Talking Poetics #43 : Bronwen Tate

 

Spending Time with Words as Words

During my MFA back in 2004, I tried to explain to my sister what writing poetry felt like: “It’s like spending time with words as words.” I meant that writing poems involved engaging with words not just as vehicles to represent thoughts, feelings, and ideas, but as objects in their own right in all of their particularity: sounds, patterns, connotations, associations, etymological roots, and so on. The phrase words as words still flits into my mind sometimes when I’m sitting down to work on poems.

Writing, especially writing poems, requires a different relationship to time and efficiency than most other things in my life. With my responsibilities as a teacher and a member of a family, things have clear deadlines: dinner must be ready for the children to eat or the assignment sheet needs to be posted to Canvas by 9 am on Monday. I can also expect a more direct correlation between time and results: an hour spent commenting on student work will yield a certain number completed, the zucchini butter spaghetti will take about half an hour to cook. In contrast, no one is urgently requesting poems. I am accountable to no one for them. And I have much less clarity about what an hour or five hours spent writing them might yield. Maybe something? Maybe something I’ll discard 80% of in a few weeks? To write poems, I need to find ways to enter that uncertain time, that inefficient time.

Now Entering Inefficient Time

Often, the container of a set amount of minutes is enough. For thirty or sixty or ninety minutes, I am in it, and I can set everything else aside. I used to tell myself mean stories about this: that real writers feel the poem rise up in them and overflow and don’t need dedicated time, that sort of thing. But now I’m more ok with the idea that there are many different kinds of writers, and I can just be the kind that I am. And the kind I am often needs the parameter of dedicated time for being intentionally unintentional.

How do we know when the poem is done? If it’s a sonnet, we can at least say when we’ve achieved the form, even if we may still be left with big questions about which word belongs in which place and continue to revise forever. But when we’re not writing into an established form, so much, everything, is up for grabs. Having a time parameter can let me stay with a poem and its uncertainties—and return to—it without constantly asking if it (or I) am done.

Pre-Deciding

Another thing that helps is pre-deciding. I often engage in some kind of daily practice. Having decided ahead of time that I will spend thirty minutes with my first coffee, writing by hand and just tracing sound patterns, or that I’ll send my friend a new sonnet before I go to bed, lets me shift the focus to how I’ll do that thing rather than whether I’ll do it or what to do out of the many possible things that could be attempted.

Mornings are often a good time for me. I have lots of optimism and fortitude in the morning, but still a bit of fuzziness and lack of inhibition that can be good for drafting. And, especially when I manage to get up early and not check my email, the morning can feel like time outside of time, like it “doesn’t count yet,” which lets me slip more easily into inefficient time.

From Material to Poem: Gathering and Arranging

Sometimes when I write, I’m just putting out feelers—documenting what’s going on, looking for emergent patterns in the words. Occasionally something will stick this way, but mostly this kind of writing becomes material I draw on later.

Other times, I’m working in a mode. Most of these modes involve a two-step process: gathering and arranging. Once I’ve found a generative mode, I often try to stay with it for a while. I’ve talked a bit before about reading Proust in French and then starting poems from the words I was unsure about, my guesses, and their dictionary entries. In this case, the gathering principle was “read Proust, find opaque or semi-opaque words, make guesses about them based on context and similarity to other words, look them up in French-English dictionary (and often a French dictionary too).” And then the arranging principle was something like “use this material to write prose poems that speak to your life, however obliquely, or that intuitively give pleasure by their juxtapositions or patterns.” Then, of course, so many revisions!

I can trace recognizable bits from this act of gathering (above) in at least two different poems in my book The Silk the Moths Ignore. Here’s one of them:

This book—and these prose poems, in particular,—have had a long revision process with a multitude of changes along the way. I initially wrote them in prose blocks, and then at some point, I played with lines in some of them, but eventually, I settled on this “prose verset” form that doesn’t use line breaks but relies heavily on paragraph breaks for pacing. In “Creating What We Name,” I see words and phrases that came out of that initial gathering (zither, remove seeds from a melon), but then the whole second paragraph I can trace to more recent play with puns and sound (felt/felt, cut/cut, shear/sheer). There’s often a period in my revision process that involves writing intuitively into a gap. I picture this as reaching out slowly with my eyes closed, feeling for something I can’t yet see but know is there. Sometimes revisions require an opposite impulse: I also like breaking up continuities to allow a greater leap.

Notebooks of freewriting are often a source for a gathering step. Other gathering methods include generating anagrams of a significant word or sketching out a moment from the day and finding a pair of words connected to this moment that rhyme and might form a kernel to write around, as in these Lorine Niedecker-inspired short poems. Other arranging principles might involve shaping fragments into a set form like these ten-liners that shift between couplet and monostich or repeating the same word with shifting meanings along a chain of sentences. I’m working on some poems now that use notebook fragments and anagram word lists as gathering methods and rely on colors and fairytale tropes as arranging principles. 

Whatever mode I’m working in, I’m constantly looking for emergent sources of pattern and friction and trying to draw these out. In any poem, certain elements are marked or activated while others remain absent or in the background. Friction means change, movement, tension, something at stake. And patterns—especially where and how we break them—determine where attention gathers.

 

 

 

Bronwen Tate lives in Vancouver, where she is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. She completed an MFA in Literary Arts at Brown University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Stanford University. Before coming to UBC, she was the entire Creative Writing department at Marlboro College in the Vermont woods. Her poetry collection The Silk the Moths Ignore (Inlandia Institute, 2021) is available for preorder. Recent poems have appeared in Tinfish, The Rumpus, Typo, Carousel, and Court Green. Bronwen also has a few new essays: a brief one on participating in a collaborative homage to Bernadette Mayer (the project is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press) and a longer one in Contemporary Literature on how ambivalence, complicity, and feeling can coexist with critique in the work of Harryette Mullen. You can find her on Twitter or IG at @bronwentate or on her website at https://www.bronwentate.com/.

 

Talking Poetics #42 : Ken Norris

 

ON THE ROAD TO THE NEXT POEM

For a long time it’s been first lines. I’m washing dishes and a first line pops into my head. I’m strolling down the beach and a first line pops into my head. I try not to keep the first line waiting too long. I try to write it down within twenty minutes of first hearing it. And it is somewhere between hearing it and thinking it. And it feels given more than it feels formulated.

In Hawaii I started writing down the first line in the Notes app of my phone. And often the rest of the poem just unfolded. I don’t really “work” poems much anymore. I don’t really write them anymore. They just come to me. The first line announces itself, and the rest of the poem soon follows.

Thirty-five years ago, when I was thirty-five, I did a lot of construction. It was a different way of writing, more craftsmanly. Now it’s more mystical. I follow the first line till the poem runs out of gas, or it completes itself. It sounds kooky, but that’s how it happens now.

 

 

LISTENING

The first line makes me listen to it. Then it’s all about listening. I don’t have to write the poem, I just have to hear it. The duration of the first line sets the structure. If it’s a long line I start writing in long lines. If it’s a short line I start writing in short lines. Lately, a number of poems have arrived as sonnets. I didn’t count the lines until after the poem was written. My short poems have always been haunted by the sonnet. Sometimes they are two lines less. Sometimes they are two lines more. But they tend to operate in sonnet territory.

When I was a young poet I worked with the kernel of an idea a lot. Many of my poems were idea driven. Now I have no idea what a poem is about until after it’s written. The poem tells me what it’s about. I don’t tell the poem what it’s about.

 

 

OTHER POETS, OTHER MEDIA

As a younger poet, I was prompted by the work of other poets all the time. That was probably my primary way of getting poems going. Reading to write. Hunks of newspaper stories wound up in the first book of Report On The Second Half Of The Twentieth Century. I’d quote something from a newspaper story and then offer poetic commentary.

Now? No.

I don’t write as much as I used to. It isn’t a daily thing anymore. During the pandemic, months have gone by between poems. That just didn’t happen when I was younger. But I’m seventy now. Most of what I’m going to write has already been written.  So writing has become more fanciful. I don’t push at poems trying to get them to arrive. I don’t try to manufacture the poetic moment anymore.

 

 

REMEMBERING JOE

I remember that Joe Rosenblatt used to write down good lines on index cards. That made no sense to me at all. But different writers write in different ways.

Years ago, I used to sit down and write maybe sixty or seventy lines.  Then I would set about trying to find the poem in the poem. Maybe there was a poem in there somewhere; maybe there wasn’t. The chances were pretty good that the poem wasn’t those seventy lines. But maybe poetry happened in there somewhere along the line; or maybe it didn’t happen at all.

These days the first line announces that a poem is happening. Then I just have to follow it, I just have to hear it. I have to stay out of the way with any ideas I might have. It’s more like what Spicer called dictation.

 

 

NOTEBOOKS

I have been writing in notebooks since 1980. I find them extremely useful in sustaining the idea of a book. I’m writing a book in these notebooks. Most of my books occupy somewhere between four and seven notebooks.

For me, notebooks create an atmosphere. All these poems I’m writing are traveling together. They all have something to do with one another. They’re in the same notebook, so they’re in the same book. Notebooks tell me when a book starts and then tell me when it ends.

 

 

LINE BREAKS

Early on, I was intrigued by Margaret Atwood’s line breaks. They didn’t make any sense to me. So I kept looking at them, studying them. After a while I started to understand how they were dramatizing things. Line breaks = world view. Or certainly they can function that way.

What I notice lately are lines running past the line break, with more to be said. That seems to be how I’m breaking lines lately. As I said, the first line tends to dictate line length, and often the first line doesn’t stop at the end of the first line—it continues into the second line. So then the poem becomes a network of lines that are running past their line lengths.

Bowering said something about how my lines ‘tilt” now, and I suspect that it is this that he was talking about.

 

 

OTHER WRITERS AT THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD

Maybe five years ago I started trying to do translations of Frank O’Hara poems. I would take a poem like “A Step Away From Them” and I would try to translate it into my own experience. The structure of the poem would come from O’Hara, but all the specifics of the poem would come from my life, not his.

So that’s not back of your head—that’s front of your head.

Everything I’ve ever read is in my head somewhere. Louis Dudek used to talk about the “word assembler.” Spicer talks about the Martians. Whatever is putting the poem together has access to whatever is in my head.  Are there other writers in my head? Of course there are. Do bits and pieces of other writings make their way into Ken Norris poems? Yes, they do, and they always have done so.

 

 

A GOOD OR A BAD EXAMPLE

Here is “Early Morning Waves,” from Hawaiian Sunrise, written in Hawaii back in December.

EARLY MORNING WAVES

I took the Wallace Stevens franchise to another shoreline.
Now I’m staring at the early morning waves.
They roll in, blue and unafraid, white-capped and peaceful.
This ocean and I go back a long way.

You can’t expect everyone to write at the Ontario cottage
and come up with something different. I travel—
to places where the white birds swoop and soar.
There’s a tin roof waiting for me, there’s a tropic heart
waiting to be born. 

                                   When she sang beside the genius of the sea
he was there to hear it, and to take it further.
The waves are our brave counsellors,
breaking here, in the lush greenery, at our feet.

When I read it this poem seems so logically put together. It’s almost a little mini-essay.
There’s almost a series of thesis statements.

But, for me, writing it, the poem just unfolded. I had no idea where it was going. I had no idea what it was going to say.

Depending upon how you want to count lines, it’s either twelve lines or thirteen lines. It kind of has the propositional formality of a sonnet, but it isn’t quite a sonnet. It’s an off-sonnet, an almost-in-the-ballpark sonnet. It gestures towards the sonnet, but it isn’t a sonnet, even though I have a rather broad sense of what a sonnet can be.

Line followed line. I didn’t build this poem at all. Or maybe, the building now takes place at such a rate of speed that it doesn’t look like building to me.. It looks and feels like improvisation or dictation. The poem was written in one sitting in ten minutes. How it looks on the page is how it looked on the notebook page.

Little things I notice. In the title, are we talking about the waves that are breaking or the early morning waving? In the last line, there is sort of a gesture to the surround with “the lush greenery.” That is the one bit in the poem that I later tried to change, and anything I tried just didn’t work. So I just have to trust the poem and the reader to get it right. Grammar takes you one way, sense takes you another..

The poem is haunted by the Wallace Stevens poem “The Idea Of Order At Key West.” Beside the sea is where the action is. In this case there’s no singer and no listener, except that the last stanza drags them in. The relationship seems to be more about the waves and the poet who is watching them and listening to them.  Instead of an idea of order, then what? Perhaps the inhuman counselling the human?

 

 

THE NEXT POEM

I haven’t written any poems in about three months. That is an unusual state of affairs. In my youth I used to write six poems a day.

The last poem I wrote is called “On Spadina Road.” Maybe it will see the light of day. Maybe it won’t. I still throw out 80% of what I write. I wrote it in late March or early April. It is now late June.

Maybe poetry is in the process of abandoning me. It’s been known to happen.

It happens. I’ll sigh a huge sigh of relief when the next poem happens.

 

June 24, 2021
Toronto

 

 

 

Ken Norris was born in New York City in 1951. He came to Canada in the early 1970s, to escape Nixon-era America and to pursue his graduate education. He completed an M.A. at Concordia University and a Ph.D. in Canadian Literature at McGill University. He became a Canadian citizen in 1985. For thirty-three years he taught Canadian Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Maine. In 2021, Guernica Editions published South China Sea, and above/ground press published HAWAIIAN SUNRISE. He currently resides in Toronto.