It rained all night, and it will rain all day, and even in the predawn dark I glimpse the glum snowpack, fingers of frozen earth, my sloppy garden emerging from its winter tent. Mud season starts early here in the temperate "south." The sight is not inspiring.
Well, I have tons to do today to distract me from the weather. Editing, ms reading, a meeting, class planning, all of the housework I didn't get around to yesterday because I was on the phone with Teresa for two hours . . . we chattered about our new books, about doing readings together, about teaching adventures, about the Aeneid . . . we might as well have been a pair of teenagers curled up on our beds, devouring Cheez-Its, murmuring about boys, sproinging the stretched-out phone cord between our fingers.
Now, on this wet and glowering morning, I'm perched alone in my shadowed living room, staring up from my laptop into the smoldering glow of a vase of just-open daffodils. Tom is still asleep upstairs. The cat, for reasons best known to himself, has insisted on racing out into the rain. I woke up too early today, but am not unhappy about it. Four a.m.: the "nightwatch hour," Teresa calls it. A time and space particular unto itself.
One thing that Teresa and I were pondering yesterday was the question of whether or not a poetry collection should be "balanced." This was a word that came up in discussions during Sunday's class, and I was taken aback by it. Pattern, yes: poetry collections are filled with patterns. But is balance a goal? Have I been wrong all this time, in striving for imbalance . . . the dizzy, the vertiginous, the potholed? Do other people read poetry in search of balance?
13 comments:
...daffodils.
...mud.
...balance.
Or not.
Thank you for inviting us all into this scene, this conversation.
Apparently my cats observe the "Night Watch" and don't want me to miss that opportunity too.
Just throwing out an idea that balance is not the responsibility of someone outside the reader. So often I read to find a connection, something that allows me entry into an emotion, a thought, a new perspective, a similarity, an understanding, some hope even. I'd need a definition of balance.
The more I think of it, the more I hate the notion of balance as the presiding genius of a manuscript. Why seek stasis? Like you, Ruth, I am puzzled by the definition of balance. It feels like a generality: "seeking balance in one's life": what does that mean? Does it mean doing more things that matter deeply to you and fewer things that don't? That seems like a giant shift, a teeter into a new way of being . . . Maybe balance is what's already wrong with the picture.
Hm, rejoining this conversation.
Balance does need to be defined! I think of balance as not too much of one thing or another-- in life-terms, quietude. The feeling of monotony, tonally, is likely destructive to a manuscript. But too much dissonance would be hard to bear, too-- I think you are right about how poems in a ms connect to form an arc of experience, even if that experience has its moments of disquietude as well. Poem to poem, page to page, section to section, and thus the whole, right? But it can't be all "white bread" nor can it be razors, entirely. And one would have to be very careful where one places either one.
Am I getting it?
Bear with me: I'm thinking on the fly. Plath is all razors. Manning is a messy, muddy querying of the spirit. Neither of their collections gives a shit about balance, but both are deeply patterned in ways that reinforce their obsessions. So here's an example: What if one's goal is to compose a poetry collection that embodies one's actual everyday circumstances: the juggling of a difficult job with home expectations, self-excoriations, flashes of insight, flashes of terror, fear of one's past, fear of judgment, etc., etc.? I think most of us are familiar with a version of this life. How does the concept of balance fit into the creation of this body of work? Again, pattern, yes: but embodying a felt chaos means opening one's individual poems to chaos and opening one's collection to chaos. I can't think of a single great poet who celebrates balance.
Hmmm. I see what you are saying; yes, if the work is to be a reflection or amplification of one's experience, but arranged in a way that makes those experiences accessible to the reader-- maybe "balance," in this context, is more the patterns that form the architecture. Not "nicely balanced" but more arranged with intention to create a whole? I like the paradox: an intentional whole that allows for chaos.
Kinda Blake-ian, in my mind.
This is super helpful, by the way. I am struggling to flex my poems into some sort of order, and this widens the scope a whole lot.
Think of those 4 Ruth Stone poems we read. The page spreads created a pattern, but there was no sense of balance or stasis in the way in which the poems interacted. Rather, the pattern worked to emphasize, among other things, the notion of humanity as a sort of detritus, of abandoned parts, a fracturing of family history, of the sentiment of community, of the familiarity of the body. No balance there. But a lot of existential terror.
I see now why my attempts at arranging just don't work; they are too safe and artificial, too categorized: "these are my house poems, these are my religious ones, etc." This is hugely helpful. Thanks!
Okay, I can relate to that. Individual days or times need balance; that is figuring what needs to be done, when, can be postponed, rearranged, or eliminated. . However, for me being totally balanced means I'm not trying anything new or indeed creating or daring to imagine possibilities. Patterns emerge, but chaos IS part of life whether we like it or not. Poems reflect this or?????? Perhaps trying too hard, not clearly thought through, not authentic or ?
I am so grateful for your e-mail and invitation to your blog. Ever since Sunday (only two days ago!), I've been in a whirl of poem revision re: the poem assignment in class PLUS the let it rip assignment. I was so fired up, I wrote for two hours straight after the class finished and thought and jotted on the move all day yesterday, I revised as well just before seeing your blog this morning.
So the question, was I out of balance as I let it rip? In a strange way, I feel MORE balanced (as in calm or quiet as Carlene days) now that I've laid the words down. The next part... shaping the content, the intent, the expression into a form that seems, feels, sounds "right" helps me with the need to create. To write, I am always on a journey with my muse or the unconscious where there are no markers. Thus, there's always a sense of imbalance or more to point, unbalance. We are in a risky business... our guts on the page... to be critiqued... the need for a tough skin but a very sensitive heart and pen. I think the balance thing is less on the page than off the page... how we manage the emotions and the risks of putting "it"-- the whole gestalt out. Obviously, I speak from my own experience---the difficulty of submitting and showing all that "stuff" in the work...Clearly, more ready now than ever... Thanks for this.
I've enjoyed reading these comments of poet friends, as I relish reading Dawn's prose and poetry every day. So . . . with regard to your invitation to "weigh in"? This image suggests that balance IS necessary for equitable distributions of concern, care, and the effort to be good, fair, and just in communal questions – that “spirit level” of social scientists like Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, who may have titled their research to echo an early title of Irish poet Seamus Heaney. As for Carlene's reference to William Bake’s “marriage of heaven and hell,” given an individual poet's concern, care, and effort to recognize and to respect both innocence and experience, this conversation suggests that imbalance is necessary for individuals to discover and to communicate patterns that showcase a collection of poems through lucid or dark, often cryptic, connections that hold the attention of readers of a chapbook. The eyes of the balancing agent are in popular lore always blindfolded, of course. So, in deftly avoiding suicide, we are left with this death-defying paradox: Both/And blindly embraces Either/Or. A poem of extremes that engenders wild conversation also longs for the quiet fellowship of reconciliation in this chorus of voices, this cosmic saga, this Facebook THING of THINGS!
I quite agree with Richard's consideration of both/and rather than either/or. It occurs to me that to balance is to right one's self. Or
as a writer, balance is to write oneself—i.e., to include or dip into the whole self, the ying & the yang, the ups & downs of our emotional. personal, civic lives, the predictable and unpredictable.... Thus, in the case of a 26 poem Chapbook such as Farris, her work embodies a total experience in an unexpected, extraordinary way that defies the reader to look away.In my experience, both/and in balance.
O, Richard, you are so astute: the agent of balance is always blindfolded. Wow. Powerful metaphor.
And with Blake, I was more thinking of Urizen... though of course, his Songs are also invested in the paradox.
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