Naughty Nuns and Bad Habits: If They're not yours, they're even more fun

I just found the Ploughshare blog. Ploughshares has long been one of my favorite literary magazines; I've been unsuccessfully submitting there, the Indiana Review, and Mid-American since college because I just LOVE them, and the editors were nice to me when they read in my bio that I was trying to get into an MFA program.

I like the blog because it's more than just an addition to the magazine; it discusses poetics and criticism. A recent blog post focuses on bad habits that writers/poets discover in their writing. We've all had that moment, looking over poems when we realize (or have pointed out in workshop) that we do the same thing routinely. For some of us it's a word, (I used "stone," in about twelve poems before someone in my workshop finally had enough)but sometimes it's a movement when we run out of other ideas, a default.

It's not that these are necessarily BAD habits, just that they're bad for us because, well, they're habits, and you can't really be new and fresh if you do the same thing every time.

My idea is that the next time I find myself following in my old ways, I'll use SOME ONE ELSE's bad habit instead. So I try to end all poems with a neat bow by throwing in some unrelated abstraction paired with at least two concrete details and hard consonants. When it comes off just too pat, maybe I'll try a slant rhymed couplet instead! At least it's not what I usually do, and isn't that the interesting and helpful thing about form anyway?

Here's a link to the blog for more ideas, and if you have bad habits of your own, you can post them in the blog comments :)

http://pshares.blogspot.com/2008/11/bad-habits.html

Comments

"Self-Portrait as Medusa in Shock" Jayme Ringleb

"Self-Portrait as Medusa in Shock, " Jayme Ringleb, Puerto Del Sol Online, is such a lovely and challenging ekphrasis. I won't quote any of it, because there is this seductive kind of movement in the poem, like very classy striptease, a dance of veils, or the pulsing of a jellyfish, that when relaxed, its nearly transparent arms floating away from the body, allows you to see more clearly through what when held tightly concealed those mysterious internal structures. The layers of ekphrasis in this poem are constructed like a nesting doll, each stanza with a lovely similarity, a theme, but each leading more intimately to the interior. The poem begins in the natural world of the jellyfish, which is written over by classical myth that shares the creature's name, which in turn is compared to Biblical stories of resurrection, before the poem finally turns toward memoir. There the poem compares this idea of the classical Medusa, being confronted by her own fatal image t...

The Imaginary Poet

Often in lyric poetry we get wrapped up in ourselves--what is true to us. I think it is much more interesting to lie outrageously. Check out this issue of Blackbird online. It has a feature, "Tracking the Muse," with commentary by various poets about their process. Here's a link to Jehanne Dubrow's "Notes Toward a Nonexistent Poet." http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v7n1/features/muse/dubrow_j.htm It is great. She starts off suggesting you lie a little bit about yourself, making up an experience you never had, like a childhood overseas. But she progresses toward creating a whole fictional poet and writing poems for her. While the amount of research needed for a whole book of works by a fictional poet might be a little more than a Wednesday afternoon will permit, you could pick a person you know and write a poem as them, or as a famous person, or as a made-up person. My poet is Sara Johnston. She's from North Carolina, daughter of an Airforce captain, and her ...

Poem on Poem Ekphrasis: Brian McHale's Feminist Reading of Berryman's Homage to Mistress Bradstreet

In Brian McHale's The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems , he starts his chapter on Susan Howe's The Europe of Trusts with a short introduction to the idea of silence of women and the canon, describing "Berryman's 'Homage'...as a kind of parable" of "the received version of literary historiography" in which women are silent or overwritten (205). McHale argues that Berryman's "poetic 'homage' to the precursor-poet consists in silencing her." (205) Anne Bradstreet , in "Upon a Fit of Sickness" writes, 'Bestow much cost there's nothing lost,/ to make salvation sure,/ O great's the gain, though got with pain, / comes by profession pure." In "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet" , Berryman says as Bradstreet's persona "Hard and divided heaven! creases me. Shame /is failing. My breath is scented, and I throw / hostile glances towards God. " You mig...

Medusa's Head

Search This Blog