If pith is the mode of the automaton and the worker bee, then Desolation: Souvenir, Hoover’s latest work, puts smoke in the hive. His work is the interruption to the monotony of habituation, deadly as Schlovsky claims. It calls attention to the anemic patterns of habit, using pain and courage to carve through.

Though Hoover is relatively prolific, his writing is capable of traversing, if not discovering within itself, new measures of emotional depth and conceptual difficulty. The entire volume of his published work should be the call to invent new concepts in the prizing of poetic superheroes that acknowledges the sustained lift of a long-fighting heavy weight. Scars and blows all gorgeously legible.

Desolation: Souvenir starts at the point where language fails (as maybe it is supposed to if it is to show it is capable of meaning anything that would touch us): the death of a child. The brief poems piece aphorisms into elegy. The awkward junctures function as attempts at connection, solace, that instead show the gaps – of what is unknown, of what is suffering, of what’s been lost. In “the dream and now a field,” Hoover’s speaker identifies the “vain remedy” of language in the aftermath of emotional evacuation: “the consolations pour/ those unseen wither/ thinking’s like a wind/ tying knots in twine” (14).

These elegies are not only for the loss of a person, but address the sense of impermanence inherent in language in the moment it seeks to comfort, to close a gap or cover an open wound. Hoover writes in “and what is last in us”: “touch is a form of speech/close your eyes to imagine/open them to remember/forms are firm, shapes shift” (29). Where the contradictions do not result in a zero sum, instead verify the irrational logic of the heart suffering what is ultimately unthinkable, impossible.

The language is colloquial; occasionally literary references crop up, and then recede back into the subtle mixture of short lines, references to the personal and to cycles of earth, and transient, lithe meditations on the nature of words, and reality.

In a short section at the end of the book, called “The Windows (The Actual Acts)” Hoover spends twenty four pages on an exercise which seems to be for the purpose of trying to get language to be something real. They are propositions. If propositions are meant to illustrate the things of the world that are, and that can be said, all else is nonsense. In “The Windows” Hoover is carving even more depth to his unnamed speaker. In a move to fix language to say and to be what is, to imply permanence, and, therefore, the propositions function to claim the unchangeable immortal truths of the world. They are a gorgeous defense to the metaphysics and splayed logic of language when confronted by death.

Hoover’s propositions, however, shape what is with humor and a lush bleed of the illogical into what is: “A new species of clam being eaten by a new species of bird./ And there’s no new man to record it./ To imagine a world is to clean it./ Hard to conceive of a dirty new world.” And, here he leaves us, in a dirty new world – with perfect half-finished lives, sentences, thoughts, and sort of made beds. Where people and words suffer and die, or survive and maybe get shocked hard enough into having to be something new.

Related Posts:

• Forty-One Jane Doe’s by Carrie Olivia Adams
• Easy Math by Lauren Shapiro
• Collected Poems by Joseph Ceravolo
• Kings of the F**king Sea by Dan Boehl
• The Collected Poems by Marcel Proust

I don’t mean to suggest that Adams employs trickery. Quite the contrary — her writing is specific (without being limiting) and straightforward (without offering a conclusive narrative). In the opening stanza of the section “Winter Came” she writes:

This was the year I deserved the winter,
and when it came there was nothing
I could say—
I could not send it back.

It had come for me.

There is nothing hidden here; Adams is not playing games with her reader. She shoots straight from the hip, and her aim is true.

It is difficult not to imagine the “I” in these poems as Adams herself, although one never knows. Perhaps, like the many versions of Jane Doe that we meet in the title section of the book, the “I” is many versions of Adams. Perhaps the “I” is entirely other from the writer (though I am more doubtful than usual of this).

The “I” in Forty-One Jane Doe’s takes on identities. She is Pandora, opening the box: “It was me. There was no lock or key. I just asked, ‘Shall I?’/And the stars fell out.” In the first section of the collection, aptly titled “A Mystery Story,” she is a detective, investigating the weather. She is alternately knowing and wondering, known and unknown.

What is clear throughout is the presence of a narrator, serving not as lecturer or advisor to the reader but as guide and interrogator. The “I” addresses the reader directly in the section “Technologies”: “My body./Reader,/he strokes it in letters” and “Reader, you and I have been lashed/by the weather. We’ve been let down.” A few pages later, the “I” questions the reader, asking “Do you know mathematical beauty, reader?” and then acknowledges itself:

It is an act of extreme egotism to believe
that my being [here]changes the city.
Disrupts it so.
A windbreak. A shadow caster.
My breath catches. Extends.

Self or selfless,
I am in the way.

Whoever she is, the “I” in Adams’ poetry is aware, of herself and of everything she encounters. She is as inquisitive as she is introspective — Forty-One Jane Doe’s is a book of investigation, of questioning. “Why must the body insist?” asks the narrator in a later section of the book. But as we’ve already been told, “The detective/she leaves it to you.”

There are clues that serve both to clarify and to confuse. “The first clue is snowflakes,” but also, “The first clue is wide-eyed.” There are hand-delivered clues and clues made of “paper/wrapped.” There are hints and evidence. And, “Some days there are no clues/other than the patterns of migrating birds.”

There are windows. Pandora gives her box an intentional window “[t]o become perceptible; to be expressed; to permit passage; to make manifest. Maybe for all these reasons. It caught a cluster, a bee and a thistle; the spindle of a watch balance. The sun on the tip of a matchstick.” Later on, there is an accidental window, an unintentional aperture as “the ceiling collapsed,/the roof opened to reveal the sky/yawning back at me—.”

And, of course, there are the Janes. The title section begins, “There are Janes for everyday./And there are sometime Janes.” There are recognizable, apparent Janes and there are hidden Janes. The Janes are distinct and unique, but crowd them “in a graffitied bathroom stall” and “they would all be dialing the same number.”

Adams shifts back and forth between the plural and singular in this section. The many Janes sometimes coalesce into one Jane:

Mornings, Jane tries to look so tall,
no matter what she’s carrying.
She strides down the wooden train platform, one hand
holding her skirt against the breeze, the other clutching.

And then are split apart into multiples again:

One day there were high rise office buildings
and tenements and grids
and alleyways sunk under with rain water.
And then the Janes came with them.

Above all else, the Janes are aware: “One Jane Doe remember burying / Jane Doe in the sand. There is a moment, she says,/when you know what you are doing / is wrong, but you do it anyway.” This is a poetry concerned with the specificities of the universe, of nature, of science and of the body, of love and of pain. The Janes are aware, the “I” is aware, and Adams is aware.

Forty-One Jane Doe’s closes, fittingly, with a question:

If you know the end,
if the day has already come
and another begun for you
can you tell me of it,
so I may know
what to look for?

Like I said, this poetry is magic. Ultimately, Adams challenges her readers to observe intensely the world around us, to decide for ourselves which particulars are clues to be deciphered and which questions are asking for our answers.

(Note: Three short films, created in tandem with the writing, accompany Forty-One Jane Doe’s. The images presented in these films serve to reinforce and inform the poems. I’d recommend reading the book in its entirety prior to viewing the films.)

Related Posts:

• The Moon and Other Inventions: Poems After Joseph Cornell by Kristina Marie Darling
• Counterpart by Elizabeth Robinson
• Desolation: Souvenir by Paul Hoover
• Easy Math by Lauren Shapiro
• Collected Poems by Joseph Ceravolo

I entered the book from its first pages, drawn in and distracted from my own private pain by Orr’s play of language down the page. Orr’s short lines run up against his long sentences. The brief poems are only momentary intervals within their long sequences. He has something both simple and complex to say. I think I think something about what I am to think, and then Orr asks me to think again. I think I think something about what I am to feel, and then Orr asks me to think again.

Love overwhelms us.

Or death takes

One more
Of those.
We cherish most.

Where else?

Where else can we go? (68)

Immediately I copied these lines out of the book and passed them along. For these lines, alone, I could have chosen River Inside the River to discuss in this month’s club. But this book shows us that nothing, no matter how singular or solitary, really stands alone, and so it is not just for these lines that I selected this book.

I often say that reading poetry, and writing it, means taking part in a long conversation, one that has been going on around us all along. We can jump in with our own way of seeing things, sharing in the dialogue for awhile. Then we, and so much of what we love, will be gone. River Inside the River reminds us these things are true, both the long running conversation and the brevity of our time in its midst. This book acknowledges the frailty and continuity of mortals and their words.

Starting with Adam and Eve and their simultaneously immediate and eternal loss, Orr pulls at the root of all heart ache. “To Speak,” “To See, “To Write,” “To Name”: These are the titles of the first five poems in the book, taking us to the base representation of the verbs, before the complications of tense and time and case. Soon enough, though, in the book’s sixth poem, when the worm fails to appear for the grand naming ceremony in Eden, “a dark shroud” (17) is stitched through the cycle, and even this careful design begins to be corrupted. How quickly Orr brings us to the point. “The book said: everything perishes,” he writes in a later poem. “The Book said: that’s why we sing” (89).

In the collection’s three sequences, “Eden and After,” “The City of Poetry,” and “River Inside the River,” Orr balances the need to say things newly against the impossibility of saying anything new. He gives beauty reign equal to anguish. In the middle of “The City of Poetry,” just after he he asks where else we can go, in the face of love and loss, besides the city of poetry, Orr writes, “If you’re halfway honest, I’m sure/They’ll tell you this city, like the human heart,/ Contains it all–spun sugar and gossamer,/But also deepest grief and even horror” (69). The book deals with loss, yes. The book confronts Orr’s own difficult history, and also our nation’s, and also the world’s. But the book also talks about love and hope, the spaces we’ve created, through imagination and determination, where we can rest and love and grow to be ourselves. The book talks about the “Mother’s House” and how that is just another name for the transformative power of verse.

Despite or maybe because of the length of each cycle, the individual poems in this collection are spare, often as short as eight or twelve lines. Most made up of three or four beats, and some as little as one. Why go on and on?

River inside the river.
World within the world.

All we have is words

To reveal the rose
That the rose obscures. (124)

We all know what happened in Eden and afterward, so why go on? We all know that people we love will die, that love can corrupt us, that humans are hard on each other time and time again. Why go on? Why rehash, at length the old familiar song? Except that we need, sometimes, often perhaps, to know we are part of something larger than ourselves alone. Except that the writing brings us to something new. The words can “reveal the rose/That the rose obscures.” At times in this collection we run across familiar forms (Oh look, a villanelle!) and names as familiar as Shakespeare, Sappho, Baudelaire, Dickinson, Neruda, and we see them as we always saw them, but yet we see them new. Those poets, like so many people, are lost to us. Those old forms are past their prime, and even the new forms are made up of nothing that’s new. I could be devastated by all of this so easily, but I am not. I turned to this book because I wanted the busy work of reading poetry, the distraction of working through words, but Orr reminds us that poetry is alchemy. In the process of reading about grief and beauty and people and forms I knew, Orr introduced something that made everything altogether new.

“I’m an old man/ Made young again/ By the poems I love,” writes Orr as he closes “The City of Poetry.” I could go on and on quoting lines and stanzas from this collection, evidence to support my admiration for this book which is, in turn, evidence to support the need for poetry. I could go on and on quoting moments when Orr has reminded me, newly, what it is I always knew. I could go on and on, talking you through this book, but I won’t. You’ll need to take this journey on your own.

Related Posts:

• Why I Chose Camille Guthrie’s Articulated Lair for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
• Why I Chose Cleopatra Mathis’s “Book of Dog” for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
• “Book of Dog” by Cleopatra Mathis
• The Daily Beast Loves The Rumpus Book Club
• The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat 32: Gregory Orr

There is another thing that kind of made me laugh at myself: I continued to pay attention because Richard Blanco is a fine, fine-looking man. Dem arms. Seriously.

Look, perhaps we should have more open lusting for poets, yeah? If that is someone’s gateway into a poet’s work, then so be it. We all need more poetry in our lives.

All right, now that I’ve got all that off my chest, can I also tell you that I really enjoy Looking for The Gulf Motel? Yes, I do. Truly. It hits all my thematic hot spots — love, lust, and loneliness. Blanco revels in memory and intimacy, and much like Tracy K. Smith’s poetry, his work makes me want to bed down and stay.

Because my parents come from Florida — Miami, more specifically — and because I still visit my maternal grandmother in Port St. Lucie (which is more on the central coast), I feel at home reading about Florida. I’ve never lived there, but I imagine the familiarity I have is similar to what Blanco feels about Cuba, minus the political upheaval.

We click beers — Viva Cuba — though
I want to believe I’d hate my life here

from “Poem Between Havana and Varadero”

And I think I’d hate to live in central Florida, though I could grow to love Miami. My mom still likes to tell the story of taking me to a Cuban restaurant, and how the waitstaff was so amused by this baby with a giant, blond-fuzzed head, who would shovel in all the black beans she could get her hands on. Even though I barely remember my last trip to Miami at nine years old, I don’t think I’d feel like a tourist. (For one thing, I’d be busy eating all the properly cooked platanos in sight and would therefore be unconcerned with other matters.)

Everything I am is here still, sitting
with my grandfather on lawn chairs
watching plum sunsets and the clouds
of his tabaco vanishing into the wind,
into the chirp of crickets echoing back
from stars that haven’t moved since
I first saw them, and the moon not yet
replaced by the glow of the city’s lights

from “Sitting on My Mother’s Porch in Westchester, Florida”

Motel is not all about Cuba and Florida, but about identity, and about feeling comfortable with our desires. Whether we know we will be at home farther north, or that we do not fit the tidy traditional narrative our families imagined, Blanco has the words. I loved his poems about his romantic relationships, and “we were no good at that kind of talk, / remember? We had no language for / those mysteries: two men consumed / with one another.” (“Cheers to Hyakutake”)

There’s also an underlying anxiety with the desire to sometimes be someone else — to be the specific someone another needs. Is he supposed to be his father? Is there another him somewhere out there in another parallel universe? And the biggest question of all: “Why have you been sad all your life?” (“Birthday Portrait”)

To be honest, I don’t know what I love most about Looking for The Gulf Motel because it’s just all so true. What I don’t understand about people who get so turned off by the concept of the Other, as though their poor little brains cannot possibly process anything deviating from what’s in front of their noses, is that we’re really not so different. We all want to be loved, desired, and not so sad. We have complicated relationships, romantic and familial, and it’s not so scary to say so. Richard Blanco is a treasure, his words a salve, and he fills me with the best sort of yearning. Most of all, he makes me want to get to work.

Related Posts:

• Looking For the Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco
• David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: A Poet and a President
• David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Viva Richard Blanco!
• The Last Book I Loved: “Please” by Jericho Brown
• The Last Book of Poetry I Loved: Revolver by Robyn Schiff

The Franklin Park Reading Series welcomes a killer line-up featuring The Rumpus’ Roxane Gay, Karen Russell, Elissa Schappell, Leigh Newman, and Michael Heald. Franklin Park, 8pm, free.

Tuesday 05/14:
Tonight join a great line-up of writers and editors for Literary Salon: Genuine Storytelling as they discuss how to apply old-school storytelling to new media. Featured readers/presenters include Michael Shapiro, professor and founder of The Big Roundtable; Ron Spillman, editor of Tin House Magazine; Halimah Marcus, co-editor of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading; Noah Rosenberg, founder and editor-in-chief of Narratively; Cynthia-Marie O’Brien, founder and co-managing editor of Hypothetical: A Review of Everything Imaginable; and Syreeta McFadden, member of LouderArts Project, Editor of Union Station Magazine, and Feministing contributor. KGB Bar, 7pm, free.

Wednesday 05/15:
PowerHouse Arena and Penguin Classics present the second installment of their new collaborative series with Sarah Manguso and Lewis Hyde discussing Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. Leigh Stein moderates. powerHouse Arena, 7pm, free.

Patasola’s Parlour returns with readings from Leah Umansky, Lauren Hunter, David Weisberg, and Elizabeth Devlin, as well as a reading from host Lisa Marie Basile and a special burlesque-reading by Emily Linstrom. As always, Patasola’s Parlour isn’t just a reading and will have music from Shayfer James and burlesque from Lorraine Sweetlorraine and Coco te Amo. Happy Endings Lounge, 7:30pm, free.

Thursday 05/16:
The Steamboat Literary Humor Series hosts Owen Egerton (Everyone Says That at the End of the World) and Iris Smyles (Iris Has Free Time), as well as others TBA. Greenlight Bookstore, 7:30pm, free.

Friday 05/17:
Eugene Ostashevsky, Matvei Yankelevich, and Edwin Frank will read from their newly-released translation of Alexander Vvedensky’s poetry An Invitation for Me to Think. This book is not only the first book of poetry released from the New York Review of Books, but the first collection of Vvedensky’s poetry in English. Get it; go to this reading. Unnameable Books, 7pm, free.

Sunday 05/19:
In celebration of the 130th anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge many renowned poets will gather for a marathon reading of Hart Crane’s poem “The Bridge.” Readers include Mary Jo Bang, Dorothea Lasky, Jorie Graham, Lonely Christopher, Eileen Myles, John Yau, and many more. Brooklyn Bridge Park, Pier 1, 3pm, free.

Related Posts:

• Notable New York: 5/6-5/12
• Notable New York: 4/29-5/5
• Notable NYC: 4/1-4/7
• Notable NY: 4/8-4/14
• Notable New York: 03/25-0331

All across America, men are inventing
the steam engine while women sew
the faces of presidents into quilts.
If a whistle is left alone in the forest
it may restore a measure of silence
to the world. Television
reminds me of a math problem
I got wrong on the SAT. Come on, Kathy says,
can’t you just enjoy it for once? By now we know
who patented the steam engine,
but think of all the men who tinkered around,
helping to invent it. Kathy is like one
of their wives, knitting a scarf
out of peach wool. Kathy, I say,
feeling a burst of goodwill,
I’ll give you all my collectibles.
Thanks, she says. I’ll take the John Lennon
dinnerware set for eight. As I walk home
to get it, the world looks like
a Brueghel painting and all the trees
are sending off beautiful
little equations into the air.

Let’s note at the start that the first law of thermodynamics is that energy is constant, just so we’re all on the same page. So: what’s going down here? I think a compelling argument could be made that ultimately Shapiro’s speaker’s exploding the idea of individual tasks (“think of all the men who tinkered around, / helping to invent it”), which is why the title’s significant: if energy’s not lost, then all the work done, in a big enough context, leads to every development. Maybe that’s a bullshitty metaphysical stretch, but it seems, at least according to this poem, sort of reasonable. Aside from that aspect, the poem’s fairly thick with what’d have to be called philosophical stuff: the half-joke about something in a forest and who’d hear it comes in for revision, this time as something to “restore a measure of silence / to the world,” and television—that greatest pleasure-giver, that narcotic of light and laughtrack—”reminds me of a math problem / I got wrong on the SAT.” Whatever you decide that those lines mean, they’re trying in their way to bend and tweak things —just look at the fact that the linebreak turns television from a math problem into a math problem the speaker got wrong.

And, of course, there’s math: math in the bit about TV, and math at the poem’s end, and it’s those equations I want to focus on for a second. Because, of course: regardless of the poem’s title or ideas, that’s just a beautiful image, the notion of trees “sending off beautiful / little equations into the air.” It’s just gorgeous, which is the other thing to note: Lauren Shapiro makes gorgeous poetry, and there are lines in this book that’ll stun—you’ll dogear every sixth page or so. But take a second to humor the possibility that there’s more going on: if the poem’s about energy being constant, and if the poem addresses notions of somthing’s invention coming not just from the Eureka-shouting discoverer but from everyone who tinkered up to the discovery, and if the poem ends with this gorgeous image or idea of trees offering/transmitting equations—literally things for other people to solve, or try to solve, anyway—that surely all adds up to something, yes? Maybe that’s an optimistic read, but I finished that poem sort of stunned at the potential Shapiro was seemingly offering: that the world is, as she says in the book’s title, Easy Math.

Here’s another—here’s “ESL Students” from early on in the book’s first quadrant of poems.

They ask, Why is it in the car but on the bus?
I turn up my hands and give them a pained expression.
There is a moment of quiet anger. Then they pop
open their blouses and the buttons fall
like foreign coins to the floor.
They stand on the desks. They kick the air.
We’re sick of this bullshit, they say.
I am very still. I look them in the eyes.
We’ve show you our tits! they shout.
Yes, I say quietly, and begin to unbotton my cardigan.
The class is silent. For some time we stand there naked,
they on their desks and me in front of the blackboard.
Then Maoki says, There is a difference scene
in every room in the world.
Our clothes are but the lint of a passing era, says Hana.
I will light a candle and watch the prayer moths
circle the room like used napkins, says Oui.
I don’t speak. A shadow passes over the left
side of my chest. Then the bell rings.

I won’t go through and nerdily take apart this one, but just look for a second at what Shapiro’s pulling off: these students don’t understand, or are frustrated by, the weird inconsistencies in language—they’re frustrated that the coding system of meaning is fucked or flawed. Fair enough, obviously. And in response, they get naked. Play along however you like, but it’s hard not to feel like they’re begging for language to reveal (at its best, shouldn’t language be perfectly transparent—shouldn’t I be able to say I feel good and have that be 100% clear to anyone I talk to? Isn’t one of the big crap deals of language the ambiguity, the way it fails?), and when they realize this new language (ESL students) won’t, they reveal themselves, like a dare: here’s what we’ll do, not language, do your part. Maybe that’s a drastic misread. But then it gets even weirder and cooler, with three students offering these strange lines toward the end, and what’s the teacher do? Doesn’t speak. Take the poem however you want: the drama enacted in it has to have something to do not just with communication, but with the ease of communication, with what we expect systems (math or language) to provide for us if we offer our dilligence.

I want to make clear, too: it’s possible the book is in fact doing none of this stuff, and it’s just a very good debut collection of poetry with sharply memorable lines (“When I reach out for you, there’s a tiny genie / in my right ear saying, Go! and an enormous / elephant in my left saying, What the fuck / are you thinking, you little shit?” from “First Man Gets the Oyster, Second Man Gets the Shell”; “I’ve always wanted to be the softest piece / in the chess set. I’ve always known / there never was a soft piece in the chess set.” in “A to Z”). Easy Math is, as far as I can tell, a really beautiful scattering, an attempt to find sense and sustenance (emotional, aesthetic, whatever). Such of course could be said about lots of books, but the big value in Easy Math that I can find is how it doesn’t quite solve, doesn’t quite offer anything as simple as closure. The last line in her poem “Dominoes” applies well to the experience of reading this book and being forced to reconsider the world around you, the one you’re trying to fix, or escape with books, or whatever: “Why couldn’t you see any beauty in that?”

Related Posts:

• Loud Dreaming in a Quiet Room by Betsy Wheeler
• Wanting Light and Buying Hammers
• Glass Is Really a Liquid
• A Struggle at the Roots of the Mind
• 10 Mississippi

Born in 1934 to Italian immigrants, Ceravolo got an engineering degree, served in the Army and wrote ardent, engaged poetry until shortly before his death from a brain tumor in 1988. He studied with Kenneth Koch, and won the first Frank O’Hara Prize for Spring In This World of Poor Mutts. He was always considered something of a “poet’s poet,” appreciated with detailed loyalty by writers who felt hugely grateful to have been introduced to his work. Collected Poems is the banquet with all the courses to validate their enthusiasm.

Koch called a Ceravolo poem “an amazing perceptual archaeology,” and that’s a good place to begin, with its engagement of what one senses (perceives), and also what one must dig for. Ceravolo’s combinations of words, line spacing and the music they make both amaze and stop breath.

“Passion for the Sky,” from the O’Hara Prize volume, gives a brief glimpse of how so much comes together with so little :

It is a flawless love poem, for the person who is loved and for other offerings night holds.

There is an almost relentless urgency in every line, demanding a level of being awake that could be enervating, but miraculously isn’t. With Ceravolo reading becomes both energizing and, more often than not, a time-out to praise, as well as a respite from surroundings. “Dive in!” I want to shout in response to “Inland:”

This poem makes me think of Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart,” as do other Ceravolo poems, in part because, deliberately avoiding stardom, he lived in mundane Bloomfield, New Jersey, where typical Springsteen fans lead lives of unheralded emotions . Bloomfield is close enough to New York to satisfy many appetites, and Ceravolo was an eager consumer, admiring Ted Berrigan and absorbing the grit and rough beauties that the area had to offer. He was also not completely immune to the lure of surface glitter, and posed for Francesco Scavullo, the lens master best known for glamming up Cosmopolitan Magazine for many years. The Wesleyan staff was wise to use one of Scavullo’s smoldering portraits for the cover of this book, as a way help hook a new generation on a talent that ranks with the best that American letters has to offer.

“End of the World” could be about any place, including the industrial parts of New Jersey not far from where Ceravolo lived and worked :

This is the kind of poem that makes me ache over the fact that Ceravolo is not with us to share a bill with Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Ed Roberson and other living masters. His physicality is ever-present, sometimes with the plain elegance of “Lethal Sonnet:’’

Ceravolo was a man of many parts, laboring to unite a whole and to do it with integrity. Engineering is an occupation that has more room for poetry (think precision, dedication, symmetry, and a lust for questions and answers ) than one might immediately assume. He made room to fall in love, to marry and have children and be attentive to those he loved. He fed his muse in ways that honor the sacred without ever crossing the line into a slackness that bruises the raw holiness he sought, found and celebrated. Sometimes his short poems say it best :

“Vision.”
Sacrifice love and record position
The goats balance
On beautiful mountains.

“Promontory”
At dawn whatever light
returns, my heart
becomes quicker and quicker
in the night.

He was also wounded by events beyond his control, taking them in as if they were his own, as if suffering for them could somehow heal individuals ripped apart by the decisions of others. “Lament #2 for Lebanon” is too long to quote in full, but like almost everything in this collection, shows bravery, balance, and pure art:

Tomorrow night before the winds blow down
the hungry trees : they’re swaying in the mist,
I want to stop this grove from filling.
Stars in our sleep ride the massacre
in corners of destruction’s nest.
Suns of chords
like dialysis or death.
unknown
Oh Lebanon
land of wood,
defoliated dreams, decapitated screams.
land of wood
Like a pawn you lie
in the middle of the beast,
in the midst of an
old land of sorrows
of controversy crossing the soul.
A dark walk in the desert!
A scorched memory’s toll!

The entire piece is about twice what you see here, and is, like every word in this volume, (including David Lehman’s rigorously appreciative introduction) a “scorched memory” and well worth the price, the toll of time spent with this incendiary material.

Related Posts:

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• Inside/Out: Selected Poems by Marilyn Buck
• Poets Beyond the Barricade by Dale M Smith
• “My Poets” by Maureen McLane

For me, the aspiring poet, this fact struck an ominous chord of self-doubt. Could I even be a poet? Was such a vocation even possible?

Happily, in college, I learned there were in fact living poets still writing poems, and I took a special interest in their lives. Before I would read a poetry collection, I invariably checked the index to make sure there was only a birth year, hyphen, and blank space after the author’s name. If there was a death year, the book was likely to remain on the shelf.

In 2003, I moved from Washington State to Pennsylvania to pursue an MFA in poetry at the University of Pittsburgh. Shortly after my arrival in Steel City, a new acquaintance recommended a poet to me. “You should be reading Denise Duhamel,” she said, with an air of authority. “She writes about everything you care about, and there’s no pretense—just really good poems.”

I remember my eyebrows arching with suspicion. “Is she alive?” I wanted to know.

Nancy smiled at me. “Very much so.”

I started reading Denise Duhamel’s poetry a full decade ago, and I never stopped. She may be the only poet about whom I can say that I have read everything and then read it all again. When I hear a line buzzing around in my head like, for instance, “believing, even then, in all kinds of answers” or, “It was just the alabaster moon, a little girl, and a young woman,” odds are, the line is from a Duhamel poem. Over time, her words, questions, and images have become part of the soundtrack playing in my mind.

I began teaching Denise’s poetry collection, Kinky, in 2006, in an Introduction to Feminist Studies course at Carlow University. Since then, I have continued to teach her work in Contemporary American Literature, Creative Writing, and Gender and Sexuality Studies courses, always to resounding positive response from my students. “We thought poetry was boring!” they say. “We thought poetry was hard to understand.” Sometimes students confide in me that they, too, used to believe that all the great poets had already lived and died. Yet here is Denise Duhamel—youthful, spirited, inspiring—a woman in the prime of life writing at the height of her powers.

Denise Duhamel’s poems have been reprinted in more than one hundred anthologies and textbooks, including nine volumes of Best American Poetry, and her individual poems have appeared in more than three hundred literary journals. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, she is professor of poetry at Florida International University in Miami.

Last year, in a stroke of outrageous serendipity, I joined the FIU faculty in Creative Writing, where Denise is now my colleague, my faculty mentor, and my friend. She remains not only one of the most inspirational and influential poets writing today, but one of the liveliest women and writers I am lucky to know.

***

The Rumpus: Over the last twenty-five years, since the release of your first chapbook Heaven and Heck in 1988, you have published eleven books of poetry, five chapbooks, and six collaborative poetry projects. You are not only an immensely prolific poet, but your poetry leaves the reader with the strong impression of someone who is always questioning, always seeking, always open to the world around you. Is there any topic you intentionally shy away from in your work, or a topic that you perhaps unconsciously avoid?

Denise Duhamel: Julie, that is a great question. Though it does seem like I have written an immense amount of work, over the years I have pushed the pause button. I have poems that I haven’t sent out for publication, mostly based on political/social issues.  I just felt too unsure of myself—and afraid I’d hurt the wrong people. Not that a poem can “hurt” someone the same way a physical blow can or even a mean remark can…I just felt unsure that my tone would be taken the right way and/or unsure of my own writing, that I couldn’t maintain the tone I wanted. These aren’t exactly failed poems—I have a lot of those that remain unpublished!—but just poems that haunt me a bit.

I don’t know if there are topics that I unconsciously avoid, but as soon as they pop up in my writing, I try to take on those topics, whether or not I publish the poems.

Rumpus: Are there poems you can write now that you couldn’t have written ten years ago, twenty years ago, or vice versa?

Duhamel: I think some of my earliest work is actually more challenging in terms of subject matter than what I write now. I had no idea, when I was writing early on, that my poems would be published or read by anyone, never mind people I knew or would meet.  I just wrote urgently—naïvely, I suppose, looking back. Now that my poems have a better chance of ending up in print, I am more circumspect. This is not to say I censor myself—I still write what I need to write—but I can’t deny that something has changed when I think about sending work out. Maybe it’s just growing older and feeling more responsible to the world.

On the flip side, I have more fun with sheer language now. I have internalized more in terms of craft. Twenty years ago I couldn’t have written the poems I now write, since I just didn’t have the technical chops to do so.

Rumpus: How has your process of poetry-making evolved over the years? What have been the constants in your life as a writer?

Duhamel: I started wanting desperately to say something, to make a point, to be heard—and I still feel that way. Free verse served me best when I embarked on poetry.

Over the years, I became more and more interested in the forms and techniques in which things could be said. I came to writing traditional formal poetry quite late. I remember wanting to take a sonnet class with Joan Larkin at Sarah Lawrence in the late 1980s and then chickened out at the last minute. She had published an amazing crown, “Blackout Sonnets” (in her book A Long Sound), and I recognized the way she was invigorating and enlarging the form. I wanted to learn how to write like she did, but I was so afraid of failure that I wound up becoming her fan instead of her student. I continued to read formidable formalists, like Marilyn Hacker and Molly Peacock, but couldn’t bring myself to try to even rhyme. I finally learned form through my collaborations with Maureen Seaton. We often played exquisite corpse, and she wanted to write exquisite corpse sonnets and pantoums. Maybe because I only had to come up with half of the lines, I wasn’t as afraid. Maureen gave me some training wheels. After writing with her, I was able to approach form on my own. In addition to writing in received forms, I have also had fun making up forms—Möbius strips and visual poems, particularly.

What has stayed true in my life as a writer is my dedication to writing—I try to write every day, no matter what—and the joy that writing has given me. I know writers for whom the act of writing is a necessary chore. They suffer to write great work. I am very lucky that for me writing is a delight.

Rumpus: Do you have an ideal or imagined reader you are speaking to when you write?

Duhamel: Yes…I am speaking to other women, usually younger than I am. That is not to say those are the actual readers of my work, but I picture such women in my head. Maybe they are my “poetry” daughters.

Rumpus: Poet Jean Valentine has written about you: “She chose poetry but she could have chosen music videos or comic strips: Denise Duhamel is wildly satiric, and we are blessed by this true and fierce mirror of our straight gate.” Why do you think you chose poetry? Or did poetry choose you?

Duhamel: As a teenager, I loved acting, painting, photography, and making films with my friend’s Super 8 camera.  But I always loved writing the best. I chose writing even before I knew poetry was available to me. (Until I was an undergraduate in college, I’d never read a contemporary poet—only poets who had died—and in some mind blip I assumed there just weren’t any poets anymore.)  I always wanted to be some kind of writer—I wrote plays and songs and “books” before I realized living and breathing people still wrote poems.

Rumpus: If you weren’t a poet and a professor of poetry, who would you be?

Duhamel: Jean Valentine may be right—I might have been a maker of comic strips or music videos. I remember my friends and I making music videos before there were music videos, before MTV. My favorite was one my high school friend Nancy made about Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?”—at the end she quick-cut the “actress” rocking a baby, with the same actress in the same position rocking a bottle of booze—no easy task as this was before editing machines. This song and Nancy’s image was my first true understanding of existentialism.

I also could see myself as a stand-up comedian, a fashion designer (for people of all sizes), a hairdresser, an earnest and eventually burnt-out politician, or the owner of a small bistro. But I fear that, without poetry, I would have simply been going through the motions, feeling like Peggy Lee in the song. But since I became a poet, I answer Peggy Lee’s question, “Is that all there is?” with a big “No!  There is poetry…”

Rumpus: Who/what have been the biggest influences on your own work as poet?

Duhamel: Jean Valentine and Jane Cooper were my professors at Sarah Lawrence College—and they were uncompromised in their art. They gave me models of how to live one’s life as a poet. I also studied with Michael Burkard and Thomas Lux, both of whom instilled a love of poetry of all kinds and were encouraging as any mentors I could hope for.

As to the reading of other poets, there are many influences—the short list would include Sharon Olds, Ai, Albert Goldbarth, Frank O’Hara, Edward Field, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. I also spent quite a bit of time at the Nuyorican Poets Café in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The spoken word community was significant in making me want to write accessible and urgent poems. Bob Holman, in particular, was an impressive figure.

Many of my peers (in terms, roughly, of age or generation) also are important for the possibilities they display in their work. I’m thinking specifically of David Trinidad, Tim Seibles, Dorianne Laux, Kim Addonizio, Nin Andrews, Terrance Hayes, and Tony Hoagland.

Rumpus: I remember reading once that Robert Frost was asked if he had to choose which poem from his entire body of work came closest to saying everything he needed to say, what poem would it be? Frost chose “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” What poem from your own canon would you choose?

Duhamel: Robert Frost is a lot better at this than I am, but here goes: I choose “Playa Naturista.”

Rumpus: I don’t know if Robert Frost was asked a follow-up question, but I wonder if you could say a little more about why you chose this poem.  “Playa Naturista,” as I recall, features the lines I love:

My husband and I slip out of our bottoms
and run like Adam and Eve, if
Adam smoked Dunhills and Eve
wore Ray-Bans.

Duhamel: Many of my poems up until “Playa Naturista” were concerned with body image—women’s in particular—and a speaker who was a little more than obsessed. The speaker in “Playa Naturista” is nude, as are all the people around her. There is a connection to these many imperfect bodies, and a gratitude and celebration of her body and others and the natural world.

Rumpus: In “Old Love Poems,” a poignant and powerful poem from your new book Blowout, your speaker begins:

I can burn the pictures, but not the poems
since I published them in books, which are on shelves
in libraries and in people’s homes. Once my cousin told me
not to write anything down because the words would be there forever
to remind me of the fool I once was.

Are there any poems from your body of work that you regret writing/publishing?

Duhamel: Not really. Ultimately, I think “my cousin” was wrong. Writing is performative—and while, yes, the words in essence will be there “forever,” poems are often about ecstatic moments rather than trying to pin down a particular truth of an event. The “truth” is the poem itself.  Just because someone writes a poem about a feeling she has does not mean that the feeling will stay forever. The truth of the emotion of the poem remains, even if the particular truth of the poet changes.

Rumpus: What do you wish you had known as a young poet just starting out? If you could give your former self one morsel of advice, what would it be?

Duhamel: While poetry was less professionalized than it is now, I still had this urge to win prizes and see my work in magazines, to get an “A,” as though poetry could be graded. I wish I had been more patient and less frantic about getting published. My advice to my younger self would have been, “Chill. Concentrate on the poems. Everything else will work itself out.”

Rumpus: One poem from Blowout that I especially love is an emulation of Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke with You” titled “Having a Diet Coke with You.”  In this poem, as in many poems from Blowout, you raise important meta-questions about the nature of poetry and the relationship between art and life:

because some things I want to be just for us
and there it is I suppose the problem
with all narrative post confessional transgressive poetry
whatever this kind of poetry is referred to as in this moment
how to keep loyal to the art without being disloyal
to the love and what to tell and what to hold back

This excerpt alone makes me wonder about a number of things. How do you classify your own poetry? Are there any classifications of your work that you would object to?

Duhamel: I have no idea, actually, where I fit in, in terms of poetry camps. At AWP conferences, I have been on panels about humor, collaboration, visual poetry, confessional poetry, gender, and the body, as well as tributes to Edward Field and Albert Goldbarth. I felt at home on all of them—most poets straddle more than one school. And unlike Woody Allen, I would be happy to be part of any (poetry) club that would have me.

Recently I have been reading about The New Sincerity. Jesse Thorn wrote a manifesto that includes these sentences “…’Be More Awesome.’ Our lifestyle: ‘Maximum Fun.’ Throw caution to the wind, friend, and live The New Sincerity.” I am, I guess, The Old Sincerity.

Rumpus: What have you figured out about keeping “loyal to the art without being disloyal to the love”?

Duhamel: I am still figuring it out—but I can tell you this. If you are my friend and say to me, “Please don’t write about this,” I won’t. I don’t think I could have agreed to that twenty years ago and would have been only able to say, “I’ll try my best not to!” I remember going to a poetry panel in the mid-1990s, and someone asked if Sharon Olds might be part of a cultural nexus that included talks shows like those hosted by Phil Donahue and Oprah. The audience just sort of giggled and the panel didn’t address the question, but I do think there is something to that notion. Not that Olds herself watched such shows—I have no idea if she did or not. But the question asked by the audience member suggested that there was something in the zeitgeist that allowed for and accommodated disclosure.

My students rarely wrote about personal topics when I first started teaching, but now they are more forthcoming with seemingly personal details. There is less embarrassment around certain issues. We have come far from the days of the first confessional poets. In 1959, M.L. Rosenthal actually referred to Lowell’s Life Studies as a “as a series of personal confidences, rather shameful, that one is honor-bound not to reveal.” I can’t imagine any reviewer writing that about a book of poems today, although I suppose TMI has made it into our lexicon for a reason. Reality TV takes this notion even further. Viewers follow “real” people, not only when they are in crisis or giving birth, but also as they do the most mundane things.

Rumpus: When I think about Blowout as a whole, I realize there is a lot of love in this book—loss of love, longing for love, letting go of love, discovering of love anew. You conclude one poem, “Fourth Grade Boyfriend,” with the line, “So what if he couldn’t dance? That was love.” In another, called “Sleep Seeds,” you write: “Back then, before I met you, /I thought gross.  Now I think love.” Did you begin writing Blowout with love in mind?

Duhamel: I didn’t conceive of Blowout as a book until after all the poems were written. I had been writing a lot of poems about love and loss, unsure what I would do with them. After my marriage ended, I had an urge to skip that part of my life completely in terms of poetry, not publish anything at all about it. I had failed another human being, and I wanted that part of the past in some sort of box (and not necessarily the box a prose poem makes). I had a fleeing notion that if I was going to write about this particular heartache at all, it would be a memoir making fun of Eat, Love, Pray, a book I found decidedly unhelpful and rather insulting to those of us who had to work for a living and get on with life.

I had pulled together some poems about that time for an e-chapbook, How It Will End, and I thought, “Okay, that’s that.” So when I tried to put poems together for the book that would become Blowout, I thought it would broadly be about romantic love, cultural expectations, and a speaker’s limitations. I included poems about early love and middle-aged love. The book’s first drafts made absolutely no sense because the most obvious poems were missing. It was only when I added the more tragic poems that the book started to take shape. The title comes from a poem that mentions a blowout (a party) but also carries the associations of a blowout, a sudden rupture in a car’s front tire. My friend reminded me last night that you can also ask for a blowout at the hairdresser, a term I hadn’t intended, but that, in a strange way, works too.

Rumpus: Bruce Beasley, another poet whose work I admire, said once in a graduate workshop, that we only write about six things our whole lives or in any given project. What would you say are the six things you are writing about in Blowout? (Or feel free to tweak the number as needed.) Are these the same things you have written about in your larger body of work, or have new topics/themes emerged in this book?

Duhamel: Bruce Beasley is right! Though I might have only five. When I was putting together Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems, I was sure I would have trouble segueing from the selections from one book to the next, as I thought I had written about so many different things—fairy tales, folklore, Barbie dolls, and more personal narratives. But the truth was I’d written about the same obsessions over and over again, just using different modes of access. The big ones, of course: love and death. I think my three others are: feminism, class, and violence (macro and micro). These were present in my first books and are also present in Blowout.

Rumpus: Some hallmarks of your work include its playful and accessible language, feminist sensibility, engagement with popular culture, and laugh-out-loud humor, all of which are characteristic of the poems in Blowout.  I also notice in this book in particular a number of cinematic references—for instance, the film An Unmarried Woman, with Jill Clayburgh, appears in two poems and provides the title for one, and another poem, “You Don’t Get to Tell Me What to Do Ever Again,” takes its title from a central character in the film, American Beauty.  How have movies influenced your life and shaped your poetry?

Duhamel: Frank O’Hara writes it best in “Ave Maria:”

Mothers of America
let your kids go to the movies!
get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to
it’s true that fresh air is good for the body
but what about the soul
that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images…

Mine is a soul that has indeed grown in that darkness. I love going to movie theaters, even in the era of movies on-demand and Netflix. When you are in a movie theater, no one can reach you by phone or other means. (I play by the rules and shut off my cell.) It is the only place I can think of where you can—and, in fact, are encouraged!—to eat in the dark without shame. In almost every book I’ve written, there is a reference to a movie—legendary films, actors and actresses, and forgotten made-for-TV movies. The leaps poems make are not unlike the cuts in a film. The miniature and avant-garde prose poets have perhaps the most obvious ties to film, as a prose poem in its shape is not unlike a movie screen.

Visual media is the dominant art form in our present day culture, whereas poetry is, at best, a proxy. Yet poetry and film are both “dream factories.” One of my favorite stories about Gertrude Stein (though it may be apocryphal) is that she and Charlie Chaplin met and talked about cinema and its possibilities.

Rumpus: Another of my favorite poems from Blowout is called “My Strip Club,” which was also reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2011. I find this poem laugh-out-loud funny—subversively so:

In my strip club
the girls crawl on stage
wearing overalls
and turtlenecks
then slowly pull on
gloves, ski masks
and hiking boots.
As the music slows,
they lick the pole
and for a tantalizing second
their tongues stick
because it’s so cold.
They zip up parkas
and tie tight bows
under their hoods.
A big spender
can take one of my girls
into a back room
where he can clamp
on her snowshoes.

I’m curious as to how the idea of “My Strip Club” came about, and how you decided on its placement in this book, where many of the other poems are more explicitly autobiographical and rooted in lived experience.

Duhamel: I wrote the first draft of this poem with my class during one our writing exercises. I can’t remember the prompt I’d given, but I was specifically thinking of two things, which I started writing about, though neither ever made it into the final poem. The first was an article I’d read about a Pole Dance Doll that may have been issued in 2008 by an Asian toy company to sell to off-price retailers, and I cite this in my comments in The Best American Poetry 2011. This doll was not a novelty item for adults meant to titillate—it was actually a child’s toy. A traditional-looking doll came with two accessories—a blinking stripper pole and disco ball. There was such an outcry in the blogosphere about the Pole Dance Doll’s inappropriateness that I didn’t have much to add. Some writers pondered—and hoped—that the toy was a Photoshopped hoax. Still, a similar toy, a Peekaboo Pole Dancing Kit, was pulled from Tesco shelves in Britain in 2006.

I began to think about the extent to which nude and semi-nude female bodies are commonplace in our present day culture and how young girls might be affected. I wondered if, at some point, this bombardment of images could possibly get boring and that concealing—rather than revealing—would awaken sexual desire. I don’t think that will ever be the case, of course, but I was intrigued to write a poem in which dressing was just as erotic as undressing.

I had also recently revisited Diane Wakowski’s “Belly Dancer,” which has an interesting take on the erotic performer.  The speaker of this persona poem asserts about her audience:

…most of the women frown, or look away, or laugh stiffly…
The psychologists would say they are afraid of themselves, somehow.
Perhaps awakening too much desire—
that their men could never satisfy?

Wakowski’s poem ends with an indictment of the men who “simper and leer”:

They do not realize how I scorn them;
or how I dance for their frightened,
unawakened, sweet
women.

The third and final section of Blowout begins with three short poems, as many of the poems in the second section are quite long. “My Strip Club” and the other two are like little flowers popping up after a long winter.

Rumpus: “My Strip Club” is decidedly shorter than many poems in Blowout, with its beautiful, tightly enjambed lines. Other poems, like “Take Out, 2008,” “Recession Commandments,” and “Having a Diet Coke with You,” are poems of length, size, and endurance.  And there are also some signature Duhamel prose poems, like “Worst Case Scenario.” Could you talk a little about your relationship with the line?

Duhamel: I love the line and all it can do—reverse the meaning of the line before; speed up or slow down a reader; serve as the pause before a punch line. I actually made a long one-lined poem called “The Line,” that I wrote out by hand with a silver Sharpie onto a typewriter ribbon. This visual poem is experienced by spooling the ribbon through the typewriter.

When Ka-Ching! was published, I asked the designer at University of Pittsburgh Press that some of the prose poems (which started out as a visual poetry project, poems on the back of play money) be printed sideways in the book so that they could retain the shape of the bills. I am interested in the confines of the page and busting through/off the page as well. A writer must let go of the line when writing prose poems, which brings its own pleasures.

The “biggest” poems I ever made are based on the psychological principal of the “Johari Window:” what the self freely shares with others; what the self hides from others; what others hide from the self; and what is unknown to the self and others. I constructed prose poems to “fit” on four sides of Venetian blinds. I made a prototype of the blinds, printing out the poem on vellum and attaching text to the blinds’ slats. Readers/viewers can “open” and “close” the blinds to reveal and withhold information contained on the poem on the other side.

Rumpus: You conclude the poem “Take Out, 2008,” with the lines, “Still, I am trying harder, faster. Still, I am trying to learn the art.” What’s next for you, Denise Duhamel?  Personally?  Poetically?  What are you most eager to learn?

Duhamel: I would like someday to write really good prose—pages of it in a row that make sense and have a plot of sorts. I would like to go to the Galapagos Islands and see a Blue-footed Booby. I am open to squeezing in whatever I can in this wonderful life. Instead of asking, “Is that all there is?” I seem, lately, to be always saying, “Wow!”

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And the stuff that is working? You know, that’s fine. That’s working, we say. Leave that alone, we say. Right?

We can be a little too apathetic, don’t you think, about a writer’s strengths in a workshop and in conferences, especially when we can always be talking about your weaknesses and changing you into what you are not.

And: What do you hear when we tell you what you’re not doing? You hear: I suck! You hear: I’m not any good! You hear: I’m a fraud. Or: You look around the room and you think, Look at her, she’s good at the very thing I’m not good at! I’ll never be that good at that. Never. Did you hear what mentor said about my talent, about what I’m not doing: I suck. I’ve got weaknesses, mentor said, and if I’d just spend more time on my weaknesses, I could turn them into my strengths.

Maybe not. Sure, you can improve a piece of your writing, you can edit, you can revise, you can make another version of the same piece. But insofar as your talents go, you’re never going to turn a weakness into a strength. Never. So face it, there’s a risk that the entire industry of creative writing education is screwing you up.

Now most of the time you’re in good hands, I trust that. Most of the time. But speaking for myself only, I know that I have messed writers up badly by focusing on their weaknesses. I have made writers feel frozen by focusing on their weaknesses. I have left writers feeling like they don’t know what to do to fix the weaknesses or to repair the damage.

I remember saying to one student: Kid, you could stand to work on improving your metaphor making and on interpreting your material better. Banal stuff. But, for emphasis and to disseminate my personality—which, to be honest, is my pedagogical methodology—I then borrowed a damning turn of phrase from T.S. Eliot: You don’t want to have the experience and miss the meaning, do you, kid? Fix your weaknesses, kid. Yeah, that’s it! Do that.

But let’s look at that poor writer. He thinks: “What’s wrong with me. I am terrible at making metaphors. And: Insight is really hard. Dave’s right.” And, now, because I’ve made the writer focus his mind on his obvious weaknesses, the writer does not think clearly about what is also true: He is pretty good at writing via character.

See, I hadn’t pointed that out or I hadn’t made that the focus of the writer’s attention. So now, the rattled writer thinks: “I love writing about characters from the 14th century. With costumes. And accents. In multi-part narratives. I love that kind of writing. But, metaphor? Insight? Dave’s right, I’m screwed! Because…” (self-lacerating writer goes on to think) “…that other guy in the workshop, now that guy can make a metaphor. Did you hear what he wrote last week about Nixon’s voice in those tape recordings? “His voice was like wads of spit.” I could never have thought of that. Did you hear what that woman wrote this week about interpreting bigamy? “The penalty for bigamy is six wives.” I couldn’t have made that up in a bazillion years! Dave’s right, I’m doomed. Maybe instead of writing fiction, I should write poetry. Poets get away with all kinds of shit!

But, c’mon, it’s not my fault for addressing my student’s writing that way, via weakness. This is what we do in the the offices of our working imaginations in America—in our student lives, our professional lives, our domestic lives, and most especially in our inner lives.

In America, we work to improve ourselves. That is America. To do otherwise seems unpatriotic.

In America we devote so much time in our lives to improving our weaknesses. Businesses hire consultants to help their workers improve their time management skills, their accounting skills, and their public speaking skills—whether or not they are ever going to be naturally good at any of those things. In America, we believe that you can do anything you set your mind to. Clearly, this is one of the great American myths. If you just focus on your weakness, you can turn it into your strength. From George Washington to Barack Obama, from Susan B. Anthony to Nancy Pelosi, the message is the same: You can do anything. You’re an American.

This assumption about self-improvement is pervasive even in the quieter arenas of our kitchens and living rooms—perpetuated from generation to generation. Our oldest came home with a midterm report card some time ago: 3 As, a B, a D, and a F. Which grades do you suppose we discussed for an hour? Of course! We talked about how to bring his weak grades up to the strong grades, the A’s. We talked about his need for improvement. We talked about: you can do better if you work harder. We talked about how to make his weakest results equal to his strongest results. We did not talk about the A’s except to say, don’t let them slip.

Our entire focus was on what he was not doing. Now, honestly, that was more like triage than parenting. It was certainly necessary. We were desperate. He needed to have someone in his face! But, honestly, it was not about him, it was about his grades. It was not about his capacities for growth or the growth of his best talents. Instead, it was about his results. In the end his report card was better. 4 A’s, 2 B’s, a C. But, again, to be honest, we more or less had the same conversation all over again. The jump from F to C was a relief. But it was still, in comparison to the others, a weakness. We talked about how to improve the weakness.

And, again, what did we not talk about? The A’s. Why not? Because The A’s appeared to have no room for improvement. The A is the top. You’re good at it—English, Social Studies, Drama. Let’s not worry about those. You’re good at those. You’ve a natural talent for those. They’re your strengths. Nothing to be concerned about. Just don’t let them slip.

Again, I want to say, that’s bull.

First, the A’s have an immense room not for improvement but for growth. And second, moving from F to C was a very strategic form of growth, or what we might more accurately call management of the weakness, not improvement, and certainly not transforming the weakness into a strength. But a strategic way to be satisfactory.

So I want to talk to you about your talents. I want to share with you some considerations, perhaps a little provocative for the sake of it, perhaps inconclusive but curious and intriguing all the same, about the relationship between the competing dramas of your talents: the relationship between strength and growth, between weakness and management—certainly as it pertains to your writing. But also as it pertains to your sense of yourself as a working writer, and if we get lucky, to your conception of your life, too. But I think I’ll let you extrapolate that on your own. Not my area. I’m going to focus on your writing, but I might as well focus on aspects of your personality as well. They are, without debate, intertwined.

When I speak of strengths and weaknesses, I’m referring primarily to three talent areas of your life as a working writer: 1) your skill sets as a writer, 2) your personality as a writer, which is to say your personality as a human being, and 3) your obsessions as a writer. Your talent base is based on your skills, your personality, and your obsessions all combined. You have strengths and weaknesses in all three areas.

Now I know you can beat yourself up as a writer. One of the joys of being a writer is to complain about your failures. And one of the core facts that you need to accept about being a writer is that failure is not only imminent, it is also generative (the topic in my book Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces. I hope you’ll read that book—not just because that oldest kid is entering college soon and his grades aren’t doing him any favors!—no, he’s a special kid, wonderful—but because it’s related to knowing the strengths of your writing life).

Now, when you focus only on the weaknesses in your writing, I suspect you might find yourself, from time to time, feeling one or more of the following things: You’re reluctant to write. You feel negative toward your writing. You treat even your best writing with disdain. You complain about why you ever took up writing and doubt your dedication. And you have fewer and fewer good writing experiences.

I’m confident every writer has felt one of these feelings as a consequence of considering your weaknesses. I hope that doesn’t make you feel bad.

Let me talk about me. I have to confess to a bad pattern in my life, though one that brings interesting experiences: My trajectory as a writer is that I learn a lesson. I forget it, then I have to relearn it all over again.

My teachers all told me a variation of the same thing about my writing when they first began seriously working with me on my poems in the late 80s and early 90s. They described a feature of my writing whereby I would, as it were, put myself on a large frozen lake on the page, take a couple of quick essential strokes, and then glide through the poem. I would head out into narrative or lyric or a dramatic skate and then swish my way across the lake of the page for miles, moving left and right across the lines, veering for the thrill, veering back to stay on course, all connected, all linked, all spread out, flowing, gathering, accumulating, tallying. Just this glide of interconnection, of flow, of addition. In fact, I LOVED writing like that. That was one thing that drew me to writing, I’m sure. I thrilled when my writing felt to me like a fusion between Walt Whitman and Hart Crane, between John Milton and Dante Aligheri, between the John Keats of the first 100 lines of the Fall of Hyperion and the William Wordsworth in the great passages of the 2 part prelude. Tomas Transtromer in the Baltics meets Yehuda Amichai in Jerusalem, 1967. A place where lyricism mates with meditation and both hum to the tune of a southern hymn.

I liked it when I accelerated. Here’s an example of that sort of glide from my first book, Shattering Air. The poem is called “Country Western.” It opens with a fragment, then a sentence that is divided by a colon: about a quarter of that sentence is to the left of the colon, and about three quarters of the sentence is to the right of the colon—and in that right-side portion of the sentence there’s a m-dash too that concludes some ways down the page with a period. Real Kristi Yamaguchi stuff.

And last month’s bluebonnet slanting over the meadowgrass path no one knows who cut. You could run down the hill fast, almost stumbling, Braes Bayou running sunward, out of sight, and toward the bend that drops into Buffalo Bayou, miles from Galveston Bay, miles from where the gulls, you think, day-trip in autumn: past the gray-wrought long breakers at San Louis Pass and Matagorda, past the first light warning from the lighthouse at Griffin’s Point, past Rio Hondo, past Boca Chica, where they turn above the telephone polls and span their wings and aim their white landing for the dumpsters, almost empty but caked with lice, you figure, and a pom-pom stolen from Friday’s McAllen-Edinburg game–that after one father swings a blade at another that hardly shines under the halogen lamplight refracting across the dumptruck gravel parking lot, and no one thinks anything of it, as no one thinks anything of the pom-pom stolen from a pickup someone named Lloyd drove someone named Carolyn in and parked at the Stop N Go and went in to buy six-pack cans of Lone Star. But to leap the matter of the bayou, six-feet, you had to climb up again, look over the highway traffic, then run down, take the last footstep half over the water’s edge. If someone were watching, you had to learn, right then, to fly. Mind the gull’s black-masked flight, and you find yourself on a wire, head to the left, to the right, monocular, cloud cover. As in you mind a girl’s hand in yours after she’s watched you leap. That’s why you begin to sing what you heard on the radio, driving to Galveston Island, I-45, hot and long, and a flat haze landing in the afternoon dusk, landing right inside you as a twin-jet touches down alongside at Hobby. You’re singing above the reverb: “If Drinking Don’t Kill Me (Her Memory Will).” It’s not memory now, but the break and break again of a wave you can’t interpret, can’t get inside, or love, or take with you when you’re gone.

“Ok, Dave, Ok, Ok,” is how one of my teachers began a critique of this poem over coffee. “Ok, Dave, here comes the glide.” A gentle pat on the back. And, “You know, You’re a little too handy at that.”

Now I understood my teacher to say, You’re good at that. I heard the words. And his meaning was only mildly pejorative, more like teasing. It was like saying, Oh, Jeez, there goes Walt Whitman cranking up his megaphone of multitudes again!” (As an aside, that can be tiresome in Whitman, but it is what makes Walt Whitman Walt Whitman, isn’t it? No one can imitate it. It’s entirely his and entirely his strength.)

But what I took from that characterization of my work as a glide-aholic is this: David, Stop doing that! Because by doing that, you’re not working on the things you’re not good at! Your weaknesses. Pacing. Intimacy. Space. Silence. Hesitation. Formal argument.

And so I have to tell you, I spent the next dozen years and more focused on my weaknesses. I made the assumption—as I used to tell my students to make—that the best of my talents, my strengths, were not worth worrying about. I would always be able to pull the switch and, you know, make the poem glide. I knew how to do that. Because that was my strength. Why worry about it? It would always be there. It would always want to come into my writing. Naturally. So, it was OK to resist it. To focus elsewhere.

Now it turns out I don’t have just one strength. Thankfully. The glide was a skill strength. And it turns out that I used other strengths over the next dozen years or so—via my personality and my obsessions. But I’ll get to that in a second when I talk about how to negotiate your strengths and weaknesses.

As some of you know, I coached elite diving for many years. I would spend months at a time with my divers working mainly on their weaknesses—even during the championship season—trying to turn their weaknesses into strengths. That was how you won competitions, I figured. They could spin great front, back, reverse, and inward. But their twisting was pathetic. Everything was wrong. They looked like a corkscrew with all the pieces flying off, a cross between Jack LaLanne and Evel Knievel. The fault was mine, no doubt, teaching twisting was not my strength.

As far as their skill strengths went: Those 4 other groups: front, back, reverse, and inward—I’d just try manage those. I figured they were already good at that. Let’s just, you know, keep that in place, not lose anything. And try to fix the fricking twisting dives.

In fact, working on the twisting dives was taking up all of our practice time. The result: They got sullen. They got unmotivated. They grew resistant. They fell back. And then, worst of all, other divers began to beat them.

Ok, bad coaching. Now, I don’t like to lose. So I soon figured out what I was doing wrong there in my coaching, and I changed my approach—and I’ll explain what I did in a second.

Let me talk about your talents as they pertain to your strengths and weaknesses.

But let me do something first and ask you to write down just four things. I want to ask you to consider your talents as a writer, honestly, without self-deprecation or self-hatred. But with clear assessment. In a moment I want you to scribble down two of your strengths as a writer and two of your weaknesses.

Now, just hang onto those.

Let me read to you some of the Introduction of a piece of writing by Tom Rath that is designed primarily to help business managers improve not just their own work experiences but, equally important, that of their employees. I read Tom Rath when I was unnerved by where all my time was going—I felt pulled in too many directions—I felt inefficient, and that I was doing parts of my jobs that were not suited to my strengths and by spending so much time on things I wasn’t suited for, I felt I wasn’t getting anything done.

Tom Rath is a researcher for the Gallup organization, the polling firm that has been doing research into employee attitudes and aptitudes for decades. In fact, Gallup makes very little money on the polling business. The real money is in how they use what they discover in their polling to work with business, education, and government leaders on worker productivity. Their discoveries fly in the face of our American ideal of self-improvement.

We Americans believe that we can improve anything about ourselves. Gallup discovered 1) No you can’t and 2) don’t bother and 3) you have a greater capacity to grow in your strengths than you will ever have to improve a weakness and finally 4) you can’t turn a weakness into a strength. So 5) focus on your strengths. For one thing, you’ll work more productively. For another, you will be happier. Which will make you more productive, then happier, then more productive, and on.

It’s not following your bliss, as the wise Joseph Campbell has put it. Instead, it’s identifying what you’re good at, your skill sets, your natural personality strengths, your fluid range of obsessions, and working to become an expert in that, in those elements, and in relying on those skills, personality, and obsession strengths to lead the way for your writing, in growing your strengths. To turn what you’re good at into what Rath calls near perfect achievement nearly all the time.

Wouldn’t that be a splendid place to exist as a writer–near perfect achievement nearly all the time? And even if it’s an impossibility, wouldn’t that be an ideal goal for a writer? That in the areas that you thrive, the areas that you identify as your strengths can enable you—if you focus there, invest your time there, gain more and more and more knowledge and experience and insight there—that you would be able to work at near perfect achievement nearly all the time. Here’s Tom Rath:

In 1998, I began working with a team of Gallup scientists…on Gallup’s 40-year study of human strengths…[and creating] a language of the 34 most common talents…[and developing an] assessment to help people discover and describe those talents…

Over the past decade, Gallup has surveyed more than 10 million people worldwide on the topic of employee engagement [and]… only one-third [of those 10 million people] “strongly agree” with the following statement: AT WORK, I HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO DO WHAT I DO BEST EVERY DAY.

And for those who do not get to focus on what they do best—their strengths—the costs are staggering. In a recent poll of more than 1,000 people, among those who “strongly disagreed” or “disagreed” with this WHAT I DO BEST statement, not one single person [among the 1,000] was emotionally engaged on the job.

In stark contrast, our studies indicate that people who do have the opportunity to focus on their strengths are six times as likely to be engaged in their jobs and more than three times as likely to report having an excellent quality of life in general.

[In fact, Rath goes on to illustrate], if your manager primarily ignores you, the chances of your being actively disengaged are 40%. If your manager primarily focuses on your weaknesses, the chances of your being actively disengaged are 22%. And if your manager primarily focuses on your strengths, the chances of your being actively disengaged are 1%.

Think of those percentages as they relate to your writing! Consider “manager” to be, say, you or the workshop or your mentor. Consider, if you feel ignored, if you feel like there’s nothing or no one paying attention to your writing, if you’re working more or less in isolation, then the chances—and just for the sake of argument, we’ll use the same statistics–the chances of your being actively disengaged in your writing are 40%. That’s fatal! If you or your workshop or whatever focus on your weaknesses only, the chances of your being actively disengaged in your writing are 22%. And if you or your workshop and mentor primarily focus on your strengths as a writer, the chances of your being actively disengaged in your writing are 1%. That is, if you focus on your strengths and write in a community that focuses on your strengths, the chances of your being actively engaged in your writing are 99%. I’m not talking about praise. I’m talking about growing in your strengths—your skills, your personality, and your obsessions.

Rath goes on:

The reality is that a person who has always struggled with numbers is unlikely to be a great accountant or statistician. And the person without much natural empathy will never be able to comfort an agitated customer in the warm and sincere way that the great empathizers can. Even the legendary Michael Jordan, who embodied the power of raw talent on a basketball court, could not become the “Michael Jordan” of golf or baseball, no matter how hard he tried.

It’s clear from Gallup’s research that each person has greater potential for success in specific areas, and the key to human development is building on who you already are.

Or, let me say it this way: It’s clear that each writer has a greater potential for success in specific areas, and the key to your development as a writer and an artist is building on who you already are.

Rath:

So a revision to the YOU CAN BE ANYTHING YOU WANT TO BE maxim might be more accurate: You cannot be anything you want to be—but you can be a lot more of who you already are.

So, how do you do that, as a writer. The formula is quite simple. But just as hard as you may have worked in the past to fix your weaknesses—becoming a more engaged researcher, say, or practicing your metaphors like five-fingered exercises, you’re going to want to work equally as hard—no, harder, smarter, more joyfully—in growing your talents or strengths, in expanding your greater level of interest in your natural abilities and strengths—in your skills, your personality, and your obsessions. In fact, what Rath makes clear is this: As far as your talents go, you have a greater capacity to improve a strength than you will ever have to turn a weakness into a strength. The more you focus on your strengths, the more strengths you have to develop.

The formula: Talent + Investment (time practicing, developing your skills, and building your knowledge and confidence base) = Strength (the ability to consistently provide near-perfect performance nearly every time).

Now you’re probably asking, what are Gallup’s personality terms. They’re things like: Adaptability, Analytical, Strategic, Achiever, Arranger, Connector, Relator, Harmony maker, Inputer, Intellection, Responsibility, and so on. You can take the test yourself online! $17 bucks.

Now you believe you want to write. You think of that writing life in a macro context. You say: I’m a writer.

But writers, like other artists, like everyone in life, have strengths and weaknesses. And so do you. Be honest about your talents: You are better at some things than other things in your writing. Look at your little list: Probably a lot better. You may be good at dialogue, but not plot. Yo may be able to yarn a tale, but you can’t finish anything. You remember every detail of your life, but struggle to decide what is essential in the aesthetic literary narrative. You only recall the essentials, and struggle to remember the time of year in which that thing your father said to you that still hurts was said.

You’ve got strengths and you’ve got weaknesses. What I want to say to you is, follow the strengths and manage the weaknesses. Better yet, get assistance with your weaknesses, but for your strengths…make that the study of your life.

For example, you’re not good at dialogue. Be like the shoemaker who is great at making shoes but not great at marketing or collecting bills. He hires a salesman, a marketing person. You should “hire” a dialogue guy. Better yet, befriend one! Show him your piece and say, “don’t worry about the plot or the imagery. I’m good at that already.” Just read for dialogue. Help me manage that. Help me fix that. So I can invest more of my time developing my talent for plot and description (which I love doing and enjoy more!)—and less time focused on a weakness that, in the end, risks making me feel bad about my writing, and perhaps not writing at all.

Hear me out: If you do this consistently, if you focus on your strengths and manage your weaknesses—not ignore them or neglect them, but manage them with precision, what do you achieve? Well, that’s what we call style. That’s what we call voice. That’s what we call insight. I read you and I think, wow, that writer is terrible at dialogue, but holy hell can she create a sensory world that is transformative, true, accurate, lush. No one writes with that kind of imagery skills. Dialogue, eh. Raymond Carver, could that guy distill a story to its essentials or what? Lush description. Not so much. And though it’s controversial, his editor, Gordon Lish, knew that. And so he brought more distillation into relief into Carver’s work. Lish was his Precision Guy.

I have a friend who is a prima ballerina, Gavin Larson. Just retired as a principal dancer for the Oregon Ballet when she was 35 years old. She says she’s very good at theatricality in her dancing. That’s true. Very good at long movements and stride. Her turns? For 25 years she’s struggled with her turns. She’s performed all over the world. But there are times when she looks across the dance floor, and dancer after dancer—whether they are merely promising, or less professionally successful than her, or they are her peers—she looks at them and sees how good their turns are, and then she begins to think she’s not a good dancer. She sees her weakness in other’s strengths. (In the realm of personality, it’s akin to judging your inner life by how you see other people’s external life.)

This is a formula for self-destruction. And I guarantee that there’s not a single person reading this who hasn’t committed that sin. You look at someone else’s writing—and while you may be inspired by it—you also may think, I’m screwed. That is not my strength. Therefore I must be bad. At everything. In my writing. And probably my personal life, too. And you begin to feel so crummy about your weaknesses that it obliterates your self-knowledge and confidence in your strengths.

Once Gavin Larson realized that she would never turn as well as what she knew the best turning to be, she understood that what she needed to do was learn to manage her weakness of turning, on the one hand, and simply to learn to turn as well as was needed. But also, on the other hand, she understood that she must invest more time, attention, practice, imitation, obsession, study, care, and joyful enthusiasm into her strengths of theatricality and all the rest.

The goal is not to bring your weaknesses and strengths closer together. The goal is to separate your strengths from your weaknesses in such a way that your strengths become obviously dominant–and in such way, too, that your weaknesses are neither obscured nor ignorable. Why? Because you can manage your weaknesses to become satisfactory or ordinary. So long as you are making your strengths…extra-ordinary. And only by focusing on your strengths will you get the opportunity to attempt that.

Jump cut back to diving. As a coach who was not doing a great job with my team because I was focusing on what they didn’t do well, what I learned instead was to be more strategic, to focus on my diver’s weaknesses only during the off-season. We’d come back from Nationals at the end of the summer, I’d say, “Let’s look at your list of dives, let’s analyze where the holes are, let’s focus on improvement there—while there’s no pressure.” Not neglecting the weakness, but managing it, breaking it down into its component parts and helping them learn to make their weaknesses non-detrimental. As for their strengths, we’d rest those, simply manage them during the off season—or spend time developing and prepping their strengths into more complex or difficult dives to be learned later. We’d improve the weaknesses incrementally, take what we could get, so that during the championship season, in terms of working on strengths and weaknesses, we’d reverse our approach. We’d focus almost exclusively on the strengths. Trying to increase the pleasure of diving, increase the performances, increase the confidence, and increase the consistency. And the weakness: the twisting? We’d maintain that at a manageable level so it wasn’t pulling down the strengths. In fact, if the strengths were good enough, they would obscure the weaknesses.

And here’s the deal as it connects to your writing—if the strengths are good enough—if you’re always on the hunt for ways to broaden your knowledge regarding your strengths and seek out near-perfect achievement nearly all the time with your strengths, sometimes even the confidence gained in working on the strength lead to greater success in the weakness? Why? The constant capacity for growth in the strength area is infectious! It leads you to greater confidence and that confidence leads to greater risk taking in all of your talent areas (even ones you know to be weaknesses)—because as you know, when you’re faced with a weakness in your writing, your writing gets timid. So, be bold with your strengths—that’s how you begin to create a style and clarify your voice and develop better insights, not by babying your weaknesses but by dramatically focusing on and growing your strengths.

Let me just pause parenthetically here. What do I mean by style? What do I mean by voice? What do I mean by insight? Style is the best of your skills operating at their best and most vital and muscular energy. It’s the thumbprint of your storytelling or lyricism. Voice is the most eccentric and unique flavor of your personality at its most eccentric and unique. And insight is the clarity you make out of your materials—the very components that obsess you and with which you are obsessed by. The strongest of your talents operating at full capacity, with the throttle yanked wide open—your skills, personality, and obsessions—that is how you create style and voice and insight.

If you play to your strengths—in your skill set, your personality, and your obsessions—readers will become confident in what you are good at. Plus, you learn that you actually can take a chance with some of your weaknesses because your strengths will cover for you! You’ve got room for a weakness to be satisfactory, or as I would say to my divers in the heat of the championship season about a dive that was always a struggle and weak, I would say: “That’ll work for now.”

Focus on your strengths and there’s a good chance that that attention and dedication can bleed over into your weaknesses, as well. In a similar way, consider one-on-one competitive athletics, say, tennis. What does player A do to player B? She tries to expose the weaknesses. I’ve got an almost decent backhand but a particularly poor forehand. I love it when my opponent feeds me a backhand. But what should my opponent do? hit the ball to my forehand. What should I do…make my backhand even stronger so the other player can’t get to my forehand! But I digress.

So, now I want to transition and ask a couple of focusing questions: 1. What happened to me with that glide? 2. What’s possible for you? 3. How do you handle this strengths focus in the workshop? 4. How do you take this approach as a writer?

My answer? Follow your strengths, manage your weaknesses, and don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys (now I don’t know what that last one’s about with the cowboys, but I loved the rhythm of it (the dactyls—DON’T let your BAbies grow UP to be COWboys) and making rhythms is one of my strengths! And now that I followed my strength of rhythm-making, put it in the title of this talk because it made me smile, the rhythm did, and I’ve thought about it—I now think I know what it means and it’s influenced what I want to say here, and I’ll get to that in a second.)

So: What happened to me with the glide?

I focused on writing poems that resisted the glide. I worked on forms. I worked on lyricism. I worked on invention. I worked on engaging the art as a provocateur within my own writing-ness. I worked on sentences and lines. I invented for my own purposes an American version of the Sonnet. I created a method whereby I built poems based on accident and juxtaposition and mixing tones and textures in language—anything to upset the glide.

Here’s an example from Wild Civility, a poem called “Xerxes”:

I found the grunge and their overstuffed pulks, and the magic cups sculpted and sold by privateers. Their travails

Pent up inside me and tormented my sleep. I could’ve splurged on the marginal. A tap behind the yes was a meltdown.

Dog by dog we bullied on. My thrill was the white-faced whistler at my side. He kept my spirits up.

And the women hiding behind their infants, we left them to their razed wits. It was stellar, I tell you,

A dulcet of little fixes, a footing with dignity, the dimpled, tough we, inheritors, bezonians.

I loved the izars of women, I loved the shock and luck of the women, even when they nulled me–I was voracious with rape and the whip.

No parliament could repatriate. There was no leniency. The gestation of it, the base hate of it, the tut-tutting

I heard in my mother’s voice, What limit? she said, What limit? So I’d call the whistler to soothe me,

To mitigate the stall, then the dogs would howl, and we’d soldier on with the lovely war.

The result? The glide forced itself into my writing anyway—in similar and other ways. My lines, which previously had hued close to pentameter, a ten syllable experience, doubled and tripled in size. The glide became my line length, my multilayering of sounds and diction, my means of adding varying registers of language. So I didn’t entirely eradicate the strength—because it was natural to my writing.

Now, in my newest poems, I’m fully confident that what I’m doing is embracing the glide with abandon. For example, a few months back I was giving a reading at an alma mater. I read from The Book of Men and Women. Then I read some new epistolary poems, poems which, I have no doubt, are importantly different from the poems of my last two books. The letter form is a glide form. One of my teachers was in the audience. I read the new poems. They were received well. It was fine. Whatever. I sat down next to my friend and mentor, and he turned to me and whispered, “David, I thought you’d never get back to writing like that. I’ve always thought that that kind of writing to be your best talent.”

Now that’s a story that makes me look good. It’s an illustration of my learning.

Now, of course, I have very specific weaknesses in my skills as a writer. I’m not that good at making images. I know it. I’ve always known it. And it’s not just images in and of themselves. It’s images that fashion a metaphoric conceit. I can describe things, you know—though there are days when I feel like I can’t even describe the color of a dog. But images are not my strengths. I spent a lot of time trying to be a more imagistic writer. In fact, I wrote an entire manuscript between my first and second books in which my entire methodology was to make imagery the dominant mode in the book. Those poems are in a box in the back of a closet in my office, somewhere.

But, even if you can’t turn a weakness into a strength, no matter how hard you try—and I believe it’s not worth the time trying because you can gain so much more capacity, and maybe joy, too, by actually growing your strengths—you can locate elements in your weaknesses that so interest you—that you’re so obsessed with, say, or as Judith so powerfully illustrated, that come to you and from inside of you simultaneously (what’s the difference!), you can achieve something that’s actually quite essential in your writing.

I’m not good at description, at writing images. But I’m good at working with a couple kinds of images. Light. Wind. Sky. Horizon. Water. It shouldn’t surprise you if I tell you, I’m from the Great State of Texas. Let me say those again: Light, wind, sky, horizon, water…that is Texas in 5 words. In so much of Texas, especially the East Texas of my childhood, the landscape is more like skyscape, lightscape, horizonscape. Those particular images connect to my personality as an expatriate Texan. I like describing those things. No, those things mean something essential to my imagination…I have no choice. So here’s how it works: My obsession strength trumped my skill weakness—indulging my obsession in those particular images was a means to manage my weakness of not being so great at making images generally. And if you were ever to read my work and analyze my images, you might be inclined to think, that dude is obsessed with light, wind, sky, horizon, and water.

But, look, I’m not the message. I do what I do. You don’t need to do that.

Let’s talk about you.

It can be difficult to define your own talents and strengths as a writer, I know that. And you can learn yourself into your strengths, this is true. You may not know right now entirely what your strengths are—And you can experiment to discover what your strengths are. You don’t have to know right now what your strengths are, regarding your skills as a writer. Your personality strengths, your obsessions—these may be a little more fixed. If you’re fastidious in life, you’re probably fastidious in your writing. If you’re deliberative in life, you’re probably deliberative in your writing. If you’re competitive in your life, you’re probably competitive in your writing. And so on.

It would be helpful to have your mentor or a peer list what they believe are four or five of your strengths as a writer. And to be certain you’re getting a decent assessment, require four or five of your weaknesses. And it can be true that one way to determine your strengths is to try writing differently. If you’ve never written in the voice of a dog, then try it, and if it comes naturally—don’t stop. Try a different animal, an armadillo, a butterfly, a pig named Wilbur. Also, be sure to listen closely in workshop to what others are actually saying. I know of workshops in which the only thing the group was asked to focus on was where the very best energy was in the poem. By focusing on the best, on the strengths, the lines of possibilities in the poem became more clear—and the enthusiasm to make a meaningful poem based on the best of it likely became more inspiring. The means to revise the poem was designed to maximize the poet’s strengths. I often say to students, identify the best writing in your poem, and get the language in the rest of the poem to compete with that.

But let me say this too: I do believe that your strengths exist already. They’re part of your personality as a writer, part of your personality as a person, as I say—and the Gallup test might be very helpful in that regard. I think that there is a primitive element at play, too: That which might have driven you to write in the first place is likely, possibly, at least, at the heart of one of your strengths even today. Go back and consider that impulse. See if that’s helpful.

Two examples: Two years ago I was assigned to teach at a university a course in English Composition 101. First time I’d taught the course since I was a graduate assistant. The Department handed me the required textbook. I took it home. I skimmed through it. I felt like a Martian watching surfing—what the hell is going on in those rhetoric books!

So I “forgot” to put in my book order.

First day of class, I arrived, I swear, with no real conception of what I would say after I walked into the door beyond, hey, how’s it going. And Wendy Willis can verify this. As I was walking over to the class I was talking to her on the phone—and she asked what are you going to do, and I said, I haven’t figured that out yet.

I entered the room. 27 kids. I said, hey, how’s it going. Everything was going according to plan! 27 kids. English 101. You do the math. Me, professor—sans syllabus, sans methodology, sans experience (sort of—certainly not composition teaching experience), sans, sans, sans. In that moment, I was a walking embodiment of weaknesses. I did not know how to teach English 101. I did not want to know how to teach English 101.

“What are we going to write in here,” one student offered.

“How many assignments,” from another.

“How many pages per paper,” another.

“Do you grade grammar?”

You know, I write poems, a little prose that seems to always get me into a controversy, I write a column for the newspaper on any poem or poet I want, I comment on political events in a major American publication…all at my leisure. One of my strengths as a writer is I don’t lack for drive to write. But in that room, I didn’t have answers to those questions. They are not questions that interested me as a writer or as a teacher of writers.

So I went to my strengths. “What are you interested in?” I asked. Collective, what? “What do you care about,” I asked. Group stare. “You, what can I expect that you’re going to write about in this class?” “You, what do you plan to say in this class in your writing?” “You, what will you be turning in?” “You, what’s on your mind?” “You, what one subject do you want to focus on for the semester, so you can write about that? What are you passionate about? What do you care about? What drives you? What’s going to inspire you to write? What do you want to change in the world? One subject, one semester, what’s it going to be? What are you going to write? Tell me on Thursday. We’ll get started then.” See what I did there? I played to my strength—I’m not a composition teacher. So I turned my composition class into a creative writing workshop. I’m not good at one, I’m better at that other, I’ve spent decades working on being better at the other, and in the end I gave my students my strengths as a teacher.

It was a great semester. Once each student decided what they most cared about, the subjects for writing just spilled out. The forms that the writing most required became necessary and not optional, certainly not assigned. The audience to whom they addressed the writing became obvious.

They too followed their strengths. And their weakness as students, as writers—waiting to be assigned, waiting to learn how to please the professor, timidness in their own agency—disappeared. They wrote about what they cared about, and they cared about how that writing worked. Why? Because they were writing about something important to them, let’s call it their obsession, and that was connected to particular strengths in their personalities—and all of that stimulated, inspired, and focused their skill sets as writers.

2nd Example: Recently I had the pleasure to work with a young writer who discovered that two of her strengths as a writer are an interest in character and an interest in puzzles, complexity, and formal intricacy. What did she do to grow her strengths? She wrote a long sequence in the voice of a contemporary princess—really the princess is a fascinating contemporary metaphor. And she took on a focused, deep study of poetic forms. If you’ve seen her writing recently, you would see that her writing is often dramatic monologues in meter and rhyme.

And now that she has learned that, for instance, puzzles and formal complications are a genuine interest of hers—and that she has a strength for them—she’s set herself on a course in her writing life that is all about exploring puzzles, in writing, in the world, in relationships. She’s the puzzle poet!

Now, her interest in puzzles can also make her poems seem to have not enough space, not enough silence. She knows this. She knew it without me telling her. We all easily recognize our own weaknesses. And, speaking for myself, no one is harder on my own weaknesses than I am. And this student recognized hers, no problem. But not handling space well and not handling silence well in he poems, she would agree, was a weakness a year ago too. And probably a year before that. And probably after next year too and beyond next year.

Find the people in your literary life, in your actual life, to help you manage your weakness so that you can devote more time to building capacity upon capacity in your strengths.

Now, was my diversion for a dozen years into everything non-glide an escapade? Maybe. I took the Gallup test—now, ok, it’s a personality test. And one of my strengths, according to the test, is achiever. My achiever theme, according to Tom Rath, helps explain my drive. Quote: “Achiever describes a constant need for achievement. You feel as if every day starts at zero. By the end of the day you must achieve something tangible in order to feel good about yourself…You have an internal fire burning inside of you. It pushes you to do more…After each accomplishment…the fire dwindles for a moment (sadly, the key phrase here is for a moment!), but very soon it rekindles itself. Your relentless need for achievement might not be logical. It might not even be focused. But it will always be with you…It is the power supply that defines the levels of productivity” in your work.

There’s an argument to be made, I suppose, that while I might have taken this very advice that I’m speaking of today earlier in my career and stayed focus on the glide, another theme of mine, achiever, made me interested and, really, driven to pursue other writerly skills. I didn’t hear my teachers correctly because I needed to do other things also. That’s just me. And now that I’ve spent fifteen years in the wandering phase of my writing, I have a good vision of what I most ought to be doing as a writer. What strengths most push me forward, drive me, and set me up anew on the glide path. And, by focusing on what I believe I’m good at—lyrical gliding—I know I’m going to skate myself into new discoveries that stir up and reflect my obsessions, and that lead me to keep skating to reach the goal of near-perfect achievement nearly all the time—even though, I know, that’s just an ideal. I can fail at all of that a lot of the time, too. But: Better to have large ambitions than petty ones if you want to be a writer, is what I say. If you’re going to miss, miss big. No one likes a writer with petty ambitions.

So, look, in the same way that writing a line of poetry, a sentence, a paragraph, a scene is a journey of discovery in the micro universe of your writing, so too is the journey of self-discovery as a writer. An honest assessment of what you enjoy, what you’re good at, what you’re interested in, what your personality engenders for you as an artist, your skills and obsessions–all of it is available to you if you would focus there, on your strengths. If you would work especially well and hard on improving what you’re already good at and only managing those areas that you are not naturally inclined toward, your non-strengths. Your goal must be—must be—not to become something you are not, but to be more of what you already are!

Follow your strengths, manage your weaknesses…now what about those cowboys?

I’m going to be tough on you here. In a writing workshop, the Side B of all of this is true, as well. If you’re great at dialogue but a weakness is plot, don’t take the lead in the workshop in trying to school your fellow writer in how to improve their plot. You don’t know what you’re talking about—and you know it! How often I’ve heard, “Well, I’m not very good at rhyme, I never rhyme in my poems, and I don’t like to read poetry in rhyme, but I think the rhyme is not working well here.” Well, that’s helpful! And besides, how would you know if it’s working well or not working? Don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys that start shooting up other writers’ stories or poems about things you know are not your strengths.

Instead, give your fellow writers the benefit of your strengths, the best of your talents. If, for example, you’re an expressionistic poet and someone brings in a representational poem, don’t try to show them how to turn the representational poem into an expressionistic one—and vice versa—if you’re a representative poet and someone brings in a surrealistic poem, don’t try to strip of its eccentricities because you’re unhinged when there isn’t a plot. If, for example, you’re good at dialogue, leave it all out on the field with dialogue in the workshop. Help them there. But, let plot go by. Leave plot to the plot person. Not good at plot? Can’t frame a scene? Get a scene guy. So that you can invest more of your time in what you’re good at, be more productive in what you’re good at, and make that better and better and better. Because if you don’t, you may never get the chance. If you dwell in the weaknesses, you’re going to struggle and wind up headed in the wrong direction. Your strengths will go untapped.

Here’s Tom Rath again:

Our natural talents and passions—the things we truly love to do—last for a lifetime…Mark Twain once described a man who died and met St. Peter at the Pearly Gates. Knowing that St. Peter was very wise, the man asked a question that he wondered about throughout his life.

He said, “St. Peter, I have been interested in military history for many years. Who was the greatest general of all time?”

St. Peter quickly responded, “Oh, that’s a simple question. It’s that man right over there.”

“You must be mistaken,” responded the man, now very perplexed. “I knew that man on earth, and he was just a common laborer.”

“That’s right, my friend,” assured St. Peter. “He would have been the greatest general of all time, if he had been a general.”

So, you see, following your strengths is not just plain advice, it might actually be essential to the trajectory of your destiny.

This story is a good illustration of what can plague you as a writer, too. You could spend many years focused on the wrong set of skills, headed in the wrong direction. Or, you could take the risk and locate what you are most interested in, in what your best strengths are as a writer, as a story-teller. Interested in character, it’s ok to write in the voice of an imaginary princess. This is why it’s so important to focus your time here and elsewhere on developing your strengths as a writer—as early as possible in your writing career—and to help others around you build on theirs, too. Focusing on your strengths will start to change the writing you do, and because you’re so focused on your strengths, chances are good that you’ll write better, with more urgency, and more success. And your weaknesses will turn out ok, perhaps better. But don’t expect too much more. Don’t waste the time, anyway.

That success, ultimately, is intrinsic, something truly internalized. And yet, you come into writing with some externalized ambitions. You work at becoming a writer and it’s natural to wonder what’s on the next horizon when you’re done—what will your writing be like, what can you accomplish, what can you improve, how can you get published, what is on the next horizon and the next and the next.

There are no horizons. And even if you arrive at one, believe me, there’s another mountain beyond that. It’s like Lewis and Clark in the Rockies…there’s just another ridge beyond that one. And then, you realize, there is no secret passageway either. You’ve got to paddle the whole Columbia River yourself and your canoes keep breaking. And like Lewis and Clark, no one has to die on the journey of discovery, and hopefully, nothing in you has to die either. (And I know, I know, I told you I’m not that great with images and conceits—Lewis & Clark, sorry!—Lewis & Clark is grand Northwest cliché! Don’t blame me, I’m from Texas.)

Anyway: There are no horizons—not externally. But there are many internally, intrinsically. You have horizon upon horizon upon horizon inside of you—and the route to discover those is through your talents as an artist, through improving not your weaknesses but your strengths: through using your strengths in your skills, in your personality, and your obsessions to grow in the right directions as a writer, in the natural directions, in your best directions.

Writing, as with other arts, is a great human adventure of hope and dream and connection and life. If you step back for a second, consider what you’re good at, and then…do that, again and again and again and again. You’re going to place yourself in a zone of creating where you make things—you make things that never existed before, ever, in the literary world. You’re going to make things that you didn’t think were possible for you to make. You’re going to exceed beyond what you ever dreamed was possible as a writer because you’re getting better and better at what you’re already good at. You’re going to create a style that only you can create, in a voice that is wholly your voice, with insight that is honestly authentic—because you’re working on expanding the best and most productive of your skills, and personality, and obsessions.

We need that! We need you to write like that! And when you do that, we will be able to say that’s really…strong writing. So, please, I’m asking you. Do that. Do that. Do that for all of us.

***
An earlier version of this essay was delivered as a lecture at the Rainier Writing Workshop in Tacoma, Washington.

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Boehl’s book has an intriguing and eclectic construction. Before the book proper begins, Boehl presents a cast list—including Jack Spicer and Mark Rothko as rival pirate captains—that foreshadows the book’s theatricalities and its concerns about art as a replicative device. This cast list gives us a glimpse into the tension between reality and a constructed presentation (or representation) that runs throughout the book. In the opening poem of the book’s first section (both of which are named “Map (of the New World),” the speaker interrogates mental representations and constructions and their disconnect from reality:

Remember how smoke
issued from the stacks
like the dreams of factories
when the factories were the dreams of cities
and cities were the dreams
of our immigrant parents?
There are no factories. The city
rises in a cacophony of billboards
dreamt for us
like the factories and the steam
of our orphaned language.

Despite the mental conjurings of smoke and factories and cities, we’re reminded that these are really just constructions, and not real things with the negating gesture of “There are no factories” and, in the poem’s closing line, “There is no city.” The gesture is the same one from the “No Hay Banda” scene in Lynch’s surrealistic film Mulholland Drive, which shares with this poem–and the book itself–a deep interest in the disconnect between the real and the representation. It also seems that the poem’s opening question, and the imaginative leaps the simile and metaphor initiate, suggest unstable ontologies and referentialities, as affected by the need to mentally construct/reconstruct (“remember,” “dream”) and illustrate things via comparative proxies (simile and metaphor).

I’m also drawn to the idea of “orphaned language” in this context of interrogating signification and representation. By the sheer nature of this book’s project, many of the poems have a fair amount of self-consciousness about both themselves and the way they accumulate to produce the book’s narrative trajectory. It does not seem surprising, then, that language may be stripped of its progenitors, and exist for the sake of itself. These concerns with the rootlessness of both language and experience suggest the closing lines from another poem in the “Map of the New World” section, “Lighthouse,” when the speaker asks, “Is it true / that to sever our roots is death / or is there life on the ocean?” We’re left to consider with the speaker if it is possible to exist in the middle of the sea, “like the ship / rootless / watching the world / unwatched.” And it seems, according to Kings of the F**king Sea is also a subtly political work that interrogates past actions and present motives, and how the intersection of the two creates the speaker’s present self. A recurrent tension runs through the book in which the speaker expresses his desire for belonging while ignoring the costs. The enjambments in “Ceremony (Heroes),” suggest this tension:

This is the part where
the admiral
tells you you’re great
for all the terrible things
you’ve done to those people.

The enjambments enact the speaker’s paradox of acceptance and clean conscience, with a figure of importance providing affirmation, though for terrible things and ultimately the recognition of fault by the hard self-referentiality that comes with the personal pronoun that begins the last line of this section. The breaks affect the speed of the lines—and the speaker’s thoughts—in such a way that we are painfully aware of the speaker’s suspicions juxtaposed against his struggle to accept the accolades and community. The poem concludes with the lines

And I looked
at the other sailors
their tables decorated in ribbons
and I wanted to be on the sea
forever and ever.

In these lines, the speaker answers his previous question about whether one can live on the sea, unrooted to the world. In finding community in the other sailors, he indeed establishes roots, though only temporarily, soon collapsing beneath the weight of his loneliness made greater by the sea. In the end, he realizes that “Nobody wins. Some just lose more beautifully.” Kings of the F**king Sea is a book that compels us to cling to the imagination and the “desire to remake the world” that it entails as a way to salve our loneliness, which comes at us ever like a flood.

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