Guest Post, Elizabyth Hiscox: Expressing the Abstract in Three Easy Steps, or Destination: Poetry

Destination and destiny: same root, same idea. You have got an idea of where you’ll be, and so does the universe. If this pitch doesn’t sit quite right or has overtones of religiosity, then a disclaimer that for the purposes of this post and this prompt I access the concepts in the mostly-secular, but highly spiritual concept of E.M. Forster’s “only connect” variety.

Several destinations may inhabit any travel itinerary, and they may all have a shared destiny: the poem. A bit of structure, a road map to poetry if-you-will, can be a good way to get to both. One can become easily distracted in this world. By purple, for example. Using an easy-as-1-2-3 approach to composition can keep a writer from losing all the minutiae of the moment. It can be a comfort to have a prompt in mind when falling into experiences or off of commuter trains in strange places.

One of the best recommendations I received while trying to write during travel was at the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia. I was overwhelmed and finding it hard to wrench away from the pure experience of the place to a page. A fellow poet reminded me that we are never the first in our struggles with the art. She suggested that since haiku has been the catch-all of moment-oriented travelers for generations it might help me synthesize a portion of what the Hermitage and the Neva and the Cyrillic alphabet and the dazzling All of It had sent reeling. Haiku has helped generations in other languages, granted, but is no less available to us in the syllabic lost-in-translation-but-still-useful English-speaking world. 5.7.5. Yes? 1-2-3.

Thus, I give you a three-part travel prompt in honor of the three approachable lines of the haiku. It is not haiku. That works too. Write haiku. Do.

This is something different and is not, of course, the essence of haiku. The haiku has many constraints (season, unexpected revelation, quantity as well as quality of syllables) that this prompt completely ignores. Also, I use “approachable” advisedly: a prompt is meant to start the process, not guarantee an end product. So, this approach is only one strange articulation of a three-part way into a poem that I have used in the past to “get there” (poem) while being gone.

The set-up: Go somewhere. A well-placed park bench can work as well as another continent.

The scribble:

  1. The basics of the information/experience. What is the heart of the destination.
  2. Anything that is auxiliary, but floats to the surface. Can be in terms of image, sound, tone, concept, or just more information from the moment. What is crafty (as in craft).
  3. A connection with the anything that you knew before for which these two points ring a bell.

Destination: The poem or series of poems written from this vantage point. Like most good trips, once you get to your destination you can see roads to other places.

..

An example follows from which to discern, distill, and/or depart.

..

The set-up: Denver, Colorado. “Women of Abstract Expressionism” exhibit at the Denver Art Museum

The scribble:

  1. Heart of information/experience: Quote from Lee Krasner next to one of her stunning paintings on the exhibit wall: “I’m always going to be Mrs. Jackson Pollock—that’s a matter of fact—[but] I painted before Pollock, during Pollock, after Pollock.”
  2. Auxiliary: Krasner went through a period where she was working in a studio denied daylight and suffering from severe insomnia. She chose to abandon chromatics and thus some of Krasner’s most famous pieces are simply umber and white paint. // In order to take a picture of Krasner’s work, I had to enter my passcode to get away from my phone’s lock screen. My phone’s lock screen is of a Jackson Pollock painting. I took that picture on the same phone at the MOCA in Los Angeles this past spring. I do not know what my lock screen was before it was Pollock.
  3. What Beast Must I AdoreConnective tissue: The 2016 Olympic Games in Rio, Brazil were just beginning at the same time I found myself at this exhibition. They are just ending as this post finds its way into the world, so there will be a new set of issues for commentators and those who comment on the commentators. At this moment, however—when I was standing in front of a Krasner painting titled “What Beast Must I Adore?” (from a Rimbaud poem)—backlash against newscasters’ handling of the gender politics connected to reportage of women athletes was what was getting headlines. The Chicago Tribune had just reported the accomplishment of Corey Cogdell-Unrein (trap shooting) with the tag “Wife of Bears’ Lineman Wins a Bronze Medal Today in Rio Olympics.” They didn’t bother with her name. Elsewhere, NBC’s Dan Hicks expounded for quite a while after a world-record swim by Katinka Hosszu on her husband who, apparently, was “responsible” for the feat.

Destination: In 2016, The Guardian has an opinion piece called “How to Talk About Female Olympians Without Being a Regressive Creep—A Handy Guide.” Lee Krasner’s monochromatic masterpiece, “What Beast…” is from 1961. All the color drained from the dreams Lee Krasner could have had in those years is in brightly colored interlocking rings that serve to delight, but still deny female accomplishment at the cutting edge. One can discern chaotic unconnected rings in the painting if one is inclined. All the color drains.

So, there is the ringing bell. One connection. One coherence of thought that might make its way into the poem or poems that arise from this day. But, more direction of synapses than would have been available otherwise. 1 then 2 then 3. After all, Joan Mitchell’s paintings were in the next gallery and her purple, well, it can distract…

And, then you may be noticing all the other poems lurking. Where’s the epigraph from Rimbaud? What about the culpability of the speaker/author with the iPhone set to husband-of-Krasner? What about all the implicit possibilities in the jargon of trap shooting?

And, you are right to wonder. Usually my three-step plan (heart/craft/connection) actually has sub points that I flesh out for a while on the return home.

And, you may be writing a different poem with any material on offer. I hope you are. Because Krasner said later of the infamous title that she realized as she finished the painting that “[t]he beast [was] peering at me.” As creators, the next stare-down is always within. As we move through the world our travels are often routes to our own terrain. 3-2-1.

Guest Post, John Gist: Confessions of a Book Burner

Confessions of a Book Burner   by John M. Gist

johngistI am a burner of books. The blasphemers Nietzsche and Rimbaud. The madmen Kafka and Borges. I have burned them all.

It started on a jaunt into the wilderness. A day off from working at the Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone National Park. I was the maître d’ of the restaurant, an odd job for a rural teenager just off the high plains of nowhere Wyoming. I seated customers from Europe, Asia, and towns like Gallup, New Mexico. I didn’t like it. I hadn’t read Sartre yet, but already had an inkling that hell is other people. I craved silence.

When the chance came to get away into the woods for a day, I jumped on it. A work acquaintance (I can’t remember his name or where he came from) drove to a trailhead and, daypacks slung on our backs, we set off into the woods. Blue sky. Quiet. The makings of a good day. I brought some books to read.

We hiked the trail for a couple of hours following the neon orange markers tacked seven or eight feet high on the trunks of pine trees. I assumed the markers had been placed so high for the benefit of snowmobilers. It was Yellowstone, after all, and the snow really piled up in winter. Yellowstone Park was a snowmobiler’s dream.

Suddenly, the trail was covered with snowpack. It was early May, if I recall correctly, and though we had been steadily climbing, we didn’t expect it. We stopped and consulted the map (no GPS in those days). According to the topographic, the trail looped back around and down to the main road in a few more miles. We decided to risk it. We walked into the snow.

The going was tough. Our feet got cold. We had failed to bring coats and shivered in plaid flannel shirts. We were stupid and we knew it. We had made up our minds, though, and the way forward, according to the map, was shorter than the way back. We kept at it, feet breaking through four-foot drifts.

I had just wanted to get away for the day. Find a spot under a pine or in a meadow and sit and read and bask in quiet.

A bank of metal gray clouds, intrepid and menacing, appeared out of nowhere muffling the light. Cold breeze. By dusk we were in trouble. Snow fell from a sky we could no longer see. The neon markers on the trees became less and less visible. My companion wanted to go on. I disagreed. We needed fire and daylight. Then, like good boys, we’d turn around and head back the way we came.

By the time the decision was made, it was almost dark. We gathered wood by breaking dead twigs and branches from nearby pines. There wasn’t any kindling so I did what I had to do. I tore pages from Thus Spake Zarathustra and wadded them up and lit them. Snow fell thick. We warmed our stiff fingers and curled next to the meager flames.

By the time morning dawned, blue and icy, I had burned all four of the books in my daypack. I rolled the pages into tight little cylinders and fed them to the fire.

When we made it back to the Old Faithful Inn, I locked myself in my room and soaked in a hot bath. Blisters covered my thighs and shins, so close had I been to the fire of burning words.

I refused to go to work that evening, exhausted from exposure. The manger fired me and told me to leave by the next day.

I replaced the books upon returning to civilization. It was the least I could do.

Every now and then, when backpacking in the Gila Wilderness, I burn a book in my campfire after I finish reading it. I burn only those books that I deem well written and deep. The others I donate to the used bookstore back in town. Ceremony.  A way with words.