Poems - Page 3 of 10 - John Barr Poetry

How to Recognize a Poet

To be a poet is to be attached to life by a different set of hooks.

Picture of a man in front of a writing studio

Standing outside of my writing studio. Photo taken by Brian Emery.

They arise from among us like mysterious denizens in the grip of something to say. To be a poet is to be attached to life by a different set of hooks. It is to go through life as a broken pivot, an unfinished sentence, a wandering binomial before the discovery of mathematics. To be a poet is to be as under-employed as a musical dwarf waiting around for Christmas. Writing poetry — that sad or joyous compulsion, that syllabic enterprise, that vigorous entablature, that subcutaneous art — comes out of the need to engage life in some primary way. For poets it is the best way of dealing with the spill and flow of reality around them. It is a way of finding our way in a world which is given to us and to which we are given. Writing poetry, like the slow generation of kidney stones, takes time. It is like pulling taffy in a snowstorm. Writing it, in that divinely-induced dementia, is like trying to fly the bed when you lie down drunk. And what we are talking about — nothing less — is the future of manned flight.

As you read this, our poets are at their curious business of reducing some part of the world to a yellow legal pad or the back of an envelope. Like any of us they follow the instinct to go where they are most alive. They are like expert skiers: Their large describing curves converting mountainside to speed, they explode from powder, dangle in miles of icy air. They seek, with all the passion of an avalanche, to put the world to rights. They know that whatever we can make in our allotted days is made of salt and virtue. They write in the knowledge that the world never tires of — indeed has an unlimited appetite for — the real thing.

The poem occurs when wonder needs to be shared. It begins with the openness of innocence; it proceeds when passion and perception engage in overlapping newfangledness. Poetry’s place is where spirit and values converge, and is a way of taking responsibility. Poetry’s place is that non-Euclidean point where parallel lines of art and moral action actually conjoin.

It’s Friday on a restive planet. You wake,
the poet in you bellowing in the pens.
It’s another day in the Holler Canyon.
It’s time to start the Nativity engine.

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An Homage to Emily

John Barr / Blog

Emily Dickinson’s example permits all “Nobodies” to believe in their own work in spite of the world’s neglect. And I say, bless her for that.

Found on Wikimedia Commons. This image is in the public domain.

Emily Dickinson’s poems first appeared in book form four years after her death on May 15, 1886. It sold through six printings in six months, and collections of her work have been in print ever since. On a parallel track the biographical and critical attention that has been lavished on Dickinson by scholars, although it came a half century after her popular reception, is a veritable industry today. The list of American poets whose work enjoys both kinds of attention — a broad popular readership as well as serious critical attention — is very short. Robert Frost would be on the list, but Emily Dickinson stands at the head of it.

It is tempting to call Dickinson our first Feminist Poet — except that Anne Bradstreet preceded her by 200 years. I do, however, believe she can be called our first Modernist poet. American poetry, in Dickinson’s 19th century, was essentially English poetry written on American soil. (When Frost wrote “The land was ours before we were the land’s” he could have been talking about American poetry.) But Dickinson ignored the tight forms and English traditions in which Longfellow wrote. In her writing principles and spirit she was a progenitor of Modernism decades before Pound and Eliot. Her fierce independence of mind was Modernist in its impatience with conventional thinking. The brevity of her lyrics — they almost read like shorthand — anticipated what Pound would later call his principle of “concision.” And the passionate and private matters that drove her lyrics preceded the Confessional Poets by a century.

Only a handful of poems were published in her lifetime, and some of those may have been without her knowledge or consent. The worth of her work — nearly 1800 poems by the end — she knew full well. But that knowledge struggled against a painful shyness that became a phobia beyond her control and rendered her unable to promote or even present her poems to editors and to the public. That self-imposed self-effacement makes her the special friend, the patron saint, of poets who write in anonymity or who have an aversion to self-promotion.

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you — Nobody — Too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell. They’d advertise — you know.

How dreary — to be — Somebody
How public — like a Frog —
To tell one’s name — the livelong June —
To an admiring Bog.

Her example permits all “Nobodies” to believe in their own work in spite of the world’s neglect. And I say, bless her for that.

What we have in the work of Emily Dickinson, then, is a large body of lyric poems that was created in isolation, and without the hope of a future readership. Coming to us by the slenderest of chances, her work has been able to establish its relevance to each successive new school of poetry as the art form has continued to evolve in America. I think that will continue as far as eye can see, or poets can write. Her lyrics, simple to the ear but profound upon reflection, are sure of a continuing popular readership. And the absence of a literary “style,” which itself will grow dated, seems to keep the work fresh and open to whatever school of poetry comes next. Emily has done what every poet tries to do and rarely achieves: make something that will last forever in a world where nothing lasts forever.

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The Importance of Metaphor

John Barr / Blog

Poetry is a manifestation of the human urge to make sense of chaos, to find unity and symmetry in external reality.

A flashback to 1991 at a book signing.

The Little Oxford Dictionary says that a metaphor is when you apply a name to an object to which it is not literally applicable. Thus, “The classroom was a zoo.” “The snow covered our town like a white blanket.” “Mary is an early bird, Bill is a night owl.”

But I think that metaphor is much more than that. Poetry is a manifestation of the human urge to make sense of chaos, to find unity and symmetry in external reality. In a previous essay we saw how the poet, in using rhyme or other formal structure, displays an ear for likeness. In discussing metaphor, Aristotle credits the poet with “an eye for likeness.” My thought is that both are manifestations of the same instinct. Aural structures, road maps for the ear, are a part of that search, but the search for unity goes beyond the sound in a poem. Someone once defined human intelligence as the ability to see the similarity in disparate things, and that is where metaphor comes in. It discovers the unity in things thought to be unlike. In Garcia Lorca’s words (which are themselves a metaphor), a metaphor, by “an equestrian leap of the imagination,” makes an assertion of likeness where none was seen before. As the two things joined by a metaphor find a way to affiliate through sympathetic vibration, self reverberation, so metaphor is a kind of rhyming at the conceptual level. (A simile, by the way, is a metaphor without the self-respect to call itself a metaphor. So it temporizes with “like” or “as.” The distinction between simile and metaphor is not one of kind but degree, and at bottom not that either.)

“The greatest thing by far,” said Aristotle in his Poetics, “is to have a command of metaphor.” A metaphor is an inspired non sequitur; it joins things that have not been joined before. It is through metaphor that things of the world reveal themselves in new identities. Proteus, the Greek god who could alter his form at will, was the first metaphor. A poem’s power comes from saying one thing in terms of another, and that is the function of metaphor. In a strong metaphor there is an insurgent quality, as if the strongest of its kind would bring down governments or bring new galaxies into play. The work of the metaphor is the work of Genesis, the original Creation; it is man asserting his godliness. His Godheadedness. (In the human body is a second, hidden set of veins. These carry not blood but ichor, which flows in the veins of the gods.)

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Ship Captain Crew

John Barr / Histories

USS Warrington (1945–1972)

I. What is a ship on the ways
but twenty-seven hundred tons
of waiting steel, a maze

of empty bunks and unworked guns?
No captain? No resolve.
No crew? No dash, no muscle — no means.

But plankowners arrive,
fire the boilers, take in line —
shake the ship alive.

More than iron, more than human,
ship captain crew bond
and out of three emerges one:

Bessemer-built and -boned,
a man o’ war that hauls and sails
wherever missions command.

II. A month out of Newport, monsoon swells,
the storms of Tonkin Gulf.
Rain, fog, the midwatch bells,

and — somewhere — Pratas Reef:
graveyard for ships whose lookouts fail
to see its breaking surf.

Off North Vietnam, gun line patrol,
the still waters erupt —
two mines explode beneath her hull.

Engines wrecked, pipes
ruptured, flooding, listing port —
the crew reclaims the ship,

pumps and patches, keeps her afloat
and headed East Sou’-East
for the tow to Subic and her fate.

III. Condemned, struck from the List,
sold for parts and scrap. To Taiwan
breaking yards released.

Work of the cutting torches done,
fed to furnaces,
the atoms in her metals find

an afterlife as traces —
a small part on a ship perhaps,
a hawse pipe or a windlass.

And what of a crew without its ship?
Sailors grow old, go on
as atoms — all things go on, except

for this: The mythic bond —
a beast half steel half soul — gone
never to return.

John Barr

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Form is Hunger

John Barr / Blog

Thoughts about poetic form.

A peek at my new book! (Photo taken by a family member.)

In my last two essays I talked about what form — rhyme and meter — can do for a poem. This poem shows what form — in the shape of a web — can do for a hungry spider.

The Orb Weaver

In the pre-dream of creation — dingo
savanna, crab surf, serpent arroyo —
I was assigned thicket and air.
Whitetail taught to flee dissent,
coyote to collapse on her prey,
right whale to mouth his meadow’s krill,
my trick, to make one thing repeatedly.

Out of this orifice unheard-of muscles
press a cable mile, eight hands pay out
in junctions that I simply know.
I steeplejack an undulant array’s,
a billowing acre’s rungs and radials.
From the host of brother structures in genetic gel,
my radical dance deduces one recalling
by moon the tenor of rails, by noon’s blue hole
the 20/20 of a clean kill.

As language was given to man that he may have
dominion yet again, my web
like metaphor its hold makes good on air.

compass rose of indirection,
proof of an occult geometer,
dread nought, round hosanna,
shout of spacial glee.

After the Maker’s heart
I put the merest gloze on air.
Having sutured nothing — nothing
nearly nothing still — I frame
a reference for the flying folk.

Lighthousekeeperlike, I tend
this hazard feet above the forest floor.
Each few days, the lattice rent
and apparent with dew, I eat it and renew
(word made flesh, made fresh) its invisibility.

My hands take hold of certain strands,
I settle to see what comes my way:

arielles and tinkerbelles,
a butterfly under double flags of truce,
manic mosquitoes, a hoplite bee,
a Mack truck Luna hit the silk.

What happens next, whether to tiny tocsins
or large beats of alarum to come on the run,
whether to spring, fang, decant
is left, I believe, entirely to me.

I see a watchworks, socketed and sprung,
and I say “jeweled movement, motionless.”
Immune to vertigo, I say “excused from gravity.”
I see my causeways littered with body bags
and I say “Form is hunger, hunger form.”

From The Hundred Fathom Curve: New and Collected Poems
(John Barr, Red Hen Press, 2018)

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How to Give a Successful Poetry Reading

John Barr / Blog

Can you recall ever giving a poetry reading that might have gone better, or might better not have happened at all? It happens to all of us. Even marquee poets can remember the reading where no one came; and younger poets may recall an open-mic event where one of the poets would not give up the mic for half an hour.

Here are a few thoughts on how to make your next poetry reading a success and a pleasant memory.

· Don’t start your reading with a long or difficult poem. Starting with an accessible poem lets your listeners get used to your poetic voice and style.

· Your audience is there to experience the poet as well as the poems. Salt your reading with anecdotes, or a sentence or two on how the next poem was written. Let them see the poet at work. Humor is always welcome, and so is modesty.

· Surprise your audience; give them something they couldn’t anticipate. Allen Ginsberg is remembered for taking off all his clothes at a reading because “The poet stands naked before the world.” But there are safer options. Ask a friend or two to stand and read a personal favorite of your poems when you call on them. Or read a new poem which your listeners are the first to hear — even a work-in-progress. Or read a poem by another poet and explain why you admire it.

· Another way to add variety to the reading is to partner with a second poet. An event featuring two poets, or at most three, can be optimal. (More than three changes the character of the reading.) This brings in a larger audience, and still allows each poet to read for 20 minutes, with time for Q&A at the end.

· Don’t plan the event to last too long. Listening to poems requires concentration and you don’t want their eyes to glaze over. As a rule of thumb, I plan the whole event to last no longer than one hour.

· Serving refreshments after (cookies and cider or a glass of wine) is a nice way to thank your listeners, and to sell your book if a new book is the occasion for the reading.

· Virtual readings have come of age. Last summer I gave a Zoom reading hosted by a community library on Long Island. No travel required. The very capable library staff organized the Zoom call, introduced my reading, provided an interlocutor for Q&A, and posted the text of each poem on Zoom so listeners could read along as I read the poem. It made a big difference.

My best wishes to you for the poems you write, and for the readings that are sure to follow.

This essay originally appeared on the Red Hen Press blog.

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What Form Can Do for a Poem

John Barr / Blog

If poetry is a matter of sounds, then sound must be the basic unit of form. Putting it another way, what do assonance, alliteration, rhyme, meter, rhythm — all of the tools in the toolbox used for constructing form in poetry — have in common? All of them, in their different ways, create recognizable patterns based on their repetition of sound. That is why I can think of rhyme as a species of rhythm. We are taught to think of meter as the source of rhythm in poetry, but the regular recurrence of consonants or vowel sounds (alliteration and assonance in Beowulf) or whole words (rhyme) works to the same end. Formal structure of any kind is at bottom a pattern based in sound.

It is also a gift from the poet to the listener which carries its own inherent pleasures, while serving the ends of that particular poem. And what are those inherent pleasures? Well, take rhyme. Booming every five or ten metrical feet, rhyme is another kind of punctuation (in addition to the commas and periods) in the progress of the poem, a meter below the meter, a part sung by the basso profondo. It is not unlike the system for communication by ultra-low frequency developed by the Navy for its submarines. Rhyme is, all at once, the celebration of a small goal reached, the surprise of encountering the familiar, a reunion of likenesses looked forward to. Rhyme is like friendship.

And what are the ends of a particular poem? If it’s a long narrative poem the undulating meter, like the sea surge under the ship of Odysseus, carries it forward and carries us with it. Line by line the meter reassures us that we are going somewhere, and we are getting there. If it’s a lyric poem with a rhyme scheme, the end words can be guideposts — ear posts — to help us follow the progress of the poem. If it’s a sonnet, we’ll know landfall is coming before we see it. If it’s the last section of Auden’s requiem for Yeats,

Earth, receive an honored guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

we hear in the somber formality of the verse the drums and the caisson of a state funeral. If it’s Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” we’ll hear one sound repeated with gathering force through 80 lines.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

“Daddy” is not a demonstration of elegant craftsmanship, nor is perfection as a made thing what the poem is after. Rather, the poem is a venting to rival Mount St. Helens. In its mono-rhyme, it’s a pile driver parading as a poem.

All rhyme is a regulation of sound. But rhyme is like sweets. Too much can cloy; more is not automatically better. When rhyme is overused, is mismatched to the meaning of the poem, it competes with and distracts from the poem, rather than reinforcing its flow. Rhyme then becomes an independent, disconnected activity in the poem; the effect is that of watching a child skip a rope while trying to sing an unrelated song. If rhyme in a poem calls attention to itself, it should know what it is doing. It should be a strategy of the poem that its rhyme, or the form of which rhyme is part, intends to be noticed.

Resumé

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

Dorothy Parker

Some poems will want no rhyme, or formalism of any kind because it does not support the meaning of the poem. And that brings us back, full circle, to free verse.

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Formal Poetry… Really?

John Barr / Blog

If the history of Western literature were compressed into a single day, Homer would declaim the opening lines of The Iliad on the stroke of midnight; Dante would climb out of Hell at 6 pm; Chaucer would ride for Canterbury at 7; Shakespeare and Milton would follow them across life’s stage two hours after that.

These and all the poets of their times wrote with formal structure of one kind or another. Homer’s hexameters, Dante’s terza rima, Chaucer’s couplets, Shakespeare’s blank verse and Milton’s. Hard to believe nowadays, but for the first 23 hours of its day on earth there was in poetry no such thing as free verse.

Vers libre crossed the channel from France and appeared in English poetry as free verse in the years leading up to the first World War. As a property of ice is that it floats on water, a property of poetry before the arrival of Modernism was that it was written with the recognizable recurrences of formal structure. But the visitor from Mars, reading contemporary poetry, could not know this. With so much of today’s poetry written in free verse, a discussion of form is likely to sound anachronistic, even defensive. (Where have you been for the past century?)

Two small dogs, our Shih Tzu and our Yorkie, sit and watch me go back and forth on the rowing machine. (This daily journey on the rowing machine, I call it Hauling the Fat to Paradise.) It confirms a principle of Nature for Indy and Fritz: Whatever happens, happens again. It is the same for structure in poetry. Whatever happens, happens again in the poem’s repetitions: rhyme, meter, alliteration, assonance. The agency of life is to give form to matter; the agency of matter, to make form visible; the agency of form, to be perceived by life. That, I think, is the cycle of life and art. In my next essay I’ll talk about what form can do for a poem. But a short answer to “Why should there be any structural form in a poem?”: Because the human ear craves repetition, because man is a counting creature.

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Sound and Sense in a Poem — Part 2

John Barr / Blog

On a snowy January day, years ago, I was looking for a sales slip in order to exchange a Christmas gift. As I sorted through the mess on my desk (the clutter in my study having reached Mephistophelian proportions), there was a thought in the front of my mind, that I had seen the slip recently but could not find it now. When out of the back of my mind there floated a line: Around this house things won’t stay found. Well, as a line of poetry this is hardly worthwhile, but I’ve learned not to ask questions. I jotted it down and went on with my search. Looking back I still don’t think much of the line, but in a couple of ways it shows how the mind generates poetry as a way of dealing with external reality. First, it has a twist in the way it looks at things, in the way things appear to it. Things are not lost, rather they won’t stay found. The line is not going to take the confusions of life lying down. It talks back; it is a retort to chaos. In the current parlance the line “has an attitude.” Second, the line was born simultaneously as a thought and as a pattern of sound. The rhythm of the words is as much a part of the meaning of the line as is the thought. “Around this house things won’t stay found.” Ou — ou — oo — ou. Four rhythmic stresses that reinforce by repetition the natural emphasis already in the individual words. Finally, the rhyme of the first and last words — “Around this house things won’t stay found” — picks up the whole thought as if with ice tongs. This is a declaration spoken in exasperation, not inviting disagreement. (I never did find the slip.)

Like many writers I keep a journal as a gathering place for thoughts and lines that show up unannounced. But if the thought does not arrive clothed in its own language, if the sound and sense are not born together, I typically don’t write it down because I know it’s not poetry. Conversely, you’ll know it is poetry when the language shoulders its way to you using all of its body. Poetry employs words in all of their aspects. Words so used shimmer and resonate, all at once, in their denotations and connotations, their public and personal histories, and of course in their sound, which is why a line of verse addresses the senses as well as the mind. And why hearing a poem is a tactile experience.

It has been said that the difference between poetry and prose cannot be defined, but I disagree. The difference between them is that prose reports reality, poetry recreates it. Poetry does this by giving language co-equal status with non-lingual reality. Fine prose (I am thinking of Orwell) simply disappears into its own clarity; we readers end up looking at the thought, not the language. Not so with poetry, for which language is both a means and an end. In poetry the scaffolding and the house are one.

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In the Zoo of the Extinct

John Barr / Natural Wonders

In the Carboniferous House
a pillar of gnats stands in the absence
of a prophet’s glance, dragonflies flirt
with forever amber. In the Herpeterium
Dimetrodon, under improvised sail,
duck-billed Hadrosaur, helmet-
headed Pachycephalosaur
show you don’t need brains to inherit the earth.
Gigantopithicus (9’ 600 lbs)
shows what the marsupials might have done.
(Jurassic shrews, amounting to nothing, wait their turn.)

In the Zoo of the Extinct, passenger
pigeon rises to no final gun,
the competition among grasses is suspended.
Unaware of the weathers in wait, fry
of Ichthyosaur people Wyoming seas,
amphibia skedaddle in imbricate surf.
Armorial skulls, shelled dead ends, the treasured
thumb, the oops, the overtaken, overcome
shelter this side of extinction’s brink.

In Noah’s Park, Latin remembrancers
name the 28 orders, Odysseus asks
last questions, panzers plan their vector.
At the Ice House a keeper sweeps,
his Edsel parked outside.

John Barr

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Emily Dickinson’s example permits all “Nobodies” to believe in their own work in spite of the world’s neglect. And I say, bless her for that.

Poetry is a manifestation of the human urge to make sense of chaos, to find unity and symmetry in external reality.

USS Warrington (1945–1972)

I.

What is a ship on the ways but twenty-seven hundred tons of waiting steel, a maze

of empty bunks and unworked guns? No captain? No resolve. No crew? No dash, no muscle — no means.

But plankowners arrive, fire the boilers, take in line — shake the ship alive.

More than iron, more than human, ship captain crew bond and out of three emerges one:

Bessemer-built and -boned, a man o’ war that hauls and sails wherever missions command.

II.

A month out of Newport, monsoon swells, the storms of Tonkin Gulf. Rain, fog, the midwatch bells,

and — somewhere — Pratas Reef: graveyard for ships whose lookouts fail to see its breaking surf.

Off North Vietnam, gun line patrol, the still waters erupt — two mines explode beneath her hull.

Engines wrecked, pipes ruptured, flooding, listing port — the crew reclaims the ship,

pumps and patches, keeps her afloat and headed East Sou’-East for the tow to Subic and her fate.

III.

Condemned, struck from the List, sold for parts and scrap. To Taiwan breaking yards released.

Work of the cutting torches done, fed to furnaces, the atoms in her metals find

an afterlife as traces — a small part on a ship perhaps, a hawse pipe or a windlass.

And what of a crew without its ship? Sailors grow old, go on as atoms — all things go on, except

for this: The mythic bond — a beast half steel half soul — gone never to return.

John Barr

In Noah’s Park, Latin remembrancers name the 28 orders, Odysseus asks last questions, panzers plan their vector. At the Ice House a keeper sweeps, his Edsel parked outside.

John Barr

What is a ship on the ways
but twenty-seven hundred tons
of waiting steel, a maze

of empty bunks and unworked guns?
No captain? No resolve.
No crew? No dash, no muscle — no means.

But plankowners arrive,
fire the boilers, take in line —
shake the ship alive.

More than iron, more than human,
ship captain crew bond
and out of three emerges one:

Bessemer-built and -boned,
a man o’ war that hauls and sails
wherever missions command.

A month out of Newport, monsoon swells,
the storms of Tonkin Gulf.
Rain, fog, the midwatch bells,

and — somewhere — Pratas Reef:
graveyard for ships whose lookouts fail
to see its breaking surf.

Off North Vietnam, gun line patrol,
the still waters erupt —
two mines explode beneath her hull.

Engines wrecked, pipes
ruptured, flooding, listing port —
the crew reclaims the ship,

pumps and patches, keeps her afloat
and headed East Sou’-East
for the tow to Subic and her fate.

Condemned, struck from the List,
sold for parts and scrap. To Taiwan
breaking yards released.

Work of the cutting torches done,
fed to furnaces,
the atoms in her metals find

an afterlife as traces —
a small part on a ship perhaps,
a hawse pipe or a windlass.

And what of a crew without its ship?
Sailors grow old, go on
as atoms — all things go on, except

for this: The mythic bond —
a beast half steel half soul — gone
never to return.

In Noah’s Park, Latin remembrancers
name the 28 orders, Odysseus asks
last questions, panzers plan their vector.
At the Ice House a keeper sweeps,
his Edsel parked outside.