Mood: Decidedly mischievous
Location: Where do you think?
Dinner: Demarchelier, with a perfect stranger and a nice Sancerre
Once again I am posting perilously close to the end of the day–I could claim I am on Pacific time and thus it’s really 8:30 p.m., but that just wouldn’t wash. I find that it’s actually the best time because (a) the Adorables are slumbering, (b) I can feel a cool night breeze on my toes through the window, and (c) I can listen to New Sounds on WNYC as I type. Or not.
I was explaining to a friend tonight (see "Dinner," above) how I came to be a poet who frequently writes in meter. It all started in my first semester of graduate school at the University of Big Midwestern City (no, not that city; think smaller and farther south). I was taking a workshop with Andrew Hudgins, whose work I am ashamed to say I was not yet very familiar with. I was back in school after five post-college years in the working world, and I envisioned an ivory paradise sheltered from the "real world" of corporate greed, time clocks, and general accountability. I assumed that my poetry professor would be black-clad, bohemian, perhaps have a little beard.
Imagine my surprise at finding a clean-shaven, bespectacled gent in white oxford shirt, pincord trousers, and a pink paisley tie. "My God," I told my friend Suzanne on the phone that night. "My poetry teacher is a Republican."
Style and politics aside, perhaps the most alarming thing about Prof. Hudgins was his insistence that each of us produce, at some point in the semester, twenty lines of blank verse. (I was, you may recall, as yet unfamiliar with his brilliant blank verse narrative, After the Lost War). As an undergraduate I had somehow managed, despite falling in love with the verse of Theodore Roethke, Louise Bogan, Wallace Stevens, and Seamus Heaney, to get the impression that "real" poems nowadays were only written in tiny, cramped, unrhymed and unmetered lines. As a result, my first publication, a year after receiving my B.A., was in Rolling Stone, whose only guidelines for poems were that they be no longer than eight lines.
As I began grad school, I was teaching for the first time–an 8 a.m. composition class, twice a week–and immersing myself in literature and literary theory to an extent that my rather desultory English major had not required. Overwhelmed, I found it difficult to write new poems, so I brought to the workshop some rather lame pieces I had penned between writing ad copy for Elder-Beerman department stores in Dayton, Ohio.
Accordingly, Andrew turned up his nose at them, pointing out their obvious cliches ("evening’s heady cocktail") and lack of attention to image and line. I knew that if I could only pull of this blank verse thingy I could get the sort of praise for my literary prowess that I so richly deserved. I made a few feeble attempts but got no further than a few stilted lines.
Then fate stepped in: I went to Ann Arbor with my boyfriend, a Michigan alum, for a football weekend. It sounded like fun–meeting his old college friends, and reuniting with my cousin Todd, who was driving in from Chicago with his new girlfriend. Things did not go well. For some reason, I felt uncomfortable with the friends, my cousin was annoying, and his girlfriend, I was convinced, was better suited for my boyfriend than I was, and perhaps he was even noticing that himself.
The result was a meltdown, followed by a very tense, practically sleepless night. Later, back home, I started to explore the experience on paper and realized that the lines that emerged were more or less iambic pentameter. I was writing longer lines, and more of them, than ever before. I was channelling the great poets throughout the centuries, and I was able to give the intense and disturbing emotions a charged, dramatic treatment.
When I brought the poem–embarrassingly titled "Purgatory at the Wolverine Inn"–to the workshop, Andrew’s response was clearly positive. After class, he leaned towards me and said, emphatically, "Good poem." I had found my metier. After that I tried sonnets, sestinas, and other forms. But most often I wrote in unrhymed tetrameter or pentameter, working to keep it from becoming "sing-songy" by using enjambment and variations, telling stories–narratives and lyric narratives. It started to come as naturally as walking to me.
Even now, iambic rhythms underlie a lot of my work. There’s nothing better than feeling that "click" as a line falls into place, often after several rounds of revisions. And even if I become a more electic poet, formally speaking, I will still have a special place in my heart for the iambic beat.
Thanks, Andrew!
Daily Confession: I am a man who tilts. Whoops! Sorry–that’s not me, that essayist extraordinaire, Phillip Lopate, from "Portrait of My Body," which my Creative Nonfiction students are reading for next week. Rather, I am a woman who reclines, specifically while typing on my laptop, which makes for a completely non-ergonomic experience resulting in neck and backaches, and some very lumpy pillows. Into which I am now going to sink. Bon Soir!