Author: Paul Szlosek

Paul Szlosek was born in Southbridge, Massachusetts, but currently resides in the nearby metropolis of Worcester. He was co-founder and host of the long-running Poet’s Parlor poetry reading in Southbridge and Sturbridge, as well as a past recipient of the Jacob Knight Award for Poetry. His poems have appeared in various local publications including the Worcester Review, Worcester Magazine, Sahara, Concrete Wolf, and Diner. He’s probably best known in the Worcester poetry community for his fanatical obsession with obscure poetry forms, and has invented his own including the ziggurat, the streetbeatina, and (most recently) the hodgenelle.

10 Great Quotes About Poetry, Writing, and Art by Charles Bukowski

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 9 Comments

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“There is something about writing poetry that brings a man close to the cliff’s edge.”

“Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.”

“Writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate, they stop being writers.”

“Bad poetry is caused by people who sit down and think “Now I am going to write a poem”.

“I should think that many of our poets, the honest ones, will confess to having no manifesto. It is a painful confession but the art of poetry carries its own powers without having to break them down into critical listings. I do not mean that poetry should be raffish and irresponsible clown tossing off words into the void. But the very feeling of a good poem carries its own reason for being… Art is its own excuse, and it’s either Art or it’s something else. It’s either a poem or a piece of cheese.”

“Literature, you know, is difficult for the average man to assimilate (and for the unaverage man too); I don’t like most poetry, for example, so I write mine the way I like to read it.”

“Great writers are indecent people; they live unfairly saving the best part for paper. Good human beings save the world so that bastards like me can keep creating art, become immortal. If you read this after I am dead, it means I made it.”

“Writing is like going to bed with a beautiful woman and afterwards she gets up, goes to her purse and gives me a handful of money.”

“The secret [to writing poetry] is writing down one simple line after another.”

“To me, Art (poetry) is a continuous and continuing process and that when a man fails to write good poetry he fails to live fully or well.”

—Charles Bukowski

 

10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by Wislawa Szymborska

~ Paul Szlosek ~ Leave a comment

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“I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.”

“Poets, if they’re genuine, must keep repeating “I don’t know.” Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift that’s absolutely inadequate to boot. So the poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their oeuvre.”

“Each of us has a very rich nature and can look at things objectively, from a distance, and at the same time can have something more personal to say about them. I am trying to look at the world, and at myself, from many different points of view. I think many poets have this duality.”

“All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination. Even the richest, most surprising and wild imagination is not as rich, wild and surprising as reality. The task of the poet is to pick singular threads from this dense, colorful fabric.”

“The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.”

“In the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.”

“I usually write for the individual reader – though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.”

“I’m fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.”

“Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.”

“Contemporary poets are skeptical and suspicious even, or perhaps especially, about themselves. They publicly confess to being poets only reluctantly, as if they were a little ashamed of it. But in our clamorous times it’s much easier to acknowledge your faults, at least if they’re attractively packaged, than to recognize your own merits, since these are hidden deeper and you never quite believe in them yourself.”

—Wislawa Szymborska

10 Great Quotes About Poetry, Writing, and Art by Jane Hirshfield

~ Paul Szlosek ~ Leave a comment

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“Poems give us permission to be unsure, in ways we must be if we are ever to learn anything not already known. If you look with open eyes at your actual life, it’s always going to be the kind of long division problem that doesn’t work out perfectly evenly. Poems let you accept the multiplicity and complexity of the actual, they let us navigate the unnavigable, insoluble parts of our individual fates and shared existence.”

“Art-making is learned by immersion. You take in vocabularies of thought and feeling, grammar, diction, gesture, from the poems of others, and emerge with the power to turn language into a lathe for re-shaping, re-knowing your own tongue, heart, and life.”

“When I write, I don’t know what is going to emerge. I begin in a condition of complete unknowing, an utter nakedness of concept or goal. A word appears, another word appears, an image. It is a moving into mystery.”

“I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being.”

“Creativity itself is a joyous unlatching. The act of creative imagining, inventing, saying differently, crafting a metaphor or image, then crafting another metaphor or image when you go further or when you revise – all these take whatever you think “is” and make clear that other possibilities exist as well. The sense of possibility, the amplitude and freedom that sense of malleability brings – for me, that cannot help but be joyous.”

“The secret of understanding poetry is to hear poetry’s words as what they are: the full self’s most intimate speech, half waking, half dream. You listen to a poem as you might listen to someone you love who tells you their truest day. Their words might weep, joke, whirl, leap. What’s unspoken in the words will still be heard. It’s also the way we listen to music: You don’t look for extractable meaning, but to be moved.”

“Poetry itself, when allowed to, becomes within us a playable organ of perception, sounding out its own forms of knowledge and forms of discovery. Poems do not simply express. They make, they find, they sound (in both meanings of that word) things undiscoverable by other means.”

“The creative is always an act of recombination, with something added by new juxtaposition as making a spark requires two things struck together.”

“Art keeps its newness because it’s at once unforgettable and impossible to remember entirely. Art is too volatile, multiple and evaporative to hold on to. It’s more chemical reaction, one you have to re-create each time, than a substance. Art’s discoveries are also, almost always, counter to ordinary truths.”

“A poem makes clear without making simple. Poetry’s language carries what lives outside language. It’s as if you were given a 5-gallon bucket with 10 gallons of water in it. Mysterious thirsts are answered. That alchemical bucket carries secrets also, even the ones we keep from ourselves.”

—Jane Hirshfield

Invented Poetry Forms – The Sonnette

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 11 Comments

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Like the monosyllabic sonnet which we recently discussed, today I will talk about another invented poetry form inspired by the traditional sonnet – the sonnette. Invented by the American poet, children’s author, museum curator, magician, and Boy Scout executive G. Sherman Ripley sometime in the early 1900s, the sonnette is basically a miniature or half sonnet consisting of seven lines (exactly half of the sonnet’s usual fourteen). It has two stanzas: a quatrain (4 lines) followed by a tercet (3 lines) with the quatrain having a rhyme scheme of abba. while the tercet has one of cbc. And just like its inspiration, the lines are metered, usually written in iambic pentameter.

As you can see, meter is definitely not my strong suit, but here is my own feeble attempt at a sonnette (for you to use as an example if you would like to try writing one yourself):

Ode to a Wannabe Baby Boomer Rocker

Once he dreamed of being the next Springsteen,
but he settled for a working man’s wage
and a once-a-week gig on a bar stage.
What seems like a dream is life in between

the hours he gets to strum guitar and sing
(he’s a remnant of the Rock and Roll age
in a time where Hip Hop and Rap’s now king).

10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by Howard Nemerov

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 3 Comments

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“Robert Frost had always said you mustn’t think of the last line first, or it’s only a fake poem, not a real one. I’m inclined to agree.”

“I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.”

“Writing is like the relationship with your bowels. First you can, then you can’t. Finally, you must. Only then should you reach for the paper.”

“Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.”

“I’ve never read a political poem that’s accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.”

“It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.”

“Both poet and painter want to reach the silence behind the language, the silence within the language. Both painter and poet want their work to shine not only in daylight but (by whatever illusionist magic) from within.”

“A lot happens by accident in poetry.”

“I think there’s one thing which distinguishes our art – we don’t consider. We don’t think. We write a little verse because it comes to us.”

“I’ve thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn’t work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem.”

—Howard Nemerov

Invented Poetry Forms – The Monosyllabic Sonnet

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 21 Comments

P1010048.JPGInterestingly, you will find many invented poetry forms tend not to be created brand new from whole cloth, but rather are either a variation on an existing traditional form or a mash-up of two different ones. The former is certainly true about a form I recently discovered while perusing Miller Williams’ excellent book “Patterns of Poetry: An Encyclopedia of Forms”. Created by the British scholar, publisher, and light verse poet Frank Sidgwick in the early 20th century, the monosyllabic sonnet (also known as a word sonnet) follows most of the rules of a traditional sonnet with one exception (as its name indicates). It has 14 lines and usually uses either the rhyme scheme of an Italian or English sonnet, but each line consists of just one syllable instead of the 10 syllables of iambic pentameter. You may notice I said, “usually uses either the rhyme scheme of an Italian or English sonnet.” That is because Sidgwick’s original monosyllabic sonnet “An Aeronaut to His Lady” actually combines the two, beginning with the rhyme scheme of the opening octet of the Italian (abbaabba) and ending with the closing quatrain and couplet of the English (cdcd ee). I think you will agree when you read it below, it would be near impossible to write a more elegant and perfect monosyllabic sonnet than this:

An Aeronaut to His Lady

I
Through
Blue
Sky
Fly
To
You.
Why?

Sweet
Love,
Feet
Move
So
Slow.

–Frank Sidgwick

As you see, it is indeed a tricky form to write well, but that didn’t stop me from giving it a couple of tries. My first uses the rhyme scheme of an Italian sonnet (abbaabbacdecde):

To My Little Boy
(Who Doesn’t Want to Go Home Quite Yet)

Why
Do
You
Cry,
My
True
Blue
Guy?

Be
Still.
Hey,
We
Will
Stay…

The second is my take on a monosyllabic sonnet utilizing the English sonnet rhyme scheme of ababcdcdefefgg:

Elegy For an Aspiring Surfer/Gravedigger Who Drowned

For
Bob,
Poor
Slob,
You
Tried
To
Ride
Big
Waves,
Dig
Graves –
Boo
Hoo!

If you do decide to take up the challenge of trying to write your own monosyllabic sonnets (and I hope you do), my advice is to do what I recommended with previously discussed poetry forms with minimal words (such as the rothko, the two-by-four, and the Lewis Carroll square poem) and come up with appropriate titles to provide exposition and set up the premise of your poems. Monosyllabic sonnets are a bit difficult to write, so don’t get discouraged! Just keep playing with the form until you come up with something that you feel works for you. And please don’t be shy about sharing your efforts. I’d love to see them!

10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Art by Randall Jarrell

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 2 Comments

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“A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.”

“Most poets, most good poets even, no longer have the heart to write about what is most terrible in the world of the present: the bombs waiting beside the rockets, the hundreds of millions staring into the temporary shelter of their television sets, the decline of the West that seems less a decline than the fall preceding an explosion.”

“Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.”

“Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself.”

“Poetry is a bad medium for philosophy. Everything in the philosophical poem has to satisfy irreconcilable requirements: for instance, the last demand that we should make of philosophy (that it be interesting) is the first we make of a poem; the philosophical poet has an elevated and methodical, but forlorn and absurd air as he works away at his flying tank, his sewing-machine that also plays the piano.”

“The safest way to avoid the world is through art; and the safest way to be linked to the world is through art.”

“A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it.”

“It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.”

“I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can’t read any poetry.”

“There is in this world no line [of poetry] so bad that someone won’t someday copy it.”

—Randall Jarrell

 

 

10 Great Quotes About Poetry, Writing, and Art by Robert Pinsky

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 5 Comments

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“Poetry’s medium is not merely light as air, it is air: vital and deep as ordinary breath.”

“A sentence is like a tune. A memorable sentence gives its emotion a melodic shape. You want to hear it again, say it—in a way, to hum it to yourself. You desire, if only in the sound studio of your imagination, to repeat the physical experience of that sentence. That craving, emotional and intellectual but beginning in the body with a certain gesture of sound, is near the heart of poetry.”

“An underestimated element in poetry, that reading aloud makes clear, is the pause. I mean especially the force of a pause or a couple of pauses close together, contrasted with a longer unit of grammar.”

“Poetry is not easy. Or should I say, real poetry is not easy.”

“I have always been thinking about the sounds and shades and aromas of words – fitting them together or disrupting their customary march – more or less every second of my life, waking and sleeping.”

“‘Write’ is almost the wrong verb for what I do. I think ‘compose’ is more accurate because you’re trying to make the sounds in your mind and in your voice. So I compose while I’m driving or in the shower.

“If a poem is written well, it was written with the poet’s voice and for a voice. Reading a poem silently instead of saying a poem is like the difference between staring at sheet music and actually humming or playing the music on an instrument.”

“If what you want to do is make good art, decide what’s good and try to imitate it.”

“The last thing a young artist should do in poetry or any other field is think about what’s in style, what’s current, what are the trends. Think instead of what you like to read, what do you admire, what you like to listen to in music. What do you like to look at in architecture? Try to make a poem that has some of those qualities.”

“Jazz and poetry both involve a structure that may be familiar and to some extent predictable. And then, you try to create as much surprise and spontaneity and feeling and variation while respecting that structure.”

—Robert Pinsky

 

10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by Ezra Pound

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 3 Comments

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“Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.”

“The primary pigment of poetry is the Image.”

“The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.”

“Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don’t use such an expression as ‘dim land of peace.’ It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstraction.”

“And the good writer chooses his words for their ‘meaning’, but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.”

“Rhythm is form cut into time.”

“One discards rhyme, not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet but because there are certain emotions or energies which are nor represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns.”

“Poetry is a very complex art…. It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.”

“Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.”

“Poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets.”

—Ezra Pound

 

Invented Poetry Forms – The ‘Lewis Carroll’ Square Poem

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 23 Comments

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In my many years of researching poetic forms, I have found that two or more forms will often share the same name, which can become pretty confusing. This definitely is the case with the square poem. One version often referred to as the ‘classic’ square poem is simply a poem in which the number of syllables per line is equal to the number of lines (my invented form the streetbeatina which has eight lines of eight syllables would certainly qualify as one).

In the other variation, which we will be discussing today, the line length is counted not in syllables but in words (isoverbal prosody), the amount of words in each line being the same as the number of lines. What makes this form attributed to the popular writer and poet Lewis Carroll really unique is its almost magical quality of being able to be read the same vertically (from top to bottom) as well as the conventional way from left to right. If you want to see an example of this form perfectly executed, you cannot do better than reading the original poem consisting of six lines of six words apiece thought to be written by Carroll:

A Square Poem

I often wondered when I cursed,
Often feared where I would be—
Wondered where she’d yield her love,
When I yield, so will she.
I would her will be pitied!
Cursed be love! She pitied me …

Not nearly as eloquent or clever, but here is my take on the 6×6 square poem:

Past Confessions

What I did not admit then,
I do not remember that well.
Did not you once say “please
not remember”? Once you would not
admit that. Say, would you believe?
Then, well, please not believe me.

Theoretically, one could write a ‘Lewis Carroll’ square poem of almost any length, but I personally would not recommend writing one longer than a 6×6. Even at the length,  I found it difficult to maintain both the meaning and grammar of the poem without it becoming convoluted and strained. I feel shorter ones are much easier to do, and even a 2×2, the shortest possible with a mere four words, can be effective if you choose an appropriate title to provide exposition and set up the poem’s premise like I tried to do in the following examples:

My Doppelganger

He’s not
not me…

The Stuttering Clock

Says “tick
tick tock.”

These are a couple of my attempts at  writing 3x3s:

Dachshund Depressed About Being Fed a Daily Diet of Frankfurters

Forced to eat,
to endure “dog
eat dog” blues.

What Do I See When I Gaze Upward?

Indigo sky? Not
sky blue? Maybe
not. Maybe turquoise…

Of all the variations I tried, my favorites would undeniably be the 4x4s:

Personal Evaluation

I am not perfect.
Am I absolutely sure?
Not absolutely. Are you
perfect? Sure, you are!

Instructions on Grieving

Don’t mourn the dead.
Mourn the love lost,
the love left unclaimed,
dead – lost, unclaimed possibilities.

Declaration

I love all poetry,
love these wonderful poets,
all wonderful wordsmiths reimagining
poetry, poets reimagining themselves.

So what do you think of the ‘Lewis Carroll’ square poem? Like many of the forms I previously introduced on this blog, I think it is obviously more suited for the fanciful than the serious. It is also a bit tricky to write, but its puzzle-like aspect maybe its greatest appeal. Creating a successful one feels like pulling off a feat of verbal legerdemain.

If you do try your hand at writing one (and I hope you do), bear in mind each word will be repeated in the poem with the exception of the first word in the first line, the second word in the second line, the third word in the third line, and so on. My advice to make sure your square poem will read the same both across and down is to compose it in a grid. For example, if you are writing a 4×4, sketch a square and divide it into 16 equal smaller squares, and pencil in your first four words across the top row, and then repeat them down the first column. Just keep plugging words into the appropriate squares, and checking that it seems to make some kind of sense and it reads both ways. If it doesn’t, just try new words. I must confess I had a terrible time when I started writing my first L. C. square poem until I stumbled upon this technique, and I hope it will work for you too.