Yes, Even Still More ‘Nother Notes from the Dodge Poetry Festival

Hopefully you don’t think that this is the ring of Hell in which you’re doomed to read nothing but Dodge Poetry Festival notes for eternity. This was a good experience. Really.

First, however, thanks to Lindsey Simpson, who gave me the notebook in which I recorded for posterity the impressions left of me by the Dodge.

When I reached Waterloo Village nine-ish, garbed in shorts and my NC golf windbreaker, the rain abating, the temperature trying to get its chin over the wall of 50 degrees, I stopped into the main tent to get my bearings. There, Jorie Graham was telling the assemblage about the night the US commenced the Shock and Awe bombing, and the poem she wrote. Knowing that I can’t carry the grief of others as she does, I slinked out after reconnoitering the first session listings. Tony Hoagland had written a couple of poems that I remember enjoying, though I didn’t remember the poems themselves.

‘Twas a benevolent god led me to the Farmstead Tent. Hoagland was funny, engaging, and best of all, insightful. I found myself scribbling nugget of wisdom after nugget of wisdom in my notebook. Through the hour that I sat in the Farmstead Tent, I found the right ways to give feedback to all the senior poems I’ve been carrying in my satchel.

I’ll take his session out of order, and start with the idea he emphasized most. He repeated this poem three times:

Put your hand on the table.
Look at it.
Turn it over.
These are the kinds of facts
that habit leaves in the dark.

These are the kinds of facts that habit leaves in the dark. Paying attention to moments like these, getting past habit, is something that can “educate your poetic intelligence.” And it seemed that every word of his educated my poetic intelligence, if I can lay claim to such a thing.

The other thing I want to remember more than anything else is his idea of agendas. After he read his poem “Invitation,” which plays with corporate names in a wedding invitation, he said that he wrote it to play with the words, not to advance some political AGENDA, or some wisdom AGENDA or an abstract AGENDA. He wrote it simply that it might be enjoyed, that, as Wallace Stevens said, there might be some delight in it.

I’ve told my students that I want their notebooks to be 85% crap when they finish writing on their last page. Tony is, of course, more articulate than I. He talked about the importance of paying attention not only to experiences, but also to the “flotsam and sewage flowing between the ears,” by doing things like “listening to the rabid conversations you have when you’re in the car alone.” As he put it, “You can notice that once in 100,000 thoughts you think something that’s not stereotypical of yourself,” and this, he said, is what you pick out of the trash.

He was big on the number 100,000, as he used it again when discussing how the poet should apply her talent, saying, “Don’t waste your talent going in the direction of 100,000 you have already gone. Go in your direction, because that’s where your experience is.” Thanks to his awareness of audience, the fact that teachers go on Friday because they’re desperate for clearer ways of teaching kids how to find the amorphous, intangible thing that is the poetry inside them, he was able to talk to the problem so many of us face with kids trying to write the big message – seize the day – rather than writing their own experiences – that day, I was afraid they’d laugh at my timidity, afraid I’d make a fool of myself. In talking about this idea of direction in choosing your subject and then pursuing it, he said, “Sometimes you follow your content into the next room. You have to leave your wound (the pain you keep addressing because you can’t escape it) and move on to a better class of problems.” To get to that new room, sometimes you have to try a new form or a new point of view.

The other common problem we high school teachers deal with in poetry is un-teaching kids to use the fewest words possible when they write a poem. Good advice that is, of course, but teenagers take it to an extreme. Those who try to minimize words in a poem frequently leave out the information a reader needs to know what the hell they’re talking about. These are the Teflon poems that never get past a level of abstraction and obscurity. They hold what they’re really saying out of reach of a reader. Tony said that he prefers clarity over grace or aesthetics in a poem, so he’ll use more words to be clear. For example, you can use the chemical name for rocket fuel in your poem, but if you’re pretty sure your reader won’t know what that is, then call it rocket fuel too. I was reminded of what Paul Muldoon said in my first Dodge in 1998: “Any idiot can be difficult. It’s hard to be clear.”

He talked about the drama, the tension, inherent in the moments that are on the cusp of something, such as the way you feel when you see someone put a bottle or glass too close to the edge of the table – you worry the whole dinner when he will accidentally knock the bottle over.

Toward the end, he got to reading his own poems, other people’s poetry and talking about the books about poetry that have had an influence on him (in response to a great question asked by another festivalgoer). The poems he talked about he called dialectical poems. He read “Invitation” and Kenneth Pachett’s “The Orange Bears,” and recommended Robert Pinsky’s books on poetry (you’ll be surprised how interesting a chapter can be on syllable duration) and Carl Dennis’ Poetry and Persuasion, which contains ideas that he said got into his “groundwater.” Now that’s a precise way of saying something you can’t really put your finger on.

I bought his collection, What Narcissism Means to Me, and so far I’ve enjoyed it immensely.

Well, that’s it for me from the Dodge. See you there in 2008.