After getting a string (a long string) of rejections from a number (a large number) of journals rejection is somehow on my mind. The rejections came pro forma and personal with either a slap on the back, or a “gee, we almost took…”. MLK’s quote is apt for near misses. Sometimes a pat on the cheek is harder to take than a hard slap; you’re not sure whether or not to offer the other cheek.

With a slap, you at least know where you stand. I’ve had near misses with encouragement to submit again only to be rejected with another “we liked your poem, but…”. I know that an offer to resubmit isn’t a prelude to an acceptance, but I can’t help feeling having been set up (“oh, c’mon, jus’ take the damn thing…”).

The writer Henry Miller said he liked clean, quick good-byes with no looking back, no regrets. I like my rejections that way, too. Give me my eggs over and stepped on, not over easy. If I can’t handle rejection, what right have I to make a submission in the first place?

An Impression of Regret

Try to capture in oils

the rapture of fine rain

while painting in a torrent.

The pigments run and fade

like a flower’s colors

when severed from its stem.

Are we miserable

when we should be blissful?

Regret forms the foundation

for all future building.

 (copyright by Geordie de Boer. Appeared in Right Hand Pointing, July 2011)

This poem could be titled “An Impression of Rejection” and work as well. (Check out this fine journal, Right Hand Pointing,  by the way.) Try being “ sunny and bright” in a downpour of verbal abuse. Your colors will run and fade. But, rejection can provide the springboard for achievement. By the way, I did have some acceptances after that string of rejections.

Oh, yeah – here’s a painting titled “Rejection”.

http://fineartamerica.com/featured/rejection-paula-andrea-pyle.html

Rather uplifting, what?

http://www.albany.edu/offcourse/issue46/joyce_brown.html

Some research is required to fully appreciate this poem, although it can be enjoyed without doing any. I’ll share a bit of mine, but I suggest you do your own, too.

First, some particulars. Rock Creek Cemetery, in Washington, D.C., is located across from Soldier’s Home and its associated cemetery, burial site of Civil War soldiers, as well as other armed forces dead. President Lincoln and his family used a cottage on the grounds, built in Gothic Revival style, to escape the heat of summer and of politics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Creek_Cemetery

The poem‘s phrase St. Gaudens’ Peace refers to Augustus Saint-Gaudens‘ (American sculptor) allegorical statue called, variously, The Peace of God that Passeth Understanding, or Peace, although the public referred to it as Grief. It was commissioned by the writer Henry Adams as a memorial to his wife, Marian “Clover” Adams.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Adams-memorial-SaintGaudens.jpg

Clover Adams, while by accounts enjoying a happy marriage and fulfilling life, committed suicide. Meanwhile, Mary Todd Lincoln lived a life of tragedy – the war and its affect on her husband, his assassination, her lifelong depression, her divided loyalties due to her Southern connections, her being an “unsophisticated Westerner“.

Above are the facts used by Brown to set the tone for her poem. Let’s look at the setting, a cemetery, where the dead rest in peace, while friends and family are left grieving and “grazing among stone angels and recumbent marble lambs” along with the Union dead.

And who finds grief in Rock Creek Cemetery? Henry Adams, Mary Todd Lincoln, and the survivors of those buried there. Visitors, too, find grief – in the Saint-Gaudens statue, in thinking about wars and their victims, in considering our own mortality.

But cemeteries also stir feelings of peacefulness in their park-like grounds, the absence of society’s noise, the wind soughing past trees and tombstones. And here in Rock Creek Cemetery we even find Saint-Gaudens’ Peace in its final resting place just like the dead are in their final resting places.

Yet, the poem raises contradictions. The statue is both Peace and Grief; the dead are at peace while family and friends grieve; cemeteries are “places of rest” even for souls in turmoil (Clover Adams and Mary Lincoln); a monument to a loved one, but no marker with her name – unnamed grief, the unnamable peace that comes from God. Asian poets, such as Li Po or Basho, saw parting (death) as both joy and sorrow; the opposites, like light-dark, that are required to make sense of the world. Through these ultimate contradictions, or necessary polarities, come meaning.

An aside re: Lincoln’s cottage by the Soldier’s Home in the architectural style called Gothic Revival. The word Gothic conjures up images of gloom, darkness and morbidity, which adds to the poem’s imagery.

I find the imagery well structured and consistent throughout the poem. Key words and phrases – by herself, peace, grief, sits heavily, surrounded, to name a few – drive that image forcefully right to the end of this complete, self-contained poem.

Read it, think about it, and add your critique if you’d like.

In 2007 I began to develop motor problems. I played the guitar and sang – John Prine, Guy Clark, Jerry Jeff Walker stuff mostly – until the fingers on my right hand couldn’t pick anymore. My voice got shaky and weak. I had trouble walking. After two MRIs, blood tests, and poking and prodding by a neurologist the medical profession can’t tell me what I have. At least the experts could tell me what I don’t have, and that’s something at least. Nothing comes, or something comes and it’s nothing.

What I had to learn was patience. Patience with experts who weren’t; patience in speaking, eating, walking; patience with myself. I’ve slowly gotten better, but at the pace I’m improving I’ll be able to finger-pick my guitar about when our economy improves. That long? Yeah. I expect for poems to flow again before either my picking or the economy improves. Poems will come again.

Tony Hoagland in his book of essays on poetic craft, Real Sofistikashun, discusses how some poets transform their style and some become trapped in a particular style. When I think of poets who seem trapped in a style I think of Kay Ryan, or John Updike. I love reading both and can read their work over and again. I bring this up not to judge poets who don‘t transform their styles, or to belittle Ryan and Updike as intransigent. In struggling with my not-writing I wondered if I needed to change the way I write.

Look around this site – tumble-down poems ala Kay Ryan; prose poems; “Brautigans”; lyrics; narratives. I don’t need to change styles, maybe I need to settle on a style. When I write, I often start with a line that’s stuck in my head. It leads me into a style by which I complete the poem. Hence, the eclecticism of my style. Sometimes I’ll pick a subject then write about it, but that’s the exception not the rule. My best poems come all of a piece, then I begin to edit during which work I settle on the style. If I can’t complete it when I first start writing it doesn’t get written. My notebook is full of incomplete poems, line, and ideas.

To unstick myself from the mudhole of not-writing I’m beginning at the beginning. When I first started writing poetry I wrote in forms. Let’s see…think I’ll write a villanelle. I switched to free verse when I couldn’t get published. I’m not going back to formal verse, but I’m picking  a type and delving in…narratives, or prose poems. Also, I’m reading poetry again. I’d stopped and when I read poetry I write poetry. Time will tell if it works and I’ve become a patient man. But, like Hemingway, when I don’t write, I feel like shit.

I did sketch out a “poetry primer” for friends and family who are (sometimes) interested in my writing. Like other poets, I’m concerned that reading poetry is dying. I thought if I could give them an analysis of a published poem I might spark some interest in their reading more poetry. It didn’t work.

So, now you get the honor of reading my analysis, which begins following:

Sometimes (most of the times in my case) things fit together in one’s mind that seem cock-eyed; say like art and civil engineering. But, as Norman Maclean wrote “It’s all cockeyed and it all fits.”  He meant, I think, don’t expect normal, because normal is meant to be cockeyed.

So, back to art and engineering. An angle of repose in engineering refers to the steepest slope relative to horizontal where material (think rocks, dirt) verges on sliding. I don’t think there’s a related term in painting, but the positioning of models uses, or abuses, the angle of repose. Titian’s Venus of Urbino

http://faculty.jscc.edu/cnorman/1020Tests%20study%20guides/images/Titian,%20Venus%20of%20Urbino_JPG.jpg

appears to be situated so she won’t slide, but did the model for Modigliani’s Act on a Sofa teeter on the verge of her angle of repose?

http://www.allpaintings.org/d/34374-2/Amedeo+Modigliani+-+Act+on+a+sofa+_Almaiisa_.jpg

The engineering term popped into my head as I was looking at the Modigliani painting (Wallace Stegner’s book, Angle of Repose, popped up, too – if I recall the angle of repose he wrote about was family stability).  How did she stay aboard that sofa? And what was Modigliani thinking about when he posed her?
Angle of Repose

Think of a Modigliani model,
fully exposed, reclining
on a couch, almost slouching
into her pose, vaguely abstract,
as if her Act on a Sofa were
inclined to slide off, causing her
to feign comfort—the awkward
left arm, the pained smile,
and all the while the composed
painter saying, this is the precise
angle of repose I was hoping for.

                                 (copyright 2010 by Geordie de Boer; appeared in The Meadowland Review, October  2010)

This poem can be viewed, which I prefer since literary journals can use all the readers they can muster whatever the means, at

http://www.themeadowlandreview.com/

and you can view it online, or download a free PDF copy.

Angle of Repose is a free verse lyrical poem. Even though rhyme plays a large role in the poem it’s internal, within the lines, not end-rhyme. It has no set meter and the line-breaks interrupt what metrical rhythm gets started. However, it has a rhythm created by internal rhyme and the repetition of sounds, vowel and consonants (alliteration, or assonance and consonance).

It’s a lyric, because it reflects the poet’s subjective thoughts/feelings. And, because of rhymes and alliteration it’s “musical”, though I doubt it could be set to music.

Notes on Construction

Internal Rhyme:
 Repose/exposed/pose/composed/repose (Wow, it’s circular!)
 couch/slouching
 reclining/inclined
 abstract/Act
 smile/while
 feign/pained/painter

Alliteration:
 long o in Repose, Modigliani, exposed, almost, pose, Sofa, composed, repose, hoping
 em in Modigliani, model, almost
 ah in causing, awkward, arm
 long i in reclining, inclined, smile, while, precise, I
 long a in feign, pained, painter, saying

There you have it; my attempt to expose the workings of my mind in composing the poem. I did hear from one person (I sent it to many) who said it reminded her of Lit class at university – and she thought it was fun. For me it was a lesson to keep submitting to journals so the readers of poetry (other poets) can see what I do and maybe get an idea for a poem of their own.

Long Distance between You and Me

A fissure appears in the yard

as we talk after having not talked

these years. Two of the earth’s plates

are parting. I see the rift widen

as you recount to me shared scenes:

the countryside ride where I couldn’t

control my mount, the fall we parted

like leaves leave the limbbutalmost like lovers

topples into the breach, dragging the

stretched line. You appear, back to me,

phone grasped in hand. I feel a pull

on the line, hesitate for a heartbeat

…then, let go.

(copyright 2009 by Geordie de Boer; appeared in  Bird’s Eye reView, July 2009 http://birdseyepoetry.org/).

My original poem was prompted by a phone call from a long estranged brother, and part way into a painful and tedious conversation I remembered why we were estranged.

I submitted the original poem maybe five times to get a rejection each time. Then, I changed the poem to a conversation between two old lovers – but how close we were, and laugh,/almost like brothers. (he said this, actually) became but how close we were, and laugh,/almost like lovers. There were a few other changes made to fit the new theme. The next time I submitted it was accepted. Is jilting lovers more acceptable than dumping family? I don’t know; I did wonder if anyone would accept a land-line phone, though.

I also sexed it up a bit – “the countryside ride where I couldn’t/control my mount” – and kept the plate tectonics, the tonic for us all. A later reading of my poem called Wm. Stafford’s Travelling Through the Dark to mind - where he, too, considers a weighty decision over a recently killed pregnant doe blocking a road.

**********

John Brandi’s Heartbeat Geography: selected & uncollected poems 1966-1994 (White Pine Press: Freedonia, NY; 1995) I found in a Pullman, WA used bookstore. It was surprisingly unused, I thought. It’s a travelogue enhanced with his own journal drawings. Do I like him because he invokes Henry Miller, Chagall, and jazz? Well…I also like him cuz he’s a rambler and gambler with a social consciousness. Read this:

Let them die/in the distance between the countries/they have eyes on.

Brandi’s is a most “human” of poetics. As Scott Nicolay says in his excellent introduction, “Where his feet touch the ground, a poem remains.” This is a great journey through places and a life.

http://www.tetramatrix.com/websites/johnbrandi/biographical_information.htm

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My acquaintanceship with Carl Morris began in Eugene, Oregon (my hometown) in the 1960s, although it took until 2009 to realize it. Morris painted two murals in the downtown Post Office as part of a WPA project.

Lumbering especially drew my attention. One grandfather had been a timber cruiser in the Oregon Coast Range woods and several friends worked in the woods and mills around Eugene-Springfield.

I admit a fondness for murals in public places. They evoke a sense of time past and gone to me. Speaking of passings, Morris’s art depicting realism passed into Abstract Expressionism, which is just fine with me, too.

http://www.lanecc.edu/library/don/morris.htm

http://www.askart.com/AskART/artists/search/Search_Repeat.aspx?searchtype=IMAGES&artist=71572

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Learn about Ruth Stone through these links to The Poetry Foundation, Norbert Blei’s poetry dispatch…, and NPR. This is a wonderful poet and one to learn from – the craft, patience, and perseverance. A poem:

At the doughnut shop
twenty-three silverbacks
are lined up at the bar,
sitting on the stools.
It’s morning coffee and trash day.
The waitress has a heavy feeling face,
considerate with carmine lipstick.
She doesn’t brown my fries.
I have to stand at the counter
and insist on my order.
I take my cup of coffee to a small
inoffensive table along the wall.
At the counter the male chorus line
is lined up tight.
I look at their almost identical butts;
their buddy hunched shoulders,
the curve of their ancient spines.
They are methodically browsing
in their own territory.
This data goes into that vast
confused library, the female mind.

from Painted Bride Quarterly
Copyright © 2000 by Ruth Stone.

http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2004/jul/ruthstone/

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=6609

http://poetrydispatch.wordpress.com/category/ruth-stone/

Discovery

The petals of the vagina unfold

like Christopher Columbus

taking off his shoes.

Is there anything more beautiful

than the bow of a ship

touching a new world?

I dunno; I think it has layers of meaning though at first glance it seems as simple as a pre-Columbian Taino.

I couldn’t find any Taino poems, but here’s a link to three poems honoring the Taino: www.motherbird.com/taino.html

Some argue that Brautigan wrote “primitive” poetry; poetry created without benefit of historical traditions or conventions as guides and devoid of procedures from the literary past – as if by an Taino. This argument classifies William Carlos Williams’s Red Wheelbarrow as a primitive poem – without literary decoration and focused only on the object – though it doesn’t go on to call him an Taino.

Compare Brautigan’s Haiku Ambulance:

A piece of green pepper
fell
off the wooden salad bowl:
so what?

The “so what” might be a larger “what”. The last line of Haiku Ambulance moves the focus from the pepper back to Brautigan, and moves the poem from a Williamsesque the thing in itself to some other category – Brautiganism? I don’t know; I’m not a theorist. I just like Brautigan for his puzzlement over theorizing, over the impersonality of certain poems. If Williams and Brautigan were trying to make poetry out of everyday events and objects, I’ll take Brautigan.

T. S. Eliot wrote: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”

Wow! How un-Taino-like is that? While Brautigan wasn’t Zen-like as say Gary Snyder, his poetry did have some characteristics of haiku – brevity, suggestion, wit. Brautigan’s sensibilities seem more Eastern than, certainly, Eliot’s. Eliot may have wanted to escape his self, but Brautigan wanted to celebrate it – perhaps to his ultimate tragedy. Still, give me “primitive” warmth over “civilized” chill.
The at-first-glance lack of art in Brautigan’s poetry turns off some readers. He disregards the “poetic” for an immediate Zen-like pointing to a truth. Robert Creeley, of poets I’ve read, at times points to “what happens” as poetic expression, although I think he writes more “poetically” than Brautigan.

Link to Brautigan’s poetry and an essay about him:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=778

Christopher Barnes, British poet, and Albert Amado Vynckier, who was published in 10×3 issue 2, are two poets producing Brautiganesque verse among their works. Maybe others ought to try reducing the rhetoric and try pointing (with the right hand?), including myself.

(Check out a gallery of his work here – http://www.henrymiller.info/gallery/)

I like found things – a copy of Heartbeat Geography by John Brandi in a used bookstore; a penny in a parking lot saved for earned luck; a poem hidden within a piece of prose

The word,

Issued by the lips of Pharaoh

Sent me to the head of his army:

While the counts,

While the seal-bearers of his majesty of Upper and Lower Egypt,

While the sole companions of the palace,

While the nomarchs,

While the mayors of Upper and Lower Egypt,

While the companions and chief dragomans,

While the chief prophets of Upper and Lower Egypt,

While the chief bureaucrats

Were at the head of a troop of Upper and Lower Egypt

Or of the villages and towns which they might rule…

An official at Abydos under the rule of

Pepi I, Sixth Dynasty, c. 2375 B.C.

How about finding the solution to a problem while pondering something else, or not thinking of anything at all? It seems that things pop into the mind, or lost things become found, when you don’t engineer your environment. William Kittredge in his memoir of growing up in the remote Warner Valley of southeast Oregon, A Hole in the Sky, tells how his father, an engineer, diverted the flow of water on their ranch to maximize irrigation. The geese stopped coming, since the wetland they relied upon had disappeared. There was a hole in the sky once filled by geese; and a hole in the fabric of their lives. In this instance, a found thing (a beautiful land filled with life) became lost – the horse got covered over with brushstrokes. It was still there beneath the irrigation canals, diversion ditches and engineered fields waiting to be re-found.

Everything’s connected. When a Christian sneezes in Kansas a Hindu’s hair blows in the breeze in India.

I’m talking about not allowing life’s waves to curl and unfold themselves on the beach as they will. Wu wei – not-forcing. Don’t pester the editor if your poem hasn’t been accepted, or rejected, after 3-4 months; they’re busy wading in the pond of submissions hoping to net a gold one. (So, some never respond – no problem; they didn’t respond. Move on, patiently.)

“…see how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth…” (James 5:7-11)

“Persevere in patience and constancy.” (Qur’an 3:200)

“Better is the patient spirit than the lofty spirit.” (Ecclesiastes 7:8-9)

“Wu wei, bro-dude.” (G de Boer 7-come-11)

Be patient, pilgrim. Pick up that parking lot penny. Look for the poem within the prose. Sneeze freely and travel. Find acceptance in rejection…

It’s all cockeyed, and it all fits.