Historically and biographically, this poem is a kind of meeting of two events. The first is the destruction of the Twin Towers. The second is my being in graduate school and reading various literary/philosophical theorists. I wasn’t actually reading Jacques Derrida, the philosopher mostly responsible for the practice and theory of deconstruction. His ideas, as least in the simple form that I understand them, have permeated a lot of other writers’ thoughts. In very simple form, deconstruction as a theory postulates that all language self-contradicts, that it puts off or defers meaning. In my simple way, I look at language as being like the yin/yang symbol in which the dark area contains a speck of white and the white area contains a speck of black. Words contain their own contradictions. We humans hate or distrust in Others that which we have in ourselves—we force others to carry our own personal disgust by demonizing or stereotyping others Continue reading
Category Archives: ENGL 2307 Poetry
Myth and Structure, Concerning “After Hades, Always Persephone”
This several years ago my step-mother, Margie Harrison Grant, died. I was able to see her several times in the weeks before she died, and I was glad of that. The last time I saw her, two days before she died, she was weak but still making a quiet joke and enjoyed a slice of chocolate meringue pie that her son sneaked into her room at the nursing home. She was a wonderful lady, and very kind to me. Continue reading
Driving and Listening, Concerning “Midlife Christmas”
Of all the kinds of poems that I write, this is my favorite kind. “Midlife Christmas” is a straight ahead traditional poem. Not quite in the Housman and Heine tradition, but maybe in the Thomas Hardy or Robert Frost tradition. Rhyme, tetrameter, quatrains. Nothing more traditional. It grew out of a very specific moment driving home from my wife’s family’s house a few days after Christmas. It is dark and I was driving on country roads. I try to do that as much as possible and avoid the interstate highways. Basically, everything in the poem is true. It a sense it is a poem about dropping out of conventional American society. I was sick to death of the Republicans attacking Clinton—the insincere inquisition. I am sick of commerce and minivans and midlife crises sports cars (or young sex fueled sports cars). The only things that really matter to me are my children, my wife, honesty and fair treatment and forgiveness of fellow human beings, beauty and art, and teaching. Continue reading
Constructing Desire from Bits and Pieces, Concerning “Home Sick”
I have probably said this in other places in these little “lectures,” but I believe that poetry should be part of my daily life. I do not want to live a life where I live in the prose world for forty hours a week or more and then live in the poetry world for five hours. In this way, I am a religious devotee of poetry. Just like the Devout Christian wants to live like a Christian 24/7, or the Muslim wants to live a life for Allah 24/7, I want to live in the world of metaphor and rhythm and meaning every second of my life. Of course, that is not possible. For one reason, I would starve. The world does not pay you to live in poetry (unless you are one of the very, very rare folks who teaches at a major university and has graders and assistants to do your daily chores while you write poetry). For another, I have to be responsible to my family. Wives and children can be understanding if you have your head in the cloud sometimes, but sooner or later they want you to be present with them, to remember to pick up the dry cleaning and listen to their joys and woes at school or work. Continue reading
The Line and the Sentence, Concerning “Awaiting Word”
“Awaiting Word” is one variety of what is called “the list poem.” I think a poem like this tends to work better as a spoken, oral poem. It doesn’t offer much as a printed poem, because as you read the poem a second or third time, you don’t find many hidden treasures in the way metaphors connect or lines break or allusions grow. On the other hand, a good oral poem, a good poem for poetry readings and such, offers structures that can be readily followed, connections that lead the listener through the poem. An oral poem should not require three or four times of listening to understand it. Continue reading
Submission, Concerning “The Other Writers Block”
This poem was published in the journal Teaching English in the Two-Year College. It is professional journal that mostly publishes articles about teaching in community colleges. But each issue also contains a poem or two. Continue reading
The Ultimate Contradiction, Concerning “The Laying on of Hands”
For the past hundred and fifty years, as poets stretched the boundaries of the poem, they came to some limits. One of those limits was that the poem is an artifact with rhyme and meter. Well they got rid of rhyme hundreds of years ago with blank verse. Shakespeare did that in some plays. Then they got rid of set meter with Old Testament influenced works like those of Walt Whitman and then finally in the twentieth century with Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Amy Lowell and American free verse. As Pound said, “To break the pentameter, that was the first heave.” But still poetry was in lines, in verses. Continue reading
Following the Thread, Concerning “A Dream of Grace”
The poem “A Dream of Grace” came to me in basically the way you see it here. I was at spending the week at one of Robert Bly’s Great Mother Conferences. Robert Bly is one of the United States best poets. He is perhaps even a better translator. He is one of the people responsible for bringing Neruda, Jimenez, Machado, Rilke, Rumi, Kabir, and so many others to the attention of American intellectuals. These conferences take place in the woods, usually in Church Campgrounds or in conference centers. About one hundred people come and spend the week, take informal classes in all sorts of arts and crafts. At this conference Bly was just finishing his volume called Morning Poems. Continue reading
Stripping It Bare, Concerning “Searching for the Parking Lot for a Poem”
This poem was published in Sulphur River Review. And the publisher of Sulphur River Review submitted it for a contest, without telling me, and it was chosen for an anthology published in Dallas named Best Texas Writing. This poem and Found Things are the two that have gotten the best attention. [I find it important to note that the notice they have received is pretty tiny compared to great American poems or even good contemporary poems, but I am grateful anyway. And these kinds of things keep me wanting to write better.] The story of the poem is simply that I was in a failing marriage and a woman was in an unhappy marriage and we met. I read my poems at an event and she attended and when the event was over I walked her to her car. She went to her home and I went to mine. About two months later I wrote this poem. The first line came from the fact that I had not written a poem for about a year since “Found Things.” “Though I’ve been silent several months” sounds better than “Though I haven’t been writing poems for a year.” Continue reading
The Deep Image, Concerning “The Light Through the Peaks”
There were a group of poets in the last fifties that were concerned with what they called the “deep image.” Their ideas grew from the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, whose work was still relatively new. The proposition is that there are images—pictures of things put into words—that are deeply embedded in the human psyche. Freud approaches these images through dream analysis. Jung approached them through what he called the collective unconscious. Nowadays, in places like Austin, we are very familiar with these concepts. Jung focused on archetypes, the base, foundational concepts of energy and behavior that are often found in myth. Think of things like a flood, a desert, a king, a ring, a virgin, a sword, a warrior. The deep images are a bit more primal than other images, like say, a steering wheel, a computer, or an accountant. Continue reading