Writing Poetry in the Dark Roundtable 6: Identity

Hello Friends and Fiends--

Get ready for some more Writing Poetry in the Dark goodness! Today I wanted to continue to educate and spread some more wisdom via the courtesy of our brilliant contributors, all of who have left their mark on the genre in the most groundbreaking of ways.

Today's Writing Poetry in the Dark roundtable celebrates FJ Bergmann, Lucy A. Snyder, and Bryan Thao Worra. Each of these poets, to some degree, wrote about identity and like each of these artists, their takes are unique and powerful.

I hope you'll enjoy our conversations and maybe consider picking up a book or two on your way out.

Best,

Stephanie M. Wytovich

SMW: What is something you had to learn the hard way with writing poetry, i.e. a teachable moment in your career?

FJB: Periodically revisit older work and make sure you save it in a format your present (and future) software can open.

LS: I think the hardest lesson is that you have absolutely no control over how a reader interprets a poem you have written.

You don’t have any control over whether the reader can tell a sonnet from a villanelle or if they even care that those forms exist. You don’t have any control over whether they can read at a college level or only a 3rd grade level. You don’t have any control over whether they’re expecting something that conforms to modern literary poetic conventions, or if they’re expecting something with end rhymes, or if they’re purely looking for a transformative sweep of emotion.

You don’t have any control over whether a reader will hit that line about the awful thing from your childhood and see it as boring and twee ... or if it will trigger a day-ruining traumatic flashback for them, and they swear off your writing forever.

The reader brings their own education, biases, and baggage to your poetry, and you have no control over how those things affect their reading experience. And if you think about that too hard, it can make you crazy. (It can also make workshopping your poetry a pretty frustrating experience if your group isn’t composed of people who fundamentally understand what you’re trying to accomplish with your writing.)

To make matters worse? People who read and write poetry are generally passionate about it. They have powerfully differing opinions that may or may not be rooted in consensual reality.

A literary writer once quipped a variant of Sayre’s Law: “The arguments in poetry are so vicious because the stakes are so low.”

So, what did I do with this difficult realization?

I focus first and foremost with satisfying myself with my poetry. Have I communicated what I intended to? Did I execute the craft aspects of the poem to my own satisfaction? Have I overall accomplished what I intended do, or am I just impatient to send the poem off and I really need to work on it more?

If I can honestly answer those questions to my own satisfaction, the next person I listen to is the editor.

Beyond that? The readers experience what they experience. I hope it’s a good experience. But I know that even if I do everything “right”, someone will hate it anyhow. But that’s just how things go.

And honestly ... getting anyone to read your poetry at all when they could be doing a hundred other things? That’s a win.

BTW: Poetry is often working with ambiguous and nebulous subjects, and true things are an important anchor you work within your verse But there comes a point where you have to lift the anchor, and a point where you have to set it down again. One of the hardest lessons I had to work with was encountering different situations where the truth I wanted to work with was undermined by new details coming to light, different versions of history I was addressing becoming more accepted, or one incident where a hypothetical lizard was actually discovered before I could get the poem published. So you have to find the courage to be prepared for your poems to be wrong if not immediately, perhaps years later. That's challenging. But more practically, there was also a time during the age of Myspace and early online magazines that I'd had this marvelous idea that I wanted several poems to appear exclusively in only that venue that had accepted them, and I hadn't printed out a hard copy thanks to an idealistic aesthetic at the time. Unfortunately, that now means thanks to various critical website glitches, laptops catching fire or journals just going offline, even with archive.org, many of my poems from certain years are completely lost. Even if you don't think much of a poem at the time, do yourself a favor and just keep a copy somewhere safe.

SMW: What poetry collection would you recommend to someone interested in studying poetry? This can be speculative poetry, literary poetry, classic, contemporary, etc.

FJB: Oh, this is tough. So many collections I love! But I think it would be nice to recommend something obscure and weird, so … Denmark, Kangaroo, Orange by Kevin Griffith (Pearl Editions, 2007). And specifically [for] horror, In the Yaddith Time by Ann K. Schwader (Mythos Books, 2007). And the chapbook 25 Trumbulls Road by Christopher Locke (Black Lawrence Press, 2020).… I CANNOT STOP MYSELF.

LS: I’ve talked about this collection before, but Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart is absolutely brilliant. I think that aspiring horror poets in particular can learn much from it. This book absolutely should have won the Stoker award, but it wasn’t on anyone’s radar at the HWA.

The book focuses on the ominous shadows of small-town life in America’s heartlands in the mid-20th Century. The title poem speculates about what Amelia Earhart’s disappearance might have meant to her crew, husband, and to everyday people who simply saw her as a celebrity. Her Conners Prize-winning long poem “Circus Fire, 1944” explores the horror and tragedy of the July 6, 1944 fire that killed 168 people, mostly children, under the big tent at a Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus performance in Hartford, Connecticut. Other poems explore the economic, environmental, and social damage done to towns through mining and industrial exploitation. Calvocoressi’s poetry is dark, vivid, and starkly beautiful.

BTW: I've encouraged emerging poets to give Talking Dirty To The Gods by Yusef Komunyakaa a read. It includes selections ranging from the fantastic to the mundane, with most poems giving you ways to thoroughly reimagine the different topics he takes on. More impressively, the pieces are all presented as four quatrains each. Even if you struggle with form and meter, there's a lot of meat to learn from no matter what your skill level. "Ode To The Maggot" from that collection would be where I encourage many to start. Each year, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association produces an anthology of nominees for the year's best poems for the Rhysling Awards, and the variety of styles and topics examined give you a good opportunity to find pieces that speak to you. The Alchemy of Stars I & II showcase the winners from the last 40+ years and this may be helpful to get a sense of what's been capturing the attention of readers across the globe.

SMW: One piece of advice for all our poets-to-be.

FJB: It’s OK to imitate. If you give the same poem to a bunch of poets and ask them to write an imitation of it, you will get that many completely different resultant poems—and these are likely not only to be good but to expand the repertoire of those poets. Just remember to include “after ___” when you submit it for publication.

LS: Read lots of poetry to figure out what you think is good poetry. Read classic and modern poets. Read literary and genre poetry. Poets.org is a great resource for free-to-read poetry of all eras.

[And] learn about meter, scansion, etc., and how to write in standard poetic forms. It’s fine if you want to break the rules in your poetry, but to do that well, it helps to know what those rules are in the first place. Again, poets.org is a good resource, but I also recommend two books by poet Mary Oliver: A Poetry Handbook and Rules For The Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse. There are many excellent good poetry books out there (such as Writing Poetry in the Dark!) but those are a great place to start.

BTW: Poetry will always be in flux between traditions and innovation, moments of solitude and community, the exciting and sadly, sometimes the grossly boring. Sometimes you'll be on the bleeding edge, other times, less so. I'd encourage you to find ways to keep centered (but rarely self-centered). Cultivate an internal compass to get you through the darkest shadows and uncertain brambles, appreciating what you're reaching for, but prepared to enjoy unique opportunities that might not come around again.

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