On Being a Poet from Guest Blogger Michael T. Young

I’m happy to once again welcome Michael T. Young to the blog. Mike is an amazing poet who calls me his “poetry mom.” I’m proud to call him my “poetry son.”

Mike’s third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water (check out the amazing cover image), published by Terrapin Books (www.terrapinbooks.com), was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. His previous collections are The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost and Transcriptions of Daylight. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. His chapbook, Living in the Counterpoint, received the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. His poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals including Banyan Review, Gargoyle Magazine, Rattle, Talking River Review, Tiferet, and Valparaiso Poetry Review.

 

Michael's Website:

http://www.michaeltyoung.com/

 

To Order Michael's Books: 

https://www.amazon.com/Michael-T.-Young/e/B001K8WCQ6%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

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From Michael T. Young

 

Rilke, in response to a young poet who sought his advice, wrote, “ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple ‘I must,’ then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse.”

On the one hand, it’s commendable that Rilke advises the young poet not to seek validation for his art in its publication but in his urge to create. This rings true and is something we could all stand to remember as we pursue publication in the most prestigious journals or long for the big prizes. On the other hand, the singlemindedness of that closing declaration about building one’s whole life around writing, is more like a call to a religious passion and conjures images of monasteries and stained glass rather than someone at a desk striking out a bad line. This perspective goes back at least to the Romantics who deified the imagination. But it’s false and isolating.

Treating the desire to write poetry as a kind of monastic calling implies that if I’m not willing to sacrifice everyone and everything to my writing, then I’m not a poet. To that, I say, “h----s---.” I’m a poet because I write poems, because I like writing poems, I like laboring over the right word, the right rhythm, the image development, and every other nuance of language and poetic transition and metamorphosis. But I don’t have to turn my back on my wife to do that. I don’t have to ignore my children or friends to do that. I don’t have to quit my job and live under a bridge.

Poetry is not an all or nothing proposition; life as a poet is not an either/or ultimatum. To make life as a poet a devotion exclusive of all other things in life except perhaps as fodder for new work is to isolate the poet as a freakish creature from the rest of the world. It is to make of the poet a parasite that merely uses and consumes all around them in the production of their art, rather than seeing it as it is: one element in a full life. It is to turn the poet into a monster and provide a justification to replace the conscience they have sacrificed to the god of their imagination. But this doesn’t have to be. A poet is one who writes poems and likes the labor of writing poems. Plain and simple. This doesn’t require a monkish devotion that excludes all other aspects of life or a sacrifice of them. That is a lie the world tries to sell. As the poet Charles Martin put it in his poem, “A Walk in the Hills above the Artists’ House”:

“But if our writing matters, what 

Makes it matter matters more

Than it does.”

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Thank you so much, Michael!

 

 

 

Thoughts on a Poet's True Success by Guest Blogger Michael T. Young

Michael T. Young and His Family           L-R: Malia, Chandra, Ariel, Mike

 

Have you ever thought about what makes you feel successful as a poet? For many, getting poems and books published is the ultimate litmus test for success. But is it really? 

I recently had the pleasure of reading a “poetry meditation” by my dear friend and fellow poet, Michael T. Young. His thoughts on the true measure of a poet’s success really resonated for me, and I thought they would be a great way to begin a new year on the blog—a great way to gain perspective on what is, and what should be, important to us as writers. Many thanks to Michael for his generous sharing.

 

Thoughts on a Poet's True Success

By Michael T. Young

Some thoughts for my fellow poets as we strive to publish our work: It can sometimes be discouraging when we get many rejections. So it’s important to keep a good perspective on where the actual success lies. Everything that comes after successfully writing the poem is not an achievement but a form of recognition of the achievement. That is the case with everything from acceptance for publication to winning a prize. Those forms of recognition are good, I might even say important, because they encourage us and allow us to be part of a larger conversation and community. In that recognition of the achievement, our judgment and achievement feel confirmed. But it is important to locate the actual success correctly, so we don’t mistake the trappings of recognition for the goal. When that happens, poets put more energy into marketing strategies and promoting their name and treat their work as a commodity, rather than focusing on the never-ending struggle to refine the work and achieve their vision and voice as a poet. Those poets might be more published but that doesn’t make them more successful. This is, in fact, why there is poor writing widely published. We live in a consumer culture and those market forces distort nearly every aspect of our society. Emily Dickinson was successful because she wrote visionary poetry and that took all her energy and focus. She didn’t spend time networking or building a platform. I’m not saying don’t publish and I’m not saying avoid wanting to publish, I’m saying: just remember where the actual achievement lies as you strive to publish.

About Michael T. Young

Michael T. Young's third full-length poetry collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. His other two collections are The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost and Transcriptions of Daylight. His chapbook, Living in the Counterpoint, received the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award from the New England Poetry Club. Michael has also received a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Arts Council, a William Stafford Award, and the Chaffin Poetry Award. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous print and online journals.

Visit Michael's Website

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Visit Michael's Amazon Author Page

Breaking the Silence by Guest Blogger Michael T. Young

I’m always happy to share reflections on poetry by guest bloggers—poets whose work I respect and admire. I’m especially happy to post this thoughtful and thought-provoking essay by my dear friend and colleague Michael T. Young. 

Michael’s third and most recent poetry collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was published by Terrapin Books. His chapbook, Living in the Counterpoint (Finishing Line Press), received the 2014 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award from the New England Poetry Club.  His other collections include The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost (Poets Wear Prada), Transcriptions of Daylight (Rattapallax Press), and Because the Wind Has Questions (Somers Rocks Press).  He received a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Arts Council, as well as the Chaffin Poetry Award. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous print and online journals including The Cimarron Review, The Cortland Review, Edison Literary Review, Lunch Ticket, The Potomac Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. His work also appears in the anthologies Phoenix Rising, Chance of a Ghost, In the Black/In the Red, and Rabbit Ears: TV Poems.  Michael lives with his wife, Chandra, and their children, Ariel and Malia, in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Click here to visit Michael's website.

Click here to order Michael's books (you'll love them!).

Breaking the Silence

by Michael T. Young

Adrienne Rich said, “Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.” The silence that surrounds a poem—its creation, publication—is intimidating, sometimes disheartening. The long struggle for the right word is not simply a game; it is a confrontation with the limits of a poet’s understanding, even the poet’s perception. Writing a poem is a feeling in the dark for the light switch. It can be agonizing. The work pulls us in the gut to get it right; it tugs at the viscera to be honest, because words can cloud as easily as disclose. Intention and determination are as vital as talent, perhaps more so, because the greatest talents determined to dodge and duck behind words will leave in their wake nothing but halls of mirrors for their readers.

Writing a poem is not just about being honest about one’s personal life; it is about being honest about anything. It is about fighting the very human tendency only to see what conforms to our existing opinion, or shaping the lines to guide others only to understand in the way we acknowledge as right, picking words to narrow rather than expand the view. These are nuances, subtleties, shifts in tone or diction that may escape readers—or writers—who are not looking for them or comparing in their mind the given with other, unnamed options. To struggle and wrestle and fight with oneself for days, for weeks, sometimes for months or years to get that word, that line, that image right in spite of oneself, to then struggle and wrestle and fight to get it into print to be met with the sound of silence, can make that battle feel like a defeat. But it isn’t; the poem on the page is a triumph, the essay on the page is a success. Those words on the page knock against each other and make the right music, the right pitch and cadence. They open up what was inside you, they disclose a clarity that was once hidden.

Poets live with the knowledge that clarity is not a given; it is a battle, a willed victory over obscurity. Obscurity, ambiguity, and mystery are the norm, whether it’s in the shape of feelings buried in cliché, an insight stuffed into pedestrian language, or an unusual idea wearing a threadbare metaphor. These are the halls of everyday life. It’s not that every moment must be lived as an epiphany. Just as living in a perpetual state of emergency would lead to a nervous breakdown, so too would a state of perpetual epiphany destroy the psyche. But when the moment, the feeling, or the thought is something more than the language we’ve known, then it requires work, not only to share it with others, but to clarify it to one’s own mind. Without that effort, it will vanish into the vagueness of the given, the known. The unique is almost impossibly difficult. Like a curmudgeon, it will accept nothing but its own terms. If we dress it in yesterday’s clothing, it leaves us for a better party, a better mind.

Another consequence of our daily linguistic vagueness is that real understanding between people is quite rare. For the most part, we move along in a drift of suggestion and approximation, going in the same direction but most often not in the same raft. True understanding takes a great determination on the part of both the speaker and the listener (or the writer and the reader). So where two minds meet in that invisible space created by what becomes a common language between them, where the words chiming in one head manage to reach and orchestrate the pitch and timing of thought and feeling in the head of another—that space is a consequence of great effort from both directions. It is neither natural nor common, but quite unnatural and rare. When it happens, this uniting power and beauty in language is a kind of magic. For the understanding it conjures can take place across time and space, as when I read Gerard Manley Hopkins and, in that moment, my mind locked in to the beauty and power of his words, they create a space in my mind where he lives again while, simultaneously, my humanity is enriched and deepened by the precision and textures of his writing. Whether it pierces the mind’s eye

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring

Or it warns us:

O if we but knew what we do

When we delve and hew—

Hack and rack the growing green!

In each instance, the poetry gathers us around it like a fire to be warmed and given light. This is the power poetry has against what tries to divide us. That power starts with breaking the silence in oneself.

Lucile Clifton has a poem called “Memory” in which she traces the disparity between a daughter’s recollection and a mother’s recollection of the same event. The shared event is going out to purchase the young girl’s first adult shoes. The daughter recalls the salesman’s bigotry, his bullying and swagger. But the speaker says her mother “tells it better than I do.” The mother insists there was no bullying, bigoted, white salesman who shamed them. Her desperate desire to make a good memory out of a bad situation pushes her to create a fantasy. The speaker in holding to the truth becomes the adult. But the denial of history inherent in the mother’s false version becomes a division between mother and daughter in the context of a racist society. This is the pain that word “better” carries. This is the trauma locked inside the repetition in the poem of “ask me/how it feels.” The poem is a version of how we break silence, how we give voice by facing down the shadows that would intimidate us into accepting things as they are, or worse, creating fantasies in denial of it.

Shelley famously said that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. I would suggest they are a kind of unacknowledged soldier. The silences in ourselves, those that arise as part of the cultural expectations we internalize and express as an aesthetic are as much a form of censorship as any other. In fact, these are more efficient and effective than political censorship. To turn against those silences takes courage and determination. A poet willing to ask, “What voices are being silenced in my writing that must be heard?” is questioning the very assumptions that make their identity. But in the end, that battle to give voice to the silences within expands both the poet’s humanity and vision, and in the poem becomes a way for readers to experience the same. 

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Thank you,

 Michael!

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Prompt #243 – What Does Your Poem Mean?

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.
—Howard Nemerov

A short time ago, I came across the following Facebook post by my dear friend and fellow poet, Michael T. Young:

“When people ask what a poem means, it seems they expect to be led back to some point of origin that is a clear thought, articulated as prose, and which then defines the poem. The problem is that poems emerge out of fog. A poet doesn’t have a thought that he translates into words but more often he has a vague feeling, “a sense of wrong, a homesickness”—as Frost called it—that he struggles to find words for. It’s one of the reasons it nearly always stumps a poet to be asked what his poem means. A poet has this vague feeling he struggles to find words for and that poem is the meaning he wrestled out of the vagueness. The poem is the clarity which came out of that fog. To then have someone ask what the poem means is like asking what a dollar bill costs or what the length of a yardstick is. It’s a redundancy and a regression to obscurity. The poem is the meaning that was sought and found. The meaning is found in the destination, which is the poem, and not in the origin, which was the blank page. So, to take a reader back there is to lead them back into the fog, into the vagueness the poem emerged from, not to return to some point of clarity. The poem is the clarity.”

(Reprinted by permission of Michael T. Young.)

 

Click Here to Visit Michael's Website

Click Here to Visit Michael's Blog

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The connection Michael makes between meaning and clarity is an important one—it led me to reflect on how well we really do express what we “struggle to find words for.” It may be argued that too much analysis spoils the poem, but this week, to focus on meaning and clarity (along with editing and refining), I’d like you to go through some of your already-written poems, select one that you especially like, and do a bit of after-the-fact analysis.

Guidelines:

1. Spend some time with the poem you’ve chosen—read it and think about it. Then answer these questions:

A. What is the meaning of the poem (that is, what did you intend to “say” in it)?

B. Did you have that meaning in mind when you started writing the poem? Did you “say” anything else?

C. Remember that some of the best poems contain their obvious subjects and one or more other subjects—what in your poem appears below “the surface of the page?”

D. How well did you convey the poem’s meaning?

E. How well did you achieve clarity in the poem?

F. Now, spend some time re-working the poem. Think in terms of meaning, clarity, and how you can “say what you want to say” better this time around.

2. Identify a phrase, sentence, or line that represents the poem’s emotional center. What have you included (and should delete) in your poem that’s really meaningless in relation to the poem’s emotional core?

3. Compare your two versions. Decide which is better and think about why. How is your better version “the meaning” you “wrestled out of the vagueness?”

Tips:

1. Be specific, avoid general terms, phrases, and statements.

2. Think about freshness of expression and how you can better express the truth of your experience in perceptible and actual terms.

3. Make sure your poem has a sense of movement and trajectory.

4. Don’t lose sight of the whole poem while editing the particular. As you prune your poems, make sure that every word, every, phrase, clause, and sentence is necessary.

5. Present your subject exactly as you perceive it. Make your poem “the meaning that was sought and found!”

A Meditation on the Relationship of Love and Art by Guest Blogger Michael T. Young

This week, I’m especially happy to post an essay by Michael T. Young—a poet whose work I greatly respect and admire. Michael has published three poetry collections: Transcriptions of Daylight (Rattapallax Press), Because the Wind Has Questions (Somers Rocks Press), and Living in the Counterpoint (Finishing Line Press). His fourth collection, The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost, will be published in 2014 by Poets Wear Prada Press. He received a fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and was twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He was runner-up for a William Stafford Award and recipient of the Chaffin Poetry Award. His work has appeared in numerous journals including Fogged Clarity, Louisville Review, Off the Coast, The Potomac Review, and The Raintown Review. His work is also in the anthologies Phoenix Rising, Chance of a Ghost, In the Black/In the Red and forthcoming in Rabbit Ears: TV Poems. Michael lives with his wife and children in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Michael’s website: www.michaeltyoung.com/

Michael’s blog: inermusic.blogspot.com/

Margins: A Meditation on the Relationship of Love and Art 

By Michael T. Young

 I have always believed that love is, by definition, creative and that true creativity, likewise, is loving. This belief is conveniently circular, but then again, so are some symbols of love and eternal life like the wedding ring and the Ouroboros. Like the circle, love is what repeats itself because love is what we wouldn't want any other way. But what binds us into these circular love affairs are not seamless, hence the constant misunderstandings of love and art.

Generally, our relationship with art is as clumsy as our relationship with other people:  we trap ourselves in what we mean to each other. But love is not only defined by what someone means to us but by the freedom we grant them to be and become themselves.

To love is to pay attention to the highest degree. Such attention is what the lover gives to his beloved and what the artist gives to his creation. He willingly gives his time and energy, the substance of his life, to bring something into existence. Lack of attention is what renders a manufactured product meaningless. Invented for profit, pieced together by machines, our commodities posses function but not meaning.  Meaning is not a mechanism an artist puts into a work of art but arises through the love he invests in it.  The artist creates a vehicle through which something comes into a meaningful existence. Thus his attention is a kind of obedience to an inspiration, which he allows to define itself. Of course, the meaning of an artwork has limitations. No single work of art can mean everything at once. But then again, every single artwork tends to resist reduction to a singular meaning. If a poem or painting would impart its meaning to us it demands in return no less than that we live with it. It demands that we give it attention, the freedom to continually redefine or clarify itself.

So even for the reader of a poem or observer of a painting, it is the sustained attention he gives to it that will reveal its meaning. But it isn't something that once seen is fully had, like understanding the function of something, such as how a hammer works. For the one who experiences a work of art, meaning is the perspective he gains on himself and the world through transcendence in the work of art. It is what Shelley called, "morals" in his Defense of Poetry when he said:

The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own.

The moment one assumes full understanding of a work of art or a person, one has effectively locked them in the past. When you look at them, you will see them as they were but not as they are or as they are becoming. To pay attention to someone or something, to love someone or something is to continually extend to them the freedom to renew themselves in your eyes without jeopardizing what they have always meant to you. In this way one's perspective grows. It is what makes friendship and love profound. It is the depth perception of the mind's eye.

But the horizon sets limits even on perfect vision and nothing shrinks the world's horizons faster than pain. When Dante Gabriel Rossetti saw his wife in her coffin, he placed a collection of his poems into it with her. It was the only perfect copy of his poems and only existed because she had asked him to write them down. Silence followed him out of the room and through the next seven years. Through that time his friends, people like Swinburne, William Morris, and George Meredith became famous poets and novelists. Finally, Rossetti had his wife's coffin exhumed and the poems retrieved. They were published eight years after her death.  One could argue that Rossetti retrieved the poems to achieve fame. But that would require ignoring what inspired those poems: the love not just for his wife, Elizabeth, but for the life in her. What calls forth song is not just love but a love for life, whether it's the life one loves in another or in one's own day to day. When the life he loved died in Elizabeth, he felt it founder in himself. He felt a pain for the loss, a tear in the fabric of what he was. With that he threw the poems into the coffin with the spent life that inspired them. But he continued to feel pain and only the living feel pain. When life had stretched that pain thin over the years and Dante stared into it, what he saw was the blank page he was returning to life instead of the love he truly felt. He had to retrieve from the dead what belonged to the living.

Blake said, "Life delights in life." As many poems that have been written for the beloved, whether man or woman, there have also been many inspired by other art works: symphonies inspired by poems, poems inspired by paintings, paintings inspired by paintings, paintings inspired by poems or philosophy. It is life delighting in life, the motion of love, a circling of life back to itself creating a place for us to mean something to each other. It is also the frame around a painting, the margins around the poem. 

(Copyright © 2013 by Michael T. Young. 

All rights reserved.)

Note: When I asked Michael if he had a poem that expressed something of his essay’s spirit, his response was, It occurred to me that my poem “The Word ‘Anyway’” would make a perfect accompanying piece to the essay. This poem embodies and enacts the idea that the essay states as love and attention being a constant extension of the freedom of renewal without jeopardizing existing meaningfulness.

The Word “Anyway”

Every time I write it’s there at the end of my paragraphs,

so much so, my friends see it as a kind of signature word,

and I realize that whatever it means, it is, in any case,

like a ramp off the highway leading me somewhere else.

And where it takes me, regardless, turns and carries the letter,

the conversation, the e-mail, in another direction, though not,

necessarily, in a better one—the detour this time taken

to wrench the heart from its daily obsessions,

which is to say, I wasn’t trying to take us to our destination faster,

on the contrary, I was trying to spare you,

trying to take us both somewhere neither of us had been,

a place where the view over the valley

gives way to a lake reflecting late summer light

and the crisp air in our lungs expands

like a space we allow each other to become whatever we wish.

(From Living in the Counterpoint, copyright © 2012 by Michael T. Young. 
All rights reserved.)

Poems by Michael:

http://www.rattle.com/poetry/2010/03/the-risk-of-listening-to-brahms-by-michael-t-young/

http://hypotheticalreview.com/2013/05/05/michael-t-young/

http://www.literarybohemian.com/poetry/poem/renewing-my-passport-by-michael-t-young/

http://theformalist.org/archives/1188

http://www.lochravenreview.net/2010summer/young.html

http://www.theadirondackreview.com/MichaelTYoung.html

Essays by Michael:

http://foggedclarity.com/2012/06/truth-in-poetry/

http://redroom.com/member/michael-t-young/writing/breaking-the-line

Click on the Links to Order Michael's Books

Living in the Counterpoint

Transcriptions of Daylight

Thanks so much, Michael!

The End of National Poetry Month

I’m always a little sad to see National Poetry Month come to an end, but here we are on April 30th. Like the time lilacs are in bloom, NPM never seems quite long enough. My sincerest thanks go to all of you who joined the celebration (as readers and as writers) on The Music In It, and a big THANK YOU to readers who posted poems and/or shared comments.

Special thanks and appreciation go to Basil Rouskas who, for the second year in a row, posted a poem every day and is the recipient of The Music In It National Poetry Month Award. Bravo, Basil!

Regular prompt posting will resume on Saturday, May 4^th. In the meantime, here’s a wonderful  piece by poet Michael T. Young that takes a lighthearted look at the (sometimes agonizing) process of writing a poem. (I certainly identified with it and suspect that you will too!)

How a Poem is Written

by Michael T. Young

1. A lot of words are scattered on a page.
2. Unnecessary abstractions are reworked into images.
3. Unnecessary images are struck out.
4. Some commas are inserted, an M-dash and a semi-colon.
5. Some long sentences are shortened.
6. Some short sentences stretched out.
7. Two words from the first line are brought to the second line.
8. One word from the fifth line is brought to the sixth line.
9. Some commas are removed and the semi-colon changed to a period.
10. The short sentences that were stretched out are shortened again.
11. The long sentences that were shortened are lengthened again.
12. The last line is made the penultimate line and a new line written for conclusion. 
13. The two words brought to the second line are deleted, requiring a new verb and relineation of lines 2 through 8.
14. A new image inserted in line 13 pushes three words to line 14 requiring relineation of lines 15 to 20.
15. 2 of the long sentences that were shortened and then lengthened are shortened again.
16. Instead of lines with roughly ten syllables per line, everything is reorganized to have roughly six or  seven syllables per line.
17. Realizing that was a bad idea, it’s all reorganized so every line is roughly fifteen syllables per line.
18. Realizing that was a bad idea, it’s all reorganized back to roughly ten syllables per line.
19. A day is spent wondering if it should be structured in blank verse as opposed to free verse.
20. Remove all the punctuation.
21. Change the title five times over a day.
22. Put all the punctuation back in except for the M-dash.
23. Insert some place names for local feel.
24. Remove all but one place name because they seem clunky.
25. Strike out everything from the first line to the penultimate line.
26. Take the last line, make it the first line, and begin writing the poem.

A Note from Michael Young: I find that sometimes frustration can work itself to such a pitch that it ruptures into a moment of clarity.  Such was the source of this rant-like piece. I had been working every day on a single poem for about 2 months and felt no closer to getting it right. I don’t mind working on a poem for a long time, even years, as long as I have a sense that I’m getting a syllable closer to the mark. But when it seems there’s no progress, not even inching toward the invisible mark after endless revisions, well, that simply maddens me. Perhaps that’s why I have a somewhat obsessive way of writing; I can rarely stop thinking about a poem until it’s finished or I tear myself from it to retain my sanity. These are the poems that often, for me, become completely morphed in later years as the poem documented in this piece: a poem transformed into something completely unintended and, since writing is an act of discovery, better than one could ever intend. 

Please be sure to visit Michael online at www.michaeltyoung.com and at his blog (The Inner Music) http://inermusic.blogspot.com/. 

Click here to read poems by Michael.

Click here to order Michael's LIVING IN THE COUNTERPOINT.

Click here to order Michael's TRANSCRIPTIONS OF DAYLIGHT.