Writing Great Titles for Your Poems, Part 2: The Title as an Invitation to the Reader

I recently picked up a book by Chana Bloch, a poet who is particularly good at writing titles for her poems. Chana was the one who suggested the title of my book The Number Before Infinity. For one of her own poetry collections, she came up with one of the best titles I know, The Past Keeps Changing, almost a Zen koan.

Chana Bloch,1940–2017. (photo by Margaretta K. Mitchell)

Just looking randomly over the table of contents of Chana Bloch’s collection Blood Honey, I spot a number of poem titles that grab my attention. The first one that arrests me is “The Messiah of Harvard Square.” In this title, she mixes the mundane with the spiritual in a way that intrigues me. Who is this Messiah of Harvard Square? I want to know.

 

Chana also has a poem in this book called “The Discipline of Marriage.” Again, a bit of a paradox. We don’t often think of marriage as being a discipline, but that’s what’s intriguing about the title. How is marriage a discipline, and what can I learn about relationships from this viewpoint?

 

Another title I like in this collection is “Wild Honey.” Anytime you have the word wild in a title, it piques my interest, and honey is something sweet and delicious, so the combination is irresistible. There is also a one-word title that makes me want to read on, “Blue.” Since we all feel blue from time to time, that title welcomes us into the poem. In a similar vein, there’s a poem in this collection called “The Naked Future.” Now that, I really want to know more about.

 

In short, Chana Bloch’s titles often beckon the reader to learn more, to unravel a paradox, or to explore a complex situation—all good ways of buttonholing readers and getting them to look deeper.

 

I picked up another poetry collection to see what titles made me want to read the poems, Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968–1998 by Linda Pastan. 

Linda Pastan (photo by Margaretta K. Mitchell)

Linda’s titles often make me eager to find out what comes next, either because they suggest interesting puzzles or the revelation of secrets, or they present a conundrum. Here are a few I really like:

 

“The Obligation to Be Happy”

“RSVP Regrets Only”

“There Is a Figure in Every Landscape”

“You Are Odysseus”

“It Is Raining on the House of Anne Frank”

“25^th High School Reunion”

“Who Is It Accuses Us?”

“Routine Mammogram”

“The Myth of Perfectability”

“The Apple Shrine”

 

Do you see what I mean? Each of these titles poses a question of a sort. The reader is engaged, wanting to find something out. What happened at her 25^th high school reunion? Was she pleased, disappointed, depressed, embarrassed, refreshed, seduced? Was the mammogram really routine? What the heck is the myth of perfectability?

Chana Bloch and Linda Pastan demonstrate that a poem title can do so much for a poem. A poem title is almost like a trailer for a movie. It should whet your appetite, and get you to want more.

Writing Great Titles for Your Poems, Part 1

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies

Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other posts on writing topics:

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Homage to Chana Bloch

The world lost a wonderful member of the literary community in 2017—Chana Bloch, poet, translator, and teacher of generations of creative writers and students of literature. I attended her memorial on October 8, 2017, at Mills College, where Chana taught for more than thirty years. It was moving to see women who had studied with Chana decades ago returning to campus to recount how Chana had changed their lives, including professionals who did not end up as writers but were still profoundly shaped by the experience of working with her.

Chana Bloch

Chana had a fantastic sense of humor, and she was a modest person, free of pretention, despite her numerous accomplishments. She collaborated on some of the best contemporary translations of Hebrew poetry. The English version of Yehuda Amichai’s collection Open Closed Open that she created with Chana Kronfeld is to me one of the finest literary translations of contemporary poetry into English. A friend told a story at Chana’s memorial about this book: Amichai was terminally ill while the two Chanas were working on the translation. The poet was pressuring them to finish so he could see his best collection in English before he died. According to the speaker at the memorial, Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld resisted the demands of the great Hebrew poet, knowing they would probably only have one chance to get the translation right, since books of poetry in translation rarely go into multiple editions. As it turned out, the Chanas finished their work to their satisfaction, and Amichai lived to see the book in print.

Chana Bloch’s translation in collaboration with Ariel Bloch of The Song of Songs is one of the most beautiful renditions of a biblical text into English. Their version brings out the freshness of the language and the imagery, and returns the romance and the raunch to The Song of Songs:

Let me lie among vine blossoms,

in a bed of apricots!

I am in the fever of love.           

This book of the Hebrew Bible is often bowdlerized in translation till the sensuality becomes only symbolic or veiled. Chana was determined to create a nakedly beautiful Song of Songs, and she succeeded. 

Chana Bloch’s own poetry is full of tantalizing complexity. The poet Judy Halebsky spoke at the memorial, recalling that she had asked Chana when she was a student at Mills College about an emotion that she was trying to express in a poem, which had not yet come across as she’d intended. Chana told her, “Every emotion is actually two conflicting emotions.” That’s not only true in life, it’s true in Chana’s poetry as well.

In Chana’s poem “The Joins,” included in her collection Blood Honey, she refers to the Japanese art of kintsugi, a method of repairing broken pottery where the seams are sprinkled with gold dust to create a gorgeous pattern out of the breaks. From the first line of the poem, Chana makes clear that she is speaking in metaphor:

What’s between us

often seems flexible as the webbing

between forefinger and thumb.

Seems flexible, but it’s not;

what’s between us

is made of clay

Human relationships are almost always Chana’s subject. Even though she’s talking about a technique in pottery, the poem is clearly about breakage—emotional, psychic, global:

We glue the wounded edges

with tentative fingers.

Scar tissue is visible history

In Chana Bloch’s poetry, she begins with the assumption that we are all wounded. But by recognizing those injuries, by learning from the pain, we can reach a state that might even be better than innocence:

Sometimes the joins

are so exquisite

they say the potter

may have broken the cup

just so he could mend it.

A couple of times Chana visited a class I taught regularly on contemporary world poetry at a college in San Francisco, where she spoke about the writing of Yehuda Amichai and Dahlia Ravikovitch that she had cotranslated. I have to confess I was a little jealous of how instantaneously my students bonded with Chana, a stronger connection than I’d been able to weave during an entire semester. I think that ability to win the trust of students came from Chana’s piercing intellect, her genuine warmth, and her disarmingly frank comments, delivered in her Bronx accent. It just wasn’t in Chana’s constitution to be anything less than completely honest, as a professor, a poet, and a friend. I miss her. 

Other posts on writing topics:

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Praise and Lament, Part 6: Praise in Yehuda Amichai and Gerard Manley Hopkins

So, now we’re going to move from the valley of lament to the plateau of praise. In many ways, praise is the more difficult mode to write well. The great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai discusses this in his poem “The precision of pain and the blurriness of joy” from his book Open Closed Open, beautifully translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld.

Yehuda Amichai (1924–2000)

What Amichai describes so well in this poem is the way in which our psyches are hard-wired to record every detail of an unpleasant situation. This tendency may be a survival mechanism to keep us from repeating destructive experiences. But we humans are not well attuned to recounting the positive. That takes a different kind of attention.

Nevertheless, poems of praise are some of the most ancient in human culture. Many forms of writing or speech or song are traditionally vehicles of praise: psalms, hymns, odes, litanies, blasons (the blason is a form of love poetry that enunciates all of the beloved’s features one by one).

Just as the lament focuses on loss, on absence, the poem of praise focuses on presence. But the poem of praise is not concerned with something that is obviously present. It’s about drawing attention to something present that deserves or demands more of our attention.

One of the earliest forms of praise literature is the psalm. The Hebrew word for “psalms,” tehillim, literally mean “praises,” in this case, praises of God. Let’s say you wanted to write a poem praising God or the spiritual side of life and you wanted to do it using objects or things or creatures in the world that are the clearest manifestations of the divine. What would be the most obvious things to inspire a sense of spiritual awe? You might choose children’s innocence, sunsets, mountains, beautiful skies, rainbows, etc.—things that are self-evidently beautiful or pleasant.

Well, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a sort of modern psalm where he praises God through unusual objects or things in the world. Hopkins was a great poet and an Irish priest who lived from 1844 to 1899. 

Gerard Manley Hopkins

It’s very interesting what Hopkins chooses to single out as evidence of the divine. Here’s the poem:

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things –

   For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow;

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                Praise him.

What sorts of things does Hopkins choose to praise, and therefore to connect to the sacred in his poem? He doesn’t focus on days when the heavens are a clear blue, but on mottled skies. He praises not constancy and perfect complexions but what is “fickle, freckled.” He spotlights grungy, physical work: “gear and tackle and trim.” In what way are these manifestations of the divine, if God is, as he says, “past change”? Don’t these things seem like the opposite of the divine?

When I taught this poem in the low-residency MFA program at the University of Alaska Anchorage in the summer of 2015, my colleague, the poet Anne Caston, had an interesting interpretation of Hopkins’ choice of things to praise in this poem: “Hopkins understood something about the nature of God to accept the ‘flawed’ and ‘marred’ things in His creation. I love that notion too, that there is a part of the spiritual that sees the beauty and elegance of the ‘flawed’ things.”

One thing writers can take away from this poem is that praise needs to have an element of surprise. There’s a goody-goody side to praise that can be predictable and cloying. Avoid crystals, butterflies, waterfalls, sunsets, and cute babies, unless you can find something to praise in these things that you’ve never heard anyone laud before.

The artistic context of Hopkins’ poem is also interesting. Around the time that Hopkins wrote this poem, the United Kingdom and Ireland were in the midst of a serious medieval revival. You’ve probably heard of the Pre-Raphaelite artists such as Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Morris, for instance. 

The families of Pre-Raphaelite artists William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones

Influenced by the art critic John Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites took their name from the idea of going back in art to the time before the Renaissance painter Raphael, whose work they felt represented a sophisticated corruption of the innocence, sincerity, and freshness of medieval art. During this period of the industrial revolution, in literature as well, there was a yearning for a more innocent and pure art. Many artists turned to or imagined a period when art was inspired by faith and the importance of craft. That’s why this school in the visual arts was also called the Arts and Crafts movement.

In his poetry, Hopkins harked back to the rhyme and alliteration of the very earliest English verse, dating back to the Middle Ages. This was the period of Old English, the Anglo-Saxon roots of English before the influence of French and Latin became predominant in the era of the Norman conquest. You can listen here to a recitation of one of the greatest poems of Old English, “The Seafarer,” so you can hear the alliteration and strong rhythms that characterized the literature in English in its earliest days.

By using the sort of alliteration and rhyme from an earlier period in the history of the English language, Hopkins evokes the faith and values of that period as well. But I think one of the take-aways from Hopkins’ poem is that the thing that you are praising—or lamenting—can shape the way you praise or lament it. It has to shape the way you praise or lament it.

Praise and Lament, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

AWP Picks for Saturday, April 11, 2015

Here are the events at the conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs that look interesting to me for Saturday, April 11, 2015:

9:00 am to 10:15 am

Room 200 D&E, Level 2

S113. Yes, Writing Is a Job: People Who Get Paid to Write. (Joy Lanzendorfer,  Marcia Simmons,  Nora Maynard,  Ken Weaver) Believe it or not, it’s possible to make a living writing. Four working writers from diverse backgrounds will talk about how they make ends meet through article writing, blogging, nonfiction books, and other projects. Panelists will discuss how we get work, the financial realities of the publishing world, and our struggle to balance writing for money with creative endeavors that are closer to our hearts (but harder on our pocketbooks). Another panel on the important topic of the practical side of making ends meet as a writer.

Room 211 A&B, Level 2

S120. Straight Talk: What the MFA Promises & What It Delivers. (Lee Martin, Sonja Livingston,  Carter Sickels,  Claire Vaye Watkins,  Karen Salyer McElmurray) A 2013 Poets & Writers index says that full-time teaching positions at the university level are available, on average, for well less than one percent of creative writing program graduates. This roundtable will discuss expectations and realities of why we enter creative programs in the first place and our futures afterwards. How can programs be more forthcoming about these realities and what actions can faculty take? What does risk really mean when you choose the path of the MFA? Good subject. I know a lot of MFA students and alums are concerned about whether that degree is a good investment of time and money.

Room M100 B&C, Mezzanine Level

S123. Latina/o Poets as Publishers: A CantoMundo Roundtable. (Deborah Paredez,  Carmen Gimenez Smith,  Juan Morales,  Rosebud Ben-Oni,  Casandra Lopez) How are Latina/o poets occupying and transforming the roles of publishers and editors today? This panel convenes CantoMundo founders and fellows to discuss their work as publishers of small presses, editors of literary magazines and blogs, and founders of new media platforms. Our roundtable conversation explores the particular challenges, visions, and contributions of Latina/o publishers and editors. Looks interesting.

10:30 am to 11:45 am

Room 211 A&B, Level 2

S151. Building Communities: How to Develop Partnerships and Collaborations. (Sarah Gambito, Francisco Aragón, Cornelius Eady,  Joan Kane,  Diem Jones) This panel gathers representatives of five organizations serving writers of color: Cave Canem, Institute of American Indian Arts, Kundiman, Letras Latinas, and Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation. We will discuss best practices and possibilities for collaboration—across organizations; with presses, residencies, and university affiliations; and beyond. Panelists will discuss how partnerships promote cross-cultural solidarity and foster organizational sustainability, growth, and inspiration. Excellent panel and worthwhile topic.

Room M100 J, Mezzanine Level

S158. Teaching Translated Texts in the Writing Program. (Nadia Kalman,  Geoffrey Brock,  Elizabeth Harris,  Douglas Unger,  Russell Valentino) Creative writing programs incorporate the reading and study of literature, but often focus on English-language writers. Four writing professors, all of whom translate, talk about teaching international literature in their programs. Panelists discuss the use of various works and writers and their respective literary traditions; consider pedagogical approaches to language, style, narrative conventions, and subjects; and reveal how their own work as writer/translators informs their teaching. Important subject for exposing students to more world literature.

12:00 pm to 1:15 pm

Room 200 B&C, Level 2

S175. From the Thickets of Translation: How and Why We Should Teach Contemporary World Literature in the Creative Writing Classroom. (Jia Oak Baker,  Ravi Shankar,  Forrest Gander,  Wayne Miller,  Carolyne Wright) In the 21st century, any conversation about literature must expand beyond the Western tradition, reflecting the globalization intensifying around us. But the MFA classroom is often limited to the same few canonical examples of international writers. Join editors from highly acclaimed anthologies of contemporary world literature as they discuss pedagogical strategies and the necessity for enlarging the perspective used in classrooms today by infusing new voices into the conversation. Similar and important topic on world lit in the MFA.

Room L100 D&E, Lower Level

S193. Writing into the World: Memoir, History, and Private Life. (Honor Moore,  Carolyn Forche,  Catina Bacote,  Alysia Abbott,  Garth Greenwell) Memory drives memoir, but it can take writing to realize that while we thought we were just living, history was unfolding. Contemporary memoir has been ridiculed as MEmoir, but where would history be without the testimony of individuals, whose memories of “how it was” bring into focus, add nuance, even contradict received accounts? Even what seems private is subject to the dynamics of political, economic, and cultural change. How do we bring the larger world into our autobiographical writing while retaining the intimacy of the personal voice and affirming the uniqueness of each life? Strong panel in the memoir area.

1:30 pm to 2:45 pm

Auditorium Room 1, Level 1

S197. Disappearance and Forgetting: Geeshie Wiley and Last Kind Words Blues, A Lecture by Greil Marcus, Sponsored by the Poetry Foundation. (Robert Polito, Greil Marcus) In 1930 a blues singer and guitarist named Geeshie Wiley recorded a song that opened up the deepest crevices of the American imagination. Then she fell off the map. While recent research has, for the first time, tracked the outlines of her life, she remains in the mist—and in this talk, the song writes the singer's adventures in the long years after she once spoke in public to describe life as she knew it. A conversation with Poetry Foundation president Robert Polito follows. Greil Marcus is a fascinating speaker and thinker.

3:00 pm to 4:15 pm

Auditorium Room 1, Level 1

S229. Keeping Our Small Boat Afloat: A Tribute to Robert Bly, Sponsored by Blue Flower Arts . (Tom Verner,  Tony Hoagland,  Marie Howe,  Jill Bialosky) A tribute to honor and celebrate the life and literary work of groundbreaking poet, writer, translator, storyteller, and cultural critic Robert Bly. Bly has changed the American literary landscape with pioneering translations of Neruda, Transtromer, Machado, Hafez, and Rilke. His own poetry permeates the space between the conscious and unconscious, and finds rich meaning in mythology. An icon of American letters, Bly's many awards include the Frost Medal. He has lived in Minnesota for 80+ years. Great group of readers to honor a seminal poet/translator.

Room 101 F&G, Level 1

S235. Revisiting Highway 61. (Mark Conway, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Dessa, James Allen Hall ) Fifty-five years after Minnesota’s native son Bob Dylan came down from the Iron Range on Highway 61, four poets will respond to his pervasive influence. They will read their own work and explore how it reflects and deflects powerful elements in Dylan including Blake, the blues, the Bible and the North Country. How can you have AWP in Minnesota and not talk about the immortal Bob D.?

Room 205 A&B, Level 2

S242. Speculating Darkly: A Poetry Reading . (Bianca Spriggs,  Keith Wilson,  Kenyatta Rogers, Ladan Osman,  Airea Matthews) Taking its title and spirit from a series of essays written by poet Roger Reeves (published on the Poetry Foundation's "Harriet the Blog"), and subsequent reading series curated by poet and visual artist Krista Franklin, "Speculating Darkly, or The Folk Surreal Future," is a poetry reading that features some of the Midwest's emerging African Diaspora writers who focus on the Black Fantastic, the Grotesque, the Afro-Surreal, the Gothic, the speculative, and science fiction. Looks like a strong reading. Make sure you hear Ladan Osman.

4:30 pm to 5:45 pm

Room 211 A&B, Level 2

S277. Persimmon Tree Poets Read. (Wendy Barker, Chana Bloch, Tori Derricotte,  Sandra M. Gilbert, Fleda Brown) A reading by poets featured in past issues of Persimmon Tree: An Online Journal of the Arts for Women Over Sixty, a magazine that has showcased many of the most significant women poets of our era. The founding poetry editor and current poetry editor will also briefly review the history and direction of this highly successful journal that now reaches 12,000 unique readers each month from across the globe. Good group. I’ve heard Alicia Ostriker might read Chana Bloch’s poems, since Chana is recovering from an illness.

Room M100 H&I, Mezzanine Level

S283. Everything I Know about Poetry I Learned from Li Po and Tu Fu: The Influence of Classical Chinese Poetry . (John Bradley, Sam Hamill,  George Kalamaras,  Ken Letko) Once, Li Po was stepping over a puddle, and a wood splinter fell from his shoe sole into the water, making ripples that will be felt at this AWP Conference. These ripples, in fact, have formed Modernist poetry. Join the conversation so you can practice splitting firewood by moonlight. Good topic and panel.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8
Working with a Writing Mentor: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
How to Deliver Your Message: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Why Write Poetry? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Using Poetic Forms, Part 1: Introduction; Part 2: The Sonnet; Part 3, The Sestina;
Part 4, The Ghazal; Part 5, The Tanka

How to Deliver Your Message, Part 6: Irony

Irony is one of the sharpest tools at the disposal of a writer. Essentially, irony means saying the opposite of what you are conveying, but with a wink to the reader so it’s understood that you’re actually advocating the contrary of your surface message. The enormous advantages of irony over preaching to your audience are that irony entertains, uses humor to disarm the reader’s defenses, and still strikes right to the heart. 

One of the most famous examples of irony is Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, subtitled For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public. Even the title is devastatingly ironic. Swift published this short essay as a pamphlet in 1729 at a time when dire poverty was common in his native Ireland, and there was no safety net for the poor, who often faced starvation, disease, and freezing weather with no protection or remedy.

Swift pretended to present his solution to this poverty in the voice of an optimistic do-gooder. The narrator proposes fattening children to the age of one year so they can be sold as food for the rich: “I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasie, or a ragoust.” The reader has to laugh, but behind that chuckle is the unsettling thought that this is really what it has come to: children are so poorly provided for that eating them almost seems like an plausible alternative.

Part of the brilliance and hilarity of this essay is that Swift never stops acting his part. He always speaks in the voice of the concerned citizen, acting the hopeful social engineer who believes that his solution will work: “I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection.”

When is it appropriate to use the sort of wry humor Swift employs so successfully? As the poet Chana Bloch commented on the subject of irony in discussing the Yiddish poet Jacob Glatstein, "It's a defense mechanism, a coping mechanism: the more harrowing the context, the more threatening the circumstance, the sharper the irony." The powerless have power when they wield the blade of irony.

Many writers who lived under communism in Eastern Europe were experts with the razor of irony. The poet Wislawa Szymborska was particularly good at playing the role of the naive speaker whose words were just a bit suspect. One great example is her poem “True Love,” which pretends to be an argument against romantic relationships:

True love. Is it normal

is it serious, is it practical?
What does the world get from two people

who exist in a world of their own?

Another great example of irony in Eastern European literature is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s chapter in The Gulag Archipelago on “The Ships of the Archipelago.” In this section Solzhenytsin describes the railroad cars used to transport prisoners to Siberia, or from prison to prison, during the worst days of the Stalinist purges in Russia. The conditions he narrates are almost unbearable to read: the crowding worse than any zoo, the disease-ridden water, the lack of toilets or time to meet basic human functions, the brutality of the guards. It would be intolerable to read these details, except that Solzhenitsyn strangely takes the side of the guards against the prisoners. Of course the guards’ behavior is understandable, he argues, because there is no alternative. Instead of hauling fresh water from farther away, why shouldn’t they give the prisoners the more accessible water from the locomotive tender that is “yellow and murky, with some lubricating grease mixed in with it.” Makes perfect sense, right? And, he adds, “why should a Soviet soldier have to carry water like a donkey for enemies of the people?” Solzhenytsin’s argument is close to plausible, so the irony makes us even more acutely aware of how unjustifiable such treatment is. The humor of this completely unexpected argument allows the unendurable information conveyed to be not only readable, but entertaining.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 

How to Deliver Your Message: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

How to Get Published: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7

Working with a Writing Mentor: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Why Write Poetry? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Using Poetic Forms, Part 1: Introduction; Part 2: The Sonnet; Part 3, The Sestina;
Part 4, The Ghazal; Part 5, The Tanka

AWP highlights for Friday, March 8, 2013

Here are my very personal and individual picks for this day at the conference of the Associated Writers and Writing Programs (AWP).

10:30 a.m. to 11:45 a.m.

Room 108, Plaza Level

F138. Role and Impact of International Anthologies. (Kaveh Bassiri, Kevin Prufer, Nathalie Handal, Geoffrey Brock, Pierre Joris) I’m interested in international literature, and this panel features important anthologists.

Room 200, Level 2

F142. Essaying the Essay. (David Lazar, Phillip Lopate, David Shields, Lia Purpura, Reda Bensmaïa) Good panel, good readers, good topic.

Room 201, Level 2

F143. Books in the Age of Reader-centric Publishing. (Buzz Poole, Lisa Pearson, Richard Nash, Matvei Yankelevich, Elizabeth Koch) This topic is the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about—what’s happening to literary publishing in the age of the ebook.

Room 302/304, Level 3

F152. Why There Are Words Literary Reading Series Showcases Boston Writers. (Peg Alford Pursell, Christopher Castellani, Tracy Winn, Pablo Medina, Joan Wickersham) This is a wonderful San Francisco Bay Area series, transported to Boston by its able curator, Peg Alford Pursell. The theme is that each reader only reads for seven minutes, which psychologists claim is the time of a listener’s maximum attention to one voice.

Room 305, Level 3

F154. Things We Know We Love: The Poems and Influence of Nâzim Hikmet. (Randy Blasing, Mutlu Konuk Blasing, David Wojahn, Dorianne Laux, Zack Rogow, Sidney Wade) Nazim Hikmet is one of the great poets of the last century, and this is an important moment to make his poetry known to the wider audience it deserves.

Room 306, Level 3

F155. Page Meets Stage. (Taylor Mali, Martín Espada, Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Reginald Gibson) More good readers from this renowned series based in Manhattan.

12:30 to 1:20 p.m.

Book signing with Eva Saulitis at the Red Hen Press booth. Eva Saulitis published both a book of poems, Many Ways to Say It; and a book of nonfiction about her work as a whale biologist, Into Great Silence, all in the last few months. She will also be signing Saturday at Red Hen from 11:30 to 12:30.

Noon to 1:15 p.m.

Room 202, Level 2

F173. How to Build a Successful Kickstarter Campaign for Your Publishing Project. (Meaghan O’Connell, Benjamin Samuel, Mat Honan, Joshua Mandelbaum, Laurie Ochoa) Useful! Useful is good.

Room 210, Level 2

F180. The Urge Toward Memoir. (Elisabeth Schmitz, Jill Kneerim, Michael Thomas, Jeanette Winterson, Lily King) Good group of panelists, interesting topic—novelists writing memoirs.

Room 303, Level 3

F182. How to Catch a Pair of Flying Hands: A Reading by Deaf Writers. (Raymond Luczak, Kristen Harmon, Allison Polk, Kristen Ringman) A worthwhile topic I’ve never seen before at AWP. Good title, too.

1:30 to 2:45 p.m.

Room 204, Level 2

F204. What Poets Learn When They Translate. (Zack Rogow, Idra Novey, Chana Bloch, Bill Zavatsky) Shameless self-promotion.

Room 302/304, Level 3

F210. A Centenary Celebration of Muriel Rukeyser, Sponsored by Paris Press. (Jan Freeman, Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, Olga Broumas, Michael S. Harper) Who scheduled my panel at the same time as this event? Muriel Rukeyser, well worth honoring.

Hynes Ballroom, Level 3

F220. Cave Canem Prize Winners, Then and Now. (Alison Meyers, Major Jackson, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Tracy K. Smith, Iain Haley Pollock) Cave Canem is such a wonderful literary institution, this has to be good.

Room 107, Plaza Level

F226. A Tribute To Remy Charlip, 1929-2012. (Joshua Kryah, Erika Bradfield, Brian Selznick, Dan Hurlin) My son spent weeks when he would not go to sleep until I read him Remy Charlip’s Mother, Mother, I Feel Sick: Send for the Doctor, Quick, Quick, Quick. Remy was a terrific children’s writer and a terrific person.

4:30 to 5:45 p.m.

Veterans Memorial Auditorium, Level 2

F250. Alison Bechdel & Jeanette Winterson: A Reading and Conversation, Sponsored by Emerson College MFA. (Alison Bechdel, Jeanette Winterson, Elisabeth Schmitz) Jeanette Winterson, live, in person!

Room 202, Level 2

F263. Blue-collar College Students and the Creative Writing Degree. (Jerry Wemple, Lawrence Coates, Claire Lawrence) Class is a topic so rarely broached in discussions of creative writing programs.

7:00 to 9:00 p.m.

Offsite event: Hanging Loose Press authors reading. Community Church of Boston, 565 Boylston St., across from Copley Square Park. Great group of Hanging Loose readers featuring Robert Hershon and Bill Zavatsky, among others. Hanging Loose is one of my favorites of the small presses, and has some of the funniest and most moving authors.

8:30 to 10:00 p.m.

Veterans Memorial Auditorium, Level 2

F284. Amy Bloom & Richard Russo: A Reading and Conversation. (Leah Hager Cohen, Amy Bloom, Richard Russo) I’m a fan of Amy Bloom and I’ve never heard her read in person, so this is high on my list.

AWP LINKS:

AWP Boston 2013: What's New
Suggestions on How to Network at AWP
Highlights for Thursday, March 7, 2013
Highlights for Saturday, March 9, 2013

Zack Rogow will be reading at an offsite event at AWP on Wednesday, March 6 at 7:00 p.m. as part of the launch of Cornelius Eady's new chapbook/CD in the community room of Cambridge Cohousing, 175 Richdale Avenue in Cambridge MA. He'll also be speaking on two panels at AWP on Friday, March 8: Things We Know We Love: The Poems and Influence of Nazim Hikmet, from 10:30 to 11:45 a.m., room 305, Level 3; and  What Poets Learn When They Translate, from 1:30 to 2:45 p.m., room 204, level 2. He'll be signing copies of his latest book of poems, My Mother and the Ceiling Dancers, on Saturday, March 9, from noon to 1:15 at the Kattywompus Press table, booth 1111.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 

How to Get Published: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7

Working with a Writing Mentor: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Why Write Poetry? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Using Poetic Forms, Part 1: Introduction; Part 2: The Sonnet; Part 3, The Sestina;
Part 4, The Ghazal; Part 5, The Tanka
How to Deliver Your Message: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4