Advice for Writers

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Saturday, January 11, 2025

The Braided Poem

In recent decades, the braided poem has opened dynamic possibilities for writers and readers. The current wave of braided poems began with the work of Larry Levis in the mid-1980s in books such as Winter Stars.

Larry Levis (1946–1996)

Many other writers then successfully adapted the braided poem to different subjects. These poets include Mark Doty, Lynda Hull, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Jorie Graham, Brenda Hillman, Dionisio Martínez, and Frank Paino.

I trace the origins of the braided poem back to Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” In that poem, Whitman described the widespread mourning in the wake of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, and crocheted that together with images of lilacs, birdsong, and a star that signaled the start of spring:

Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.

What is a braided poem? A braided poem twines together disparate strands of narrative and imagery, connecting them metaphorically. Usually a braided poem restlessly moves from one topic to another, at first perhaps jarringly. As the poem progresses, the reader gradually comes to understand what ties together the different braids, on a figurative level. When done well, the braided poem is electric, following the jumps of the mind and the heart as they come to grips with complex emotions and thoughts that are difficult to fit all in one strand. The braided poem evolved alongside the braided essay, which uses similar techniques in prose, combining different threads to explore how seemingly independent topics intertwine.

One of the most successful braided poems, to my mind, is Mark Doty’s “Fog.” Mark Doty braids together three distinctive subjects in the space of only a couple of pages. The poem begins with an account of plants taking turns blooming in the speaker’s garden. Already in the opening lines, the description foreshadows fatal possibilities, as the flowers last only a few days, and the white peonies have a “blood-color…ruffle”. The second element in the poem, a Ouija board belonging to the speaker and his partner, echoes this theme. Spirits of dead children use the planchette to communicate with the couple. It’s not until line 45 that we come to understand all these hints about blood and death:

Though it [the blood] submits to test, two,
to be exact, each done three times…

The reader becomes aware that the speaker and his partner are being tested for HIV at the crest of the epidemic that killed tens of millions of people worldwide. Gradually we learn that the speaker is negative, but his partner has antibodies indicating the presence of the illness. The speaker is so stricken by the news that he can’t even use the word “positive.” Nor do the acronyms HIV or AIDs appear in the text. Those omissions reveal that the speaker does not want even to voice the possible outcomes for his beloved. The poem is terribly moving, and uses a device similar to Whitman’s elegy for Lincoln, evoking the cycles of life and death in spring to highlight grief. With incredible skill, Doty braids together the poem’s three strands—the garden, the Ouija board, and the HIV tests.

During the time when Mary Doty published “Fog” in his dazzling collection My Alexandria in 1993, the braided poem arrived as a revelation. It was a period when much of the poetry in the U.S.A. was taking paths that had become a little too well travelled: the “I do this, I do that” poems of the New York School, the Beat Generation stream of consciousness howl, or the personal-as-political autobiographical poems of identity. The braided poem allowed for a complex and nuanced exploration of myriad awakenings taking place in North American society, changes that were upending Victorian morality; as well as challenging dominant cultures in class, gender, race, and sexuality.

To my mind, the braided poem works best when the varied strands have a strong rubber band holding them together, and the different braids strengthen the poem’s emotional fibers. The strands have to twist together organically, and not arbitrarily or gratuitously. Braiding very different strands in the same poem can feel gimmicky or forced if parts of the poem strike the reader as added on for no compelling reason. Those added parts can then dilute the impact of the poem’s core.

Here are a few of my favorite braided poems that beautifully combine multiple strands:

Jorie Graham: “Salmon”
Brenda Hillman: “The Spark”
Lynda Hull: “Utopia Parkway”
Dionisio Martinez: “Bad Alchemy”
Frank Paino: “Each Bone of the Body”

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation, The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Friday, December 13, 2024

Tribute to Jerome Rothenberg by Michael Palmer

Jerome “Jerry” Rothenberg, poet, translator, performance artist, and anthologist passed away at the age of 92 on April 21, 2024. He wrote ninety books of poetry and essays. Jerry’s groundbreaking anthologies include Technicians of the Sacred, Shaking the Pumpkin, and Poems for the Millennium. He created the field of ethnopoetics, the study and celebration of non-Western, non-canonical poetries, often coming from ancient and autochthonous cultures.

Jerome “Jerry” Rothenberg (1931–2024)

At a celebration of Rothenberg’s life and work at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, poet Michael Palmer delivered a beautiful tribute to Jerry that I’m posting here in full:

Well, for Jerry, for Jerry and always for his wife, Diane Brodatz Rothenberg, where do we begin? When asked, Gertrude Stein once famously said, “We begin at the beginning, go on until the end, then stop,” or something close to that. Unfortunately, our limited time does not allow for such an approach, but I’ll try to briefly celebrate Jerry’s meaning to me personally across the years.

I remember that it was in the winter of 1963–64 that LeRoi Jones (soon to become Amiri Baraka) and I went one evening to the Half Note on Spring Street in New York City to hear John Coltrane and his magnificent quartet during that period that Coltrane was first making his extended explorations on soprano sax. Two long sessions with one break, ending somewhere around 1:30 or 2 in the morning. Coltrane performing solos that went on forever but never too long. In an interview around that time, when asked about these solos, Coltrane said that he was “looking for the door.” It struck me that this was exactly what I was searching for, in an effort to find my way to an alternative life to that which had been proposed for me, a life in the company of poets and like-minded folk, a “new life” maybe such as Dante had once proposed in La Vita Nuova. And now I realize that LeRoi was searching as well, for a life beyond downtown bohemia that the Black Arts Movement would soon help make possible.

Which brings me to the many doors that Jerry opened for us in our effort to find a way toward something vital and new, some path not yet taken or even known. Jerry as neo-Dada performer, taking on the persona of Tristan Tzara, or Samy Rosenstock as he had been known before he too took an alternate path. Jerry as translator, bringing parallel worlds into view, forging a dialogue between self and other, and self as other. Foregrounding cultures heretofore excluded by the usual institutional orthodoxies. Contact and multiple conversations, innovative and esoteric strains of song sounding across time. The project then continuing with his many groundbreaking and visionary anthologies that did no less than reconfigure the cultural map, redraw its vectors, and celebrate a range of poetic accomplishment that was at once atemporal and international, defying boundaries or limits or proscriptions, and erasing the conventional Anglo-American cultural timelines. These works by Jerry served and serve now as guides for those of us interested in erasing borders and eliminating border guards, and in coming to understand a visionary tradition in defiance of the warmongers and culture-mongers and profiteers.

And then I cannot help but emphasize the immediate, intense humanity that Jerry and Diane offered in their everyday lives, their generosity in countless matters and their commitment to deep fellow-feeling, what the arts fully committed to will bring to our sense of that company I mention above. A shared Cabaret Voltaire in the various ways we always try to reimagine it, ecstatic singers on the stage, good food and wine shared at table, yet never forgetful of the darker forces pulling us toward division and hatred of the other, that bigotry that never seems to wane throughout history, that war against the universal life of the imagination and creative growth.

Countless doors opened, no admission fee.

Michael Palmer was born into an Italian-American family in Manhattan in 1943 and has lived in San Francisco since 1969. He has taught at numerous universities in the United States, Europe, and Asia, and has published translations from a variety of languages, in particular French, Brazilian Portuguese, and Russian. Palmer has been involved in joint projects with many visual artists and composers in the United States and elsewhere and has also served as an artistic collaborator with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company for close to fifty years. His most recent poetry collection, Little Elegies for Sister Satan, from New Directions, was published in 2021. In 2023, Nightboat Books brought out a new edition of a prose work, The Danish Notebook.

Michael Palmer

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation, The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Monday, December 9, 2024

The Problem of the Unsympathetic Main Character

Quick!—think of a novel, movie, or play with an unsympathetic main character. It’s not easy, is it? There aren’t many stories that fall into that category. Why? I think humans are hard-wired to identify with characters, and it’s difficult to bond with a protagonist who is fundamentally unlikeable or evil. We have a fascination with evil, which is what makes villains such interesting folks, but as protagonists, villains or unsympathetic characters don’t work very well.

One example:

Even among fans of Charles Dickens, very few have ever read Barnaby Rudge.

This novel includes some of Dickens’ most lyrical writing and a fascinating historical setting, but it’s never been a favorite. I think part of the reason is that the main character, Barnaby, fights with deadly fierceness on the wrong side of a cause. Bad actors manipulate Barnaby to take a leading role in the anti-Catholic riots in London in 1780. Although Barnaby is sympathetic because he is developmentally delayed, he ultimately has a negative impact. His story hasn’t won many readers.

I’m having difficulty finding other examples, because authors are smart enough to realize that unsympathetic main characters aren’t very popular. One of the great things about stories is that they allow us to empathize with another person’s struggles. Empathy is not only a fundamental human trait, it is also a pleasure. When a writer denies a reader that enjoyment, the reader feels thwarted and even neglected.

I suppose one could argue that Rodion Raskolnikov of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is an unsympathetic main character. Raskolnikov commits a cruel and unpardonable crime. But Raskolnikov feels great anguish for his sins. He ultimately repents and finds a spiritual love with Sonya. By the novel’s end, Raskolnikov’s suffering and change of heart have earned him some of the reader’s sympathy. The same is true of Dickens’ miser Scrooge in A Christmas Carol.

But there are certain types of unsympathetic main characters who do manage to evoke a positive response in a reader or audience. Among male characters, a domineering patriarch can sometimes be sympathetic if that person has overcome great obstacles or worked toward admirable goals. In August Wilson’s play Fences, for instance, the main character Troy, a garbage collector, is a cold and judgmental father. He’s also an unfaithful husband who fathers a child out of wedlock, despite having a devoted wife. But Troy is partly sympathetic because he’s fighting for his dignity. Troy has suffered racial discrimination, and we admire his determination to advance out of the role of garbage collector to become the first Black truck driver working for the city.

Another somewhat sympathetic dominating male is The General in Gabriel García Márquez’s novel The Autumn of the Patriarch. The General is an impossibly violent and corrupt dictator, but the reader has to admire the stubborn strength he shows in defying neocolonial domination. Perhaps the exaggerated proportions of the crimes The General commits allow the reader to overlook some of the faults of this strange protagonist.

Among female characters, one type of unsympathetic character who manages to win over the audience is the femme fatale.

Barbara Stanwick’s most famous femme fatale role

A femme fatale often acts in amoral and vicious ways, but a moviegoer has to admire her beauty, her sensuality, and her scheming cleverness. If we never completely like the femme fatale, we still identify with her ability to live a kind of freedom that few achieve, male or female.

All in all, I would not recommend building a plot with an unsympathetic main character. If you do head down that curvy and cobblestoned street, I would suggest placing some very sympathetic characters along the way, in order to feed that terribly human impulse to identify.

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation, The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Sunday, November 10, 2024

Delicious Quotes from Middlemarch by George Eliot—Aphorisms and the Novel

Novelists have always told stories, but in the nineteenth century, they also sometimes took a step outside the narrative to make more general observations about human nature and experience. In these aphorisms, the writer commented on the action, but also served up delicious philosophical treats. There’s something very modern about that. A novel was not just an impersonal recounting, but an intimate conversation between the writer and the reader, with engaging side comments.

There’s probably no fiction writer better at these asides than George Eliot.

George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819–1880)

Eliot displayed that gift at its best in her novel, Middlemarch, the tale of a brilliant young woman in provincial England who marries too early a stuffy clergyman very much her senior. Her husband views his wife’s intellect as a hindrance to her being his unquestioning disciple.

Here are some of my favorites of George Eliot’s aphorisms in her masterpiece, in the order in which they appear. I’ve also included a few lines of dialogue that I particular love:

“…very little achievement is required in order to pity another man’s shortcomings.”

“A sense of contributing to form the world’s opinion makes conversation particularly cheerful ...”

“I have a hyperbolical tongue: it catches fire as it goes.”

“A man may, from various motives, decline to give his company, but perhaps not even a sage would be gratified that nobody missed him.”

“... our tongues are little triggers which have usually been pulled before general intentions can be brought to bear.”

“... the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with.”

“... we hear with the more keenness what we wish others not to hear.”

“... what loneliness is more lonely than distrust?”

“… it is a little too trying to human flesh to be conscious of expressing one’s self better than others and never to have it noticed …”

“… it is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences.”

[That impractical scheme] “… was as free from interruption as a plan for threading the stars together.”

“But how little we know what would make paradise for our neighbors.”

“‘I still think that the greater part of the world is mistaken about many things. Surely one may be sane and yet think so, since the greater part of the world has often had to come round from its opinion.’”

“Life would be no better than candlelight tinsel and daylight rubbish if our spirits were not touched by what has been, to issues of longing and constancy.”

“If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.”

“… to most mortals there is a stupidity which is unendurable and a stupidity which is altogether acceptable—else, indeed, what would become of social bonds?”

“… we all know the difficulty of carrying out a resolve when we secretly long that it may turn out to be unnecessary.”

“It’s no use being wise for other people.”

“It’s rather a strong check to one’s self-complacency to find out how much of one’s right doing depends on not being in want of money.”

“A man vows, and yet will not cast away the means of breaking his vow.”

“I have always loved him. I should never like scolding anyone else so well, and that is a point to be thought of in a husband.”

“… husbands are an inferior class of men, who require keeping in order.”

One of my very favorite George Eliot aphorism is the closing sentence of Middlemarch. I won’t spoil the surprise by quoting it.

It’s interesting that novelists, for the most part, no longer break away from the story to make these parenthetical, general comments. For a writer to tell us these days what to conclude from the events of the plot would feel too directive, almost manipulative—not to mention quaint. In some ways, that’s a loss, because those asides were more than just generalizations, they were a chance for an author to let another facet of their talent shine, the ability to sum up human nature and life beyond the specifics of one individual story.

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation, The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest: