetry, how can it be dead? During the aftermath of the column, she quite rationally tweeted "Look, I love poetry, I've inhaled, I was an English major, the works. And I know Is It Dead Yet? essays are, er, not un-hack, shall we say./But I do want to hear a better case for poetry than "I do it! And mine's great!"." Again, she's right, and credible poets don't disagree. I think it's wonderful that so many people write poetry and want to share it. But those who write it without reading it are only stoking "poetry is obsolete" fire. Listen: Twitter will begin to die the day people stop retweeting, because it means people have stopped reading other people's tweets. Until then, it may be overused and largely vacuous, but it's still contributing something that cannot be found anywhere else.

Of course, Petri comes to all these conclusions herself, and one realizes she must have started with them in mind. She adds

"And whenever people say this about journalism, they note that people have an insatiable hunger for news. Journalism in its present form may not continue, but journalism will. It will have to. Otherwise where will the news come from?

And this might be the silver lining for poets. The kind of news you get from poems, as William Carlos Williams has it, must come from somewhere. And there is a similar hunger for poetry that persists. We get it in diluted doses in song lyrics. Song lyrics are incomplete poems, as Sondheim notes in the book of his own. If it is complete on the page, it makes a shoddy lyric. But there is still wonderful music to be found in those words. We get it in rap. If we really want to read it, it is everywhere. Poetry, taken back to its roots, is just the process of making — and making you listen."

Which is the rub. The "process of making" requires craft (taken as a knowledge of what works and what doesn't, who you're trying to reach, and knowing what you want to say... which can be acquired through either education or practice as long as either is applied with the diligent and sincere collection of feedback) and content (whether narrative or lyric, topical or ethereal, formal or conversational, personal or persona). If the poem - or the poet - has nothing interesting to say, there is no art. And where there is neither art not interest, no one can be reached... or changed.

Back, then, to the original question: "Can it change anything?" Ask this about the poems you love. Have they affected the way you think in some way? Are you more aware of something now than before you first read them? When you share them, do they raise a response in people who are reading them for the first time? When you discuss them, do they provide something meaningful to talk about, leading you in directions that sometimes surprise you? When you write them, do they end in places that challenge you to find your way back to where you started? Good poems will do these things. And it is these poems that will (continue to) keep poetry alive.





* - Petri herself tweeted: "remind me the next time I criticize a thing that it should be a thing whose practitioners are not noted for their wordcraft." People who pride themselves on their speaking are not wont to shut up.

Poetry and Christmas - The Annual Christmas Poem

Poetry and Process Redux: (Some) Rules for Writing... a Book of Poems

In my last post, I cited some "rules" I find interesting and helpful in the writing of poems, all of which are good to keep creative juices brimming, muses engaged, and words flowing. These are primarily tips for producing individual poems, for staying in the zone and wanting to create, and if you're pursuing and trying to capitalize on moments of inspiration, this is good enough. But if you're looking to produce something larger than an individual poem, the rules only get you as far as raw material. There are more and different rules when you're writing a book.

Or so it seems to me. When I was compiling my chapbook To The Ones Who Must Be Loved, I was arranging poems that, though organized around a consistent thematic element, were all written as individuals. In the first draft of the manuscript, three problems emerged almost immediately:

• Sameness in look on the page
• too-frequent use of faborite words
• repeated presentation of particular images

A number of the poems in To The Ones appeared in journals before joining others in the book, but never more than two at a time, so these issues didn't present themselves before the completed manuscript. Since all the poems are in a voice very close to my own, they obviously reflected my speech habits, which isn't a handicap until you're 12 pages into a 24 page book and are not interested in the next poem because the last three have somehow blended together. I was fortunate to have great feedback from poet friends to point these things out to me and to suggest ways to work through them, but it was clear that a no time in their writing was I thinking about "the book", even though I was writing poems for "the book" for years. That's a mistake I'm trying to make with my current project.

Again here, I had a few poems before I had the idea for the book, but this time I started thinking about 6 poems in about what the final project should look like, and to apply some tools to refine the collection as it develops rather than discover its shortcomings later. To that end, I had do develop  some rules and be firm about applying them.

First, I created an outline. Is that common for poetry collections? It didn't seem obvious to me, but there was a particular story arc I wanted to present and a list of images and incidents I wanted to make sure were included; this made outlining essential - and had the effect of ejecting some individual poems if they tread on space charted out elsewhere in the collection. After the 50% complete point, it seemed that for every two poems I added, I had to remove one to avoid the "repeated used of particular images" trap. Might be a little frustrating that the last pages of the collection are coming together so slowly, but I'm so much more confident in the final product - it's worth it.

Next, I had to set boundaries on voice. One big difference in the new collection is that I'm speaking in the voice of a historical figure, which made it easy to avoid my own cadence in language, but harder to achieve consistency without repetition of "favorite words". I tried to fill my head with this figure's writings - through translation, since he didn't write in English - so I could make intelligent word choices. There are some words that I've avoided religiously and some I've deliberately seeded throughout the book, but consciously, considering spacing in the book, link to the repeating themes. It may come across the same way to a reader, but it will be the result of something I'm actively trying, and therefore will have a better (and earlier) idea how to change.

The outline puts me in much better position to anticipate the page-sameness issue. Instead of following inspiration to create a poem and trying to find a place for it in the sequence later, I'm writing specifically to fill a need in the story arc or character development, which means I have an idea of the context for the poem long before it is complete. While this doesn't mean I don't reorder later (not by a long shot), it does direct me to consider choices on for, rhyme, length, etc. from outside the poem, anticipating and avoiding "sameness... on the page."

Now my collection is a narrative with a distinct story arc, and there are good models to follow (such as the novels in verse of Meg Kearney), but the outlining technique is adaptable to other forms as well if you can have a model for the final product in mind (like BJ Ward's Seventeen Love Poems with No Despair, a riff on Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair).

So here are are my rules for writing a book of poems (as opposed to collecting a book out of previously-written poems):

1. Explore the subject - write a few individual poems to see if the concept holds up in quantity and quality of ideas well enough to support a book,
2. Design the final manuscript - for a narrative, outline the story from beginning to end. For other kinds of collections, define the "takeaway" of the book - either a model you'll follow or an impression you're trying to create.
3. Write the last poem - this establishes the point you're working toward. You can change it later, but you can't program the GPS without a starting destination.
4. Write regularly, targeting specific places in the manuscript when you're writing. Be aware of the poems you've already placed in these sections.
5. Weed regularly, look for unintended repetition and especially for important elements of your outline that are less powerfully included than you like.
6. Repeat 4-5 until you are satisfied with the draft

This launches us into the gathering and use of feedback, a task for another day.

Are these rules any good? I don't know, I'm completing my second manuscript right now, and this is how I approached it. We'll find out next year if it worked.

Up next: There's no place like poem for the holidays.

Poetry and Process: Rules for Writing

The northeastern United States continues to recover from the incredible impact Hurricane Sandy has delivered to us. It's hard to imagine the long path so many people have in front of them to recover from this storm. For those of us who were blessed to be mildly impacted, the issue in front of is a simple one: restore a little order to things: get the kids back to school, get back to work, figure out a routine for keeping the gas tank full in the car. With that in mind, I'm considering order in the writing process - how do we get ourselves writing when it's so easy - even easier than usual - to do something else instead.

As practiced writers know, it's not really hard to find advice on how to write. And as those writers also know, it's exceptionally hard to find good advice on how to write. But if you're well-read across and within the writing industry, you can assemble for yourself some guideposts, some tracks to follow, some tips for maintaining quality and progress, that can come in handy when you're sitting down at the keyboard*, determined to just write something, and you want that something to have a chance to be good. Here are some tips from among the writers I follow:

Poet and columnist Grant Clauser admits he has "a tendency to change ... rules when they no longer suit" him, but his current rule set seems pretty good to me. Two from his most recent set are "Have a reader in mind" (something I've made a case for many times in this space - if you're writing for "no one", you're really writing for "people like you") and "Always be nice to dogs." OK, not entirely sure about that one, but then I've always been more of a cat person.

Children's writer Irene Latham has posted helpful maps for writing press releases and speaking in public as well as crafting poems, and offered up one of my favorite rules: "Engage at least two senses". This evokes the terrific imagery of cooking to me - blending multiple textures, multiple extremes on the sweet-savory continuum seems perfect for writing - blenging multiple elements of lanugage and craft and creating surprising combinatinos along the poetry spectrum. The rest of her rules are pretty good, too.

Robert Lee Brewer, the indefatigable source of poetry energy for Writer's Digest Magazine, expands the zone around the act of writing, listing 10 things that, done regularly, should keep your poetry fuel tank full enough that you can't help but write when the opportunity presents itself. He reminds us that "As a poet, you are an ambassador of poetry to those who are afraid to read it or think it’s something they just don’t 'get'." BTW, are you participating in the PAD Chapbook challenge? That's one way to keep yourself writing.

Anne Lamott - someone with pretty good advising credentials herself - said in an NPR interview that at one time she couldn't write if there were dishes in the sink; now she could write with a corpse in the sink. The trick is to use these - or any other bits of advice that ring true for you - to get to yourself the point where the act of writing is a trained reflex, a habit no more burdensome than breathing, so that when the real world begins to press in around you, it doesn't crowd the poems out.

Up next, the difference between writing poems for a book and writing a book comprised of poems. And how it took me way too long to learn it. Something to add to my personal rules list.

My best wishes to all in the Hurricane Sandy impact area. Be warm and safe, and know you're being prayed for all over the world.



* - or the notebook if you're stubbornly old school or still waiting for PSE&G...

Supertramp's Interest in My Health (or: Poetry and Living In The Moment)

Thirty years ago every time I opened a TV Guide I was greeted by the cover from Supertramp's Breakfast in America in the Columbia House Record Club, and invariably concluded from that cover that this was not an album I would devote a fraction of my penny* too. I never actually joined the Columbia House Record Club, but in those eager planning sessions, I never circled Supertramp as I imagined how I'd deploy my cent.

A little more than twenty years ago, I began to formulate the hypothesis that whatever music was popular when you were entering high school would somehow be popular with you later in your life, even if it wasn't your music when it was everyone's music. This theory derived from finding myself singing along with Keep on Loving You, Babe, This Is It** and a hundred other songs that had been kicking around the radio waves from the mid 70s through the time I trundled off to college, secure in my accordion and my music case full of standards and mazurkas.

During a long car ride about ten years ago, I realized that a surprising number of songs that I numbered among my favorites belonged to Supertramp, not that I ever attributed the songs to that group of performers. This in itself wasn't a great surprise, as The Cars, Styx, Three Dog Night, Foreigner, Fleetwood Mac, Little River Band and so on and so on and so on had worked their way into my music collection, mostly as I acquired LPs on drastic sale as CD's became popular, then CD's as all the Sam Goody closed. But Supertramp remained out of my line of sight during the great vinyl elimination.

Every day this week, some Supertramp song seemed to be on 70s on 7 during 2 or 3 of the 75 minutes I spend in the car daily. As I had been identifying the songs to my daughters throughout the week (after recounting most of the above story on Tuesday), when the radio pumped out "intellectual, cynical" yesterday morning, they were hysterical, and I promised myself I'd put BIA on my iPod this morning. Which I did.

This brings me to a street corner a little more than a quarter-mile from my house - the corner where I typically decide whether to break my morning exercise walk off early and head home or turn the other direction and add 10 minutes to it. I had been marching in celebration to the shuffling tracks of Supertramp and as I slowed to a stop to consider my decision, a new song started down the wires of my headset. What song?

Why, "Take the Long Way Home", of course.

So what does this all have to do with poetry? Well, for starters there's the joyful notation of the moment. The ability to recognize the remarkable, but not to let it pass. Not satisfied to be aware of these moments, the poet needs to do something with them. To translate coincidence into something else. Report the moment, but not just as a purveyor of fact, but with the insight of someone aware of a great tradition of connecting this with that.

And for me in this case "this" is  a thirty-year relationship with a song that popped up with a very specific message for me. My first draft has me thinking about Roger Zelazny. I'll make the connection for you another time***. Unless you can make one yourself...


* I don't know whether I should miss those days.
** The eclectic nature of my musical taste has been previously reported...
*** (HINT: The particular story I'm thinking of is in Unicorn Variations).

Poetry and The Olympics (or the Pursuit of Excellence)

This afternoon, after 2 hours of Boggle and Apples to Apples with the family, I flipped on the Olympics and became immediately engrossed in the USA-Montenegro men's water polo match.

Yes, I know the women's beach volleyball was on opposite. I suppose that says something about me.

I freely admit to being a sports junkie. While baseball has always been my game of choice - to watch, to play, to simulate on Xbox, to play in tabletop form with Baseball Strategy*, APBA, Longball**, whatever - any combination of skill and competition has the potential to capture my attention. When I understand enough of how a game is played to appreciate the requisite skill, or it's one I play at a low level, I really enjoy watching people do it well.***

Of course, there's a lot to be said for the up-and-comers, too. When I was attended a cousin's little league game, I appreciated the kids' effort - at least those who seemed to be interested in the game. It was coach-pitch, the level at which you begin to screen out the kids who are playing because they like the uniform and the 90 minutes out of the house from those who want to be ball players.

I suppose I have the same feeling about poets.

I likewise admit to being a word junkie. Poetry is my baseball. Among literary diversions, it's the game I've played the longest, it's the one I do best - well enough to sometime be asked to play with the big kids, those who do it better, but under no illusions of my skill level. And it's a joy, frequently an electric one, to be around those who do it really well. I know enough of the art to know what it takes to be that good, and I appreciate it as the amateur appreciates the professional. I'm a AAA utility infielder in the big leagues of poetry. I keep the skills sharp where I can and am very, very proud to put on the major league uniform when I have the chance.

On the other hand, when you're working with students - grammar school English classes or adult learners at the local bookstore - and one of them jumps on your simple metaphor assignment and comes up with something excellent, unexpected, that makes you say "wow" under your breath and have to take a minute to respond, you're seeing potential, someone making a connection with poetry, maybe someone who's going to take it seriously for a while. That, too can be an electric moment.

As I watch the Olympics, I can't help but draw the comparison between poetry and water polo - or more generally, poetry and any of the sports that are undeappreciated in my home country but which require great dedication just to become "good". Water polo's eggbeater is poetry's iamb**** - a tool we in the know use to do what we do, invisible to most, but appreciated by some.

I resolve to appreciate more in the next couple of weeks.

* - Avalon Hill's entry into the sport. Worth a look at a game fair.
** - an under-appreciated game from the 70s. Bobby Murcer fans take note.
*** - water polo is the former, in case that wasn't obvious.
**** - dactyl? enjambment? insert your favorite tool here.

Poetry and Preservation

me·mo·ri·al [muh-mawr-ee-uhl, -mohr-] noun: something designed to preserve the memory  of a person, event, etc., as a monument or a holiday (from Dictionary.com)

We live in an era when preservation of memory is a function of proximity to a Verizon Hot Spot and access to The Cloud. When tweens capture images on field trips with their iPhones and upload them into PowerPoint projects the next day. When we have developed ways to truncate even the simplest of observations into 140 characters, and taken the vowels out of words we send to two-inch screens in the hands of friends 30 feet away rather than use our voices to communicate them. And it's good, knowing all this, to spend a moment understanding how poetry has served and continues to serve the practices of preservation in this era.


It seems generally accepted that poetry, at some point in our past, was essential in the recording of history. That in addition to being the oral vehicle by which epic fiction was captured, verse was part of the "historian's" tools for remembering and retelling the stories of their people, before even those people had the means or the inclination to commit those stories to paper (or stone, or any medium).

At some point, the act of recording no longer required the mnemonic devices of rhyme and meter, which required poetry, like any art, skill, or technology, to fill other niches in service of preservation, lest it become obsolete. Surely, poetry also morphed in artistic directions as well, which we can consider another time, but poetry continues to have an essential place in the memorializing of person and events.


Some say we are suffering from short attention spans because of the evolution of media; I see it a little differently. Perhaps we no longer need the same kind of attention span - largely because information is more universally and immediately available. However, when something is recognized as worth sharing, it may now shared with a highly distilled accompaniment of language - a tweet with a Tiny URL - requiring the "historian" to find only the essential accompaniment for what is to be shared. But just like there have already emerged a handful of tools for "tweeting" more than 140 characters while still using twitter, poetry will adapt and serve.


Whether indirectly or directly, poetry still serves us as a repository for memories. Maybe it's direct, like an elegy for someone in your community, or veiled in symbol, like "O Captian, My Captain", or indirect like the poppies we purchase outside churches and grocery stores that owe their existence to "In Flanders Fields." Maybe the personal elegy you compose for a departed friend, maybe the poem you turn to when asked to eulogize them. Poetry continues to play a role in memory because of the poet's focus and vision - focus to discern details in and around a person's life or the circumstances of their death, vision to see how those detail can be crafted into something memorable. Worthy of memory, and presented in ways that last. With its crisp and concise language, poetry may even find itself flourishing as it lends itself to being shared in small bits.

Poetry will find its place in today's version of memorialization the same way it adapted to the written word and every other innovation in its communication through the centuries. It's on the poets to make use of the tools and keep it well-crafted and relevant.

Poetry and "Poetry"

Yeah, I've missed half of National Poetry Month. Going to miss the other half, too, I'm afraid. But if participating in our month in the public eye means being lumped in with the likes of Snooki and Dr. Oz, I'd just as soon spend the time on my taxes.

There's a new anthology out, edited by Kathryn and Ross Petras, called "The Anthology of Really Important Modern Poetry: Timeless Poems by Snooki, John Boehner, Kanye West, and Other Well-Versed Celebrities", in which the Petras extract some found poems from the utterings of people normally hunted by paparazzi more than poets. From what was quoted in my local paper I'm sure it's quite funny, and it certainly seems to poke fun at folks who deserved to be so poked. But....

The April 9 headline in the Today section of our Newark Star-Ledger was "Celebs go Shakespeare". Ugh. Even if I accept these artsed-up celeblurbs as poems, this headline is way off the mark. First, it's not like the celebrities set out to be poets, and more importantly, this ain't the bard telling us about "the depth and breadth and height/My soul can reach", this is Carmen Electra saying "I had nice b--bs before --."

Under the headline is the tag "Poetry anthology finds beauty in ridiculousness." Beauty? Really? One of the editors explains "We're like stupidity experts. I am one of the only people who can say I proudly make my living from stupid." I think that's great! If stupid were string beans, MTV could solve world hunger all by itself. And I'm glad someone smart is harvesting that stupidity for some personal gain. But is it beauty? Is breaking Kate Moss's insightful "I just started wearing bras. It's a miracle." into


I just started wearing
bras.
It's a miracle.

creating something beautiful?

I should say that I enjoyed reading NJ journalist Amy Kuperinsky's article - it's funny and smart, the way I expect the Petras intend this anthology to be taken. But just like Kuperinsky's good journalism isn't poetry, neither (IMHO) are the creations the Petras have collected likely to rise to the level of poetry. Why do I think this? Well, Wikipedia defines poetry as "a form of literary art which uses the aesthetic qualities of language to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, the prosaic ostensible meaning." as the definition of poetry. Can repurposed celebrity quotes rise to that? I'm skeptical.

Now I hear you saying: Is this really that big a deal? What is it about this book that gives me an itch I can't scratch? Well, the things is that it's being celebrated as part of National Poetry Month. To be fair, when 2012 Dodge tickets went on sale, that was featured with equal prominence (if not quite equal length or equivalent imagery) in the Star-Ledger. My worry is that, just like my friends in places other than New Jersey seemed to believe at there just must be at least some in The Sopranos, people will believe the finds in this book must be real modern poetry.

And is it? Well, I promise to take a stroll through the book when it arrives in my library system, and if I find anything that sways me toward accepting these as poems I'll tweet my approval. Until then, I'll stick with Poetry Daily, AAP, and Your Daily Poem for my NatPoMo headlines.

Where Poetry Intersects Precision

"The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter--it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning." - Mark Twain

In my interview last year on Poetic Lines with Elizabeth Lund, I commented on how one element of poetry that most appeals to me is its precision. This comment has created some interesting discussion, especially among my technologist friends, as the definition of precise seems to argue against the condition of poetry - good poetry, at least - which creates opportunity for the reader to insert their own experience and develop their own interpretation.


That confusion seems reasonable, when you know the definition of precise is the state of "being just that and no other", to be "definite or exact in statement, as a person." But one can be precise in certain elements without being rigidly defined in others or from all points of view. Consider the Mona Lisa, in many ways a precise portrait of a woman, yet filled with elements that encourage speculation ("Who is she?" Is she smiling?" Why that background?" Did she have eyebrows?"). How about the pointillist paintings of George Seurat, which at the smallest detail are precise elements of color but which at a slight distance back combine to appear to the eye as other colors, and a little further back become characters in a scene, and which a few steps back from that are a complex snapshot open to the art of the storyteller (Sunday in the Park with George, anyone?)


How is that precision lends itself to interpretation and exploration? Precision in detail creates a vividness that frees the reader or viewer to focus their attention on something larger. This also requires precision in execution, precision in specifics without pushiness in purpose. Poetry instructors will steer students toward concreteness in word selection (precision!) and focus on images - creating in language the same situation that a viewer could have in front of a great painting. All the best guidance I've received in my progression as a writer has been to set the scene up, then step away without telling people what I see in it. It took several encounters with editors telling me they wanted my poems - minus the last two lines - for me to get that. Leave the interpretation to the reader.


Precision in art is a sign of craft, like Seurat's dots and DaVinci's brushstrokes. I find it always something to strive for, no matter what I'm writing about, and I think it shows in which poems last and which don't.

Where Poetry Intersects ... Place

There's a diner that figures prominently in my poem "Surviving the Flood". I tell a little about meeting a man there and engaging him in a debate about the "meaning" of the flood. Whenever chance takes me past it, I recall immediately and powerfully the moment the poem came into existence and the story of my conversation with the opinionated old man. Only problem is, it never happened.

The diner's not even a diner, actually, it's a small deli on a suburban street, and I've never so much as used its parking lot to make a U-turn, let alone stepped inside it for a braunschweiger on rye. Yet every time I pass the place, I remember the days when northern New Jersey was a maze of cone-lined work-arounds and so many people were suffering with the effects of our swollen rivers, and I remember vividly the first lines of "Surviving" taking shape in the silence of my idling car.

Is it a bad thing that I fabricated a diner and its small population of characters from a neighborhood delicatessen? The deli very much was part of the inspiration for the story of the poem; there's a truth in there, but I took quite a poetic liberty with the narrative. I think Stevens ("Poetry is the supreme fiction, Madame") and Picasso ("Art is a lie that makes us realize truth") are on my side in this debate, and who are any of us to argue?

A more interesting question for me is the power of the connection of place. It is absolutely true that I can't pass this little deli without experiencing again the moment of the poem's birth. And that's not the only potherem of mine that has such an impact on me. For that matter, I have that relationship with other people's poems, too. When I'm visiting Massachusetts, there's corner on a road I frequent that is like a tap from which "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" pours. There's one supermarket (an Acme, ironically) that always launches me into BJ Ward's "Mythology at the Shop-Rite". Hopefully I needn't articulate where the Great Falls of Paterson take me.

This has become very interesting to me. In To The Ones Who Must Be Loved, many of the poems have very specific places of origin, and since I still live in the midst of those places, I still live in the midst of the poems, some of which I wrote a dozen years ago. And when I visit my college campus, which I do several times a year, I recall vividly even the poems I've long-since buried for being sentimental nonsense (or reminders of people no longer in my life) - and not just my own poems, and not just famous poems or poems I know well. I walk past a particular dorm and remember a poem by one of my coeditors of our incarnation of the college litmag. And I bet he could tell me about the night it was born as vividly as I remember it. I rarely think of that poem any other time, but when I'm there, its title is as clear to my mind's eye as as the first time I read it. In 1985.

Is it that way with many poets and poems? Your own or other works that have been important to you in your writing travels?  I've heard it said that among the senses, smell is the most powerful trigger of memory. That may be so, but I'm leaning toward believing that sight has its own particular power, and that place is a more powerful promoter of poems.

Poetry and Interpretation (Or Not)

Though we tended to be perceived as very similar men (which I suppose we probably were), my father and I did not share a great number of common interests. There were the ones he trained into me (like being a Mets and Jets fan. Thanks, Dad.), and one or two that I adopted so we'd have something we could do together when I was old and smart enough to want those things, but for the most parts, our definitions of fun were fairly divergent. He was all Statler Brothers, I was all Billy Joel. He was about solos, I was about the band. He preferred blondes, I preferred brunettes. And he never really figured out why I liked to write and why I called it "poetry" when it didn't rhyme.

Not that there weren't things we enjoyed together. We played many satisfying card games together - spades, pinochle, sheephead, euchre. We could both lose half a day to a good bit of historical nonfiction. We both habitually looked for the algorithms that defined number sequences. But I always suspected that we came to things a bit differently, and stuck with them for different reasons.

Near the end of his life, I discovered my father liked Scent of a Woman. We never discussed it, but I always had the feeling he best enjoyed the parts where Al Pacino was giving someone hell. It wasn't all that big a stretch to imagine my father applying a ranger choke hold as part of defending something he felt strongly about. But those aren't the parts of the movie that attract me. I liked watching Chris O'Donnell be honorably passive-aggressive, giving people a more gentle grief than the caricature his costar was portraying. It used to bug me a bit, that even when we agreed, my father and I, we disagreed (and on the golf course, the card table, and the homework desk, it was clear this was frequently the case). It took a long time to just get comfortable that there was something we could appreciate together, to enjoy for no other reason than that we both enjoyed it.

Fast-forwarding, I recently shared poem with someone who's known me for quite a while but only recently discovered my writing hobby, and this precipitated a predictable discussion ("Wow, you really write poetry?" "Is this the kind of poem you usually write?" "Do you read Good Housekeeping? I saw a poem in there last year."). This well-intentioned but generally uninformed sort of dialog has at times been a mild irritant for me (which I'm sure you can trace in the archive without too much trouble), and it surprised me not to have that reaction this time. My recent rediscovery of Poe  has me reliving some dusty memories that have softened my edges a bit.

This includes experiences like a college classroom debate about "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", in which the professor posited a possible interpretation of "His house is in the village, though/He will not see me stopping here" as an atheistic comment. I remember that students who hadn't had a strong opinion about anything in the past 2 months were suddenly agitated and vocal. I also remember them breaking into two camps, basically "all real poets are skeptics" versus "Robert Frost is Norman Rockwell." I don't remember how it ended, but it's evidence of why "Woods" is a great poem - it evokes interpretation and passion. Decades later, I still don't know what Frost meant. It's not important to my connection with the poem.

While it's nice to have a shared mindset with someone, I realize that's a basis for forming a club, not for creating great poetry (or art in general). I've finally gotten comfortable accepting the "This can't be poetry, I get this!" response and people's confidence that they know exactly what I was trying to say. It's good just to be happy that they have a strong response to my poems. At least we can have that much in common.

Poetry and Christmas

Like many people, I've had precious little time to fit the hobby in lately. There's so much to do (I'm off to whip up a batch of pfeffernüsse in a minute), but I did want to take a minute to ponder this intersection that's so important to me.

A holiday so steeped in history, faith, and sentiment is hard to "make new", and hard to mine for content that is genuinely interesting (to others, and even to onesself on a second reading!). There are two Christmas poems in To The Ones Who Must Be Loved, though neither is really about the holiday - one is about the effect having a child has on a new father's perspective, and the other is about how that perspective is challenged and changed when a child is seriously ill. Christmas provides a context and a vocabulary with which to comment on these views, which may be the best way to cut through the dreck that so frequently spills out of Christmas poems. And many other poems, but that's for a different day.

The classic and immediate poem that comes to mind is A Visit From Saint Nicholas (even if you don't know it by that title...), well worth a read in the original form: He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot / And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot / A bundle of Toys he had flung on his back / And he looked like a peddler just opening his pack. An oldie (first appeared in 1823), this wonderful old poem has been parodied so much it's lost some of its luster, but solid narrative metrical verse, and it does have some terrific images that someone get overlooked: As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly / When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky / So up to the house-top the coursers they flew / With the sleigh full of Toys, and St. Nicholas too.

Those who sing in church are no doubt familiar with "I Heard The Bells on Christmas Day", but singing the first couple of versus omits the political context of Longfellow's poem. The whole story of the poem reeks with despair, but you don't need that whole story to understand the Civil War melancholy that set up the hopeful of the poem: Then from each black, accursed mouth / The cannon thundered in the South / And with the sound / The carols drowned / Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

I try every hear to produce a poem on the theme. Some years emerging as an exploration of faith, some years as a more secular family experience. This year, I'm informed primarily by my daughter's recent studies on the great Edgar Allen Poe. I figured if anything could keep me from wallowing in sentiment, it would be clinging to a Poe construct. I leave it to you to decided if I succeeded.

And I leave it to you to have a joyous holiday!

Poetry and.... Thanksgiving

Today I am grateful for the life of a man I barely knew. 

Fausto, a member of my parish, passed away this week at the age of 82. I knew him a little, which is to say I knew him at 9:00 mass, where he was an usher, and I am a lector. When my family first began attending this mass, I formed an instant opinion of him as a gentle but disagreeable sort - a curmudgeon in the most commonly-held sense of the word. He moved slowly, rarely smiled, and gave the smallest nods in response to greetings.

As most people do, we always sit in or near the same place at our regular mass, and as I got to know the people around us - long-time parishioners all, many older than us - in the same demographic as Fausto - I began to notice the greetings, silent and subtle, that passed among them as he would pass at the end of the communion line. I don't know if i ever saw him smile, but I surely saw my fellow parishioners smile as he passed and nodded, passed and whispered.

When I started to lector, gathering with the ushers, priests, and other lay ministers before mass, and started to listen to Fausto in the company of other men of faith, I realized this was a man who complained about his tribulations from time to time, but rarely had a negative word toward anyone else. And when he permitted it to be seen, he had a smile that was impossible to return in kind.

After a while, I noticed him interacting with the alter servers - boys and girls of middle school age, the most likely group to shrink from an uninviting adult. Without fail, he was gracious and funny with them, and they with him.

And in those few conversations I had with him, I found a man of confidence and clarity, joyful and thankful, welcoming, and proud to serve in his role in our community.

Only today, after his passing, have I learned that he was educated as a lawyer, worked for 25 years in an industry parallel to my own, and shared his passion for the game as a 25-year soccer coach. The last I probably should have guessed from how his energy level rose when the World Cup came up....

I'm grateful for having known him and having received words of encouragement and praise from such a worldly soul. I'm also grateful for the chance he gave me, and continues to give me, to be aware of the evolution of my own attitudes and interactions through understanding my small relationship with him. I'm most grateful for his example, that of confidence and service, accomplishment and community.

Which brings me to my favorite Thanksgiving poem, offered with gratitude for your readership, for your finding something of value here, and for the chance to connect with you, to be a small part of your life, and to have you as a part of mine.

Te Deum
by Charles Reznikoff

Not because of victories
I sing,
having none,
but for the common sunshine,
the breeze,
the largess of the spring.

Not for victory
but for the day's work done
as well as I was able;
not for a seat upon the dais
but at the common table.

(courtesy poets.org)

Happy Thanksgiving.

... and Response

There's a story I like to tell when I run into another native New Yorker away from the Big Apple. Shortly after college, being still active in campus theater and known to have a car, I was giving some undergrad members of the Stevens Dramatic Society (who knew me casually as "that older guy" who did Drood") a ride to a play. When my intended path along Route 46 was, shall we say, interrupted by an aggressive driver, I responded by stating my disapproval clearly and completely using the vocabulary I'd acquired during my months of driver education in the outer boroughs. With hand gestures.

And one of my young friends in the back seat immediately said "I didn't know you were from New York!"

Aside from confirming for the specific regional flair of dialectal Brooklynese, this tells me two things: that a specific mode of communication can provide an immediate, leveling, and intimate link, and that emotion - especially negative emotion - is a great font of energy from which to fuel said communication. What it doesn't tell me is that swearing at a guy in a beat-up Cherokee is great communication.

Or, in a more artful context, consider that while a visceral response may provoke a strong sense of identification, and that may be a powerfully felt and meaningful experience, that cannot be confused with great art. This idea pokes its head out a lot at open mikes, where people will present freshly-minted poems of protest and observation and receive timely attaboys and amens. Can be valuable, community-building, reinforcing. But it's usually not art. Not any more than a good standup comedy routine, anyway.

Consider the standups. Who are the great standup comedians today? There are a few that I'll stop and watch if I catch them flipping channels - Ron White, Kathleen Madigan, and Jeff Dunham among others*. I think they're terrific at their craft. And funny. And while I'll always stop and watch them, I'm not archiving their stuff to share it with my kids when they're old enough. Now, George Carlin, on the other hand... Carlin was political, vitriolic, and at times (almost) as dirty as some of the current crop. But his craft was honed at another level, one which made it timeless. The Seven Words You Can't Say On Television have all been said on television this year (four of them on "free" TV), but the routine still rings out with humor and purpose, and doesn't rely only on the shock value of the words - which is good because they don't have much of that commodity left.

I expect out poets to give the same effort when creating works of protest or witness. Not that the act of witness is not in itself important, but recognize that shock (disgust, disappointment...) is not enough; that there is crafting and distance required to apply Wordsworth's classic definition and make the witnessing into a poem. In Fooling with Words, Mark Doty admitted that many of his poems start when they "come tumbling of him", but that this isn't the poem; it's "a cry" which is refined through the physical crafting of language. Consider that when people turned to poetry in September 2001, they turned largely to a poem written in 1939; that suggests something about the works created in the years in between.

My own work crosses into witness infrequently, but when I head that way, it's usually later, when I've decided what I want to say, and whether it's something that I can say well. That last piece is important to me.

It's the value that the poet brings.



* - I'm also partial to an old Bob Newhart Button-Down Mind bit on Sirius!

... and Purpose

I had the privilege of performing for the regulars at Noble Coffee Roasters last week. It was a fine night (not just because of a terrific piece of rum cake, though that didn't hurt), and a remarkable one for a couple of reasons.

First, I found the place when even my GPS was confused.

But seriously, folk. The thing that remained with me as I was driving away was the incredible diversity in the room, evidenced by the open mic. We had the political and the pastoral, memoirs of 1934 and remembrances from the under-30 crowd. On the (longer than it needed to be*) ride home, I had a chance to reflect on some of the work I heard during the open mic and think about the different intents the poets brought to their work, and what it means for the craft behind that work.

One of the first poets, an older gentleman, series regular and long-time writer, started with "some October poems". These nice seasonal poems were observations on the time of year, referencing "orange" and "trees" (or the like) frequently. This poet's presentation was all of (rhyming) couplets and were very short. The editor of a local magazine read a poem by an "old-feeling" under-30 poet that was filled with long, complicated sentence and peppered with internal rhyme, using a lot of repetition. The poems had little in common in vocabulary or form, but shared an acute awareness of the relationship between their intent and their form.

All writers make form decisions with every word we type. These poets reminded me of the importance of conscious selection of structure to support the purpose of their poems.

Yes, I said purpose. The truth is, all art has purpose. Even if that purpose is to capture an idea only for your own review later, there is an intent in every act of artistic creation. And the assignment of structure to its presentation is deeply integrated with intent. Some intents lend themselves to nursery rhyme verse; some to multilungual exposition. And you know when you've gotten it right, and when it's wrong.

Understanding this visceral response to the connection of form and purpose in a poem can help with other forms of communication. In my career as a technical professional, I have frequently had to prepare engineering content for consumption by audiences ranging from grammar-schoolers to experts in their field; in some ways, this is navigating the spectrum from Ogden Nash to Ezra Pound. With Nash, it's a danger not to see the craft, when what you're seeing is careful presentation with a particular audience in mind. With Pound (at least the later cantos), one unskilled in the art could easily become overwhelmed and see only chaos on the page, when what's there is thoughtful in the extreme with an expectation of similar extreme thoughtfulness on the part of the reader. Neither is better or worse - both are designed with the form they require or accompligh their task.


Einstein said that things should be as simple as they need to be, but no simpler. This elegance of design,  the idea that if something seems too complicated there's a good chance it is not suitable for its task, is something we look for routinely as engineers, and sometimes have trouble communicating. Poetry may be the vehicle to bridge this understanding gap.


Poetry has design. Design has purpose. Makes sense to me.


*Note to self: Just because you can see the Wendy's doesn't mean you can get to the Wendy's from this exit. And Bear Mountain is scary in the dark, even with the GPS

... and Remembering

Today is about remembering. Many people far more eloquent than I will speak at length about the tragedy of the attacks on our country. We all have our memories from that day: those who lost friends and family, those who witnessed the events up close, those far away who watched with the helplessness of a mute on the wrong side of the glass. My own memories are that of the almost 2,000 people at my office campus leaving our desks, gathering in conference rooms to watch the news feeds that started showing up on all our video equipment, about hundreds of people heading to our loading platforms - we're a medical device company - and loading trucks to send across the river into Manhattan. It's interesting that no matter how great the event, all remembering is a local, personal act.

Do you recall how quickly Auden's "September 1, 1939" started being quoted in columns and appearing on websites? How quickly old and new poems began to appear everywhere, as people attempted to find ways to say what they couldn't otherwise say. Many poets have spoken about poetry as a vehicle for "saying the unsayable", whether it be on tragedies of a personal sort that would never be known without a brave poet's voice or those of the kind of 9/11/01 or 9/1/39, or any of a number or other horrific days that require the distance and craft of the artist to present them in a comprehensible way.

Poetry is of course, not uniquely able to convey the layers of an event; even a short look at Picasso's Guernica tells us that. But poetry may be able to do a few things differently than other art forms:

Primarily, it permits a juxtaposition of images with an immediacy and pacing that other art forms don't. Visual arts (like Guernica) hit us all at once, movies (and plays, and novels) bring us along at the rate the director has chosen. But a poem (often) strikes us with a complete visual on the page, and provides aural or linguistic beauty that begins to unfold immediately and as long and as fast as we care to take it in.

Second, it allows a deeply personal interaction without sacrificing a view of the entirety. In Auden's poem (and Yeats' "Easter 1916" which it reflects in structure and tone), we leap into a helicopter trip down through history (Thucydides even makes a brief appearance) from the most local of observations ("I sit in one of the dives/On Fifty-second Street..."). After the trip through the eons, Auden brings us home to the the individual ("All I have is a voice/To undo the folded lie..."). In this way poetry is most unique among the art forms, as it permits the reader to (choose to) assume completely the perspective of the narrator by speaking the poem. An actor in role takes on a part of the memory, but not the whole

Third, the poem uniquely packages hope with recollection. The choice to connect hope to a tragic memory is the poet's choice, of course, but the call to action, the voluble pronouncement of what can be done in response, or of what has already happened, is most real and most direct in the narrative poem. We can speak the poet's words and find ourselves carried along just by the act of saying them. We can be moved by an act of remembering, by a capture memory that was not even our own.

The risk of being cloying and cliched is more present in the poem of recollection than in other forms, I suppose, but that's a discussion of craft for another day. Other media can provoke insight, or outrage, or meaning, but when done well, there is an affirmation, a commitment possible in the remembrance poem that is unavailable in other arts. Auden closes with

May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

We remember today with the commitment that poetry can provide.

Poetry and.... Teaching.

As school starts again I think back upon the great teachers I have had and what has made them great. Sure, there's compassion and a desire for service. Without casting any disrespect upon these essential attributes, I'm learning toward something else today; I don't know about you, but I've known a number of people who are compassionate, great with kids, intent upon serving others, and/or devoted to making the world a better place. Many of them have been good teachers. But that's not what's separated the best.

When you think about it, what really distinguishes great teachers? I think it's the ability to make connections between the material and other things - maybe its application, maybe some analogous concept that helps the student establish a connection with that material. Like the grammar school teacher who can make fractions visible objects for a child who doesn't like math. Or the Bible teacher who hooks an adventure-seeking boy with the wars of the Old Testament and leads him out through the Gospels. How about a science teacher who discusses Stranger in Strange Land and the qualities of a good sausage-and-peppers sandwich in (almost) equal increments to keep a room filled with high school boys interested in corrosion* chemistry? I'm fortunate to have known all these people - they taught me or people close to me - and I think they have something in common. They're all poets.

At least one of them would raise an eyebrow for that comparison, but I think it holds. What do we do as poets? In successful, well-crafted poems, we establish connections - metaphors - that make visible something that might not otherwise be visible. It needn't be truth, it needn't definitive, but needs to be memorable and it needs stay with the reader, to create a desire to take in more. I'm sitting here remembering the tools my AP chemistry teacher used 30 years ago, not for their great scientific insight - 20 years of practice has taught me a great deal more than I learned there - but for how they kicked open a door for me that I leaped through joyfully, and how I've spent my life recalling his lessons. Even when I don't know that there's anything more for me to mine. But still I go back. And find something worth remembering again.

This is another place I go when people tell me they don't "get" poetry. For those who don't like or appreciate the surprise of making new connections, I rely on craft, or allusion, or something "intellectual." But for those who teach, as their career or as their vocation, as a part-time effort or as a part of their larger job, I say the poetic and the learning moment are the same. I invite you to join me there.






- hint it's pronounced KAT-eye-on, not KAY-shun.

Poetry and.... The Storm

Here in the northeast, Hurricane Irene is harassing us with overlapping waves of calm and pounding force. Sporting events have been cancelled and the Stop-and-Shops have been out of milk for 18 hours. Many people have retreated into their homes with days of water and prepared foods, and aren't expecting to have anynything asked of them for days. Almost (or by now, maybe more than) 10,000 flights out of area airports have been cancelled. There's a metaphor in there somewhere.

But Jayne Jaudon Ferrer at Your Daily Poem tried to find us a hurricane metaphor and came up empty. My library may not be comprehensive, but it similarly let me down as I searched for something to present here as a place where poetry had come to rest up against the coming threat. And I finally realized my mistake.

While we're exhibiting some similar behaviors in the face of the storm, what we're really doing is projecting our unique fears upon it, allowing it to distract us from something we would otherwise be fearing. Or for those who are refusing to yield, refusing to leave their homes, are doing the same - standing up to the storm because it's something they can stand up to.

Poetry operates at the place between what you want to say and what you can say. At times, it says the unsayable. At times, it starts with what is said and works back to how the need to say it was created. In both cases, it tried to surprise us, even as we put the pen to paper, with what we come to believe when we read it.

Which is what happened to me here. I'll leave it up for a while. At least until the storm ends.

The waters have receded. Poem has been deleted.