Traverse City Record-Eagle

Fleda Brown: On Poetry

WORKSHOP SCHEDULED

Fleda Brown and sculptor Bill Allen will lead a workshops in conjunction with "ConTEXTures," an exhibition at the Dennos Museum Center.

Brown will lead the first workshop session Saturday, May 15, from 2 to 5 p.m. Allen will lead a session Saturday, May 22, from 1 to 5 p.m.

The cost is $70 and preregistration is required. The deadline is Friday, May 14. Call 995-1029 or go to www.dennosmuseum.org.

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May 9, 2010

On Poetry: Taking poems personally

By FLEDA BROWN Local columnist

I just got back from the annual Associated Writers and Writing Programs convention in Denver. I love to go — I see friends I wouldn't see otherwise, I hear lots of good poems, and I'm involved in some great conversations about poetry, both contemporary and classic.

This year I particularly liked Tony Hoagland's talk about the "fate of poetry," a perennial favorite subject. I appreciate his point of view. He advocates for fewer "floaty" poems, less "textual vertigo," as he calls it, less self-conscious hyper-intelligence. He argues for more poems that connect us to our ordinary lives, that help us to find meaning, that have what he calls "weight" or "stake." As in "Personal," the poem I've chosen for this month. The speaker in the poem has a stake in what's said, and we have a stake in it too.

For a panel sponsored by the University of Nebraska Press, I'd just read from my new memoir. Someone asked, "What's the difference between memoir and confessional?" Hoagland's poem helps explain. In both my poems and my prose, I want to be deeply, passionately involved in the life they reflect. I want the reader to feel my deep "stake" in the material. At the same time, I want to have stepped back to engage with the art of the work I'm doing. I want to have shaped and polished. I want to keep the effect of the whole — as an aesthetic experience — in my mind. This is how a writer steers away from the "confessional."

We notice that Hoagland's poem is in couplets like nice, neat aphorisms, but then we notice that there's no period after "Happiness" or "Talk" or "Broken Hearts," just before he says he doesn't believe in the clean break. Nothing's an accident here. He's brought his considerable experience and knowledge of the form to bear on making this poem feel as if it just rolled out of his mouth. "Oh life! Can you blame me / for making a scene?"

And he does make a scene — the breeze and the river and the color of the fields, the wet hair of women, the tropical squalls, our confusion of the government with our own feelings about our parents, our messy tragedies in love. Pay attention, pay attention! he says, like a dog tied to a chain and barking its head off. This is our life!

Fleda Brown is professor emerita, University of Delaware, and past poet laureate of Delaware. Her latest book is "Driving with Dvorak." For more of Fleda Brown's On Poetry columns, log on to record-eagle.com/onpoetry.

Personal

Don't take it personal, they said;

but I did, I took it all quite personal —

the breeze and the river and the color of the fields;

the price of grapefruit and stamps,

the wet hair of women in the rain —

And I cursed what hurt me

and I praised what gave me joy,

the most simple-minded of possible responses.

The government reminded me of my father,

with its deafness and its laws,

and the weather reminded me of my mom,

with her tropical squalls.

Enjoy it while you can, they said of Happiness

Think first, they said of Talk

Get over it, they said

at the School of Broken Hearts

but I couldn't and I didn't and I don't

believe in the clean break;

I believe in the compound fracture

served with a sauce of dirty regret,

I believe in saying it all

and taking it all back

and saying it again for good measure

while the air fills up with I'm-Sorries

like wheeling birds

and the trees look seasick in the wind.

Oh life! Can you blame me

for making a scene?

You were that yellow caboose, the moon

disappearing over a ridge of cloud.

I was the dog, chained in some fool's backyard;

barking and barking:

trying to convince everything else

to take it personal too.

— Tony Hoagland, from Poetry (July/August 2009)

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