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