Coal Hill Review

by Michael Simms

Sometimes we sense that even the dead are connected to the fabric of life. My wife tells me that a graduate student came to her office and told this story, which he claims is true. An old man died at 3:47 AM in Mercy Hospital of Pittsburgh. His brother, who had had Alzheimer’s disease for five years, was asleep in a different hospital on the other side of town. The floor nurse recorded in his chart at 3:47 AM that the Alzheimer’s patient said his brother’s name twice. Meanwhile in a different city a thousand miles away, the student was studying for an exam. The young man looked up to see his grandfather, the man who had just died, standing in the middle of the room. The old man looked thin, but he had a gentle smile on his face. “Still studying, little professor?” he asked. The young man nodded, amazed at what he was seeing. “I have to go now,” the old man said and disappeared.

_________

by Michael Simms

I think it was the short-story writer Alice Munro who said that she is always looking for a place to hide in the house, a place away from children, the phone ringing, chores to be done, the sociability of neighbors, a place to sit and stare at a blank wall, a place to get on with her real work, waiting for necessity to speak.

And eventually necessity does speak, although often in subtle ways. Sometimes a poem begins in the recognition of an oddity of language, something read or overheard that catches the poet off-guard by its metaphorical promise. For example, the French word for time, le temps, also means weather and season, implying that our sense of time is not an abstraction, but something primal that can be experienced through the senses. Another example of how abstractions are traditionally related to our sense of the body occurs in English: the word testify is related to the word testes, going back to the ancient custom of men swearing oaths while placing a hand over their testicles, swearing on their manhood, so to speak — implying of course that if they lied they would be castrated. These primal correspondences, proto-metaphors, echo with possibilities. After this initial recognition, like finding a fossil in a rock, the challenge is to use one’s sense of craft to carve the poem, make it whole, bring it to life. As Jean Cocteau calls it: teaching a statue to walk.

Sometimes a bit of language will stir the poet’s metaphysical sense of connectedness, the feeling that trees, animals, and even rocks share our struggle to live. My wife grew up in the Siegerland, a region of Germany rich in folk tradition. Eva remembers when she was nine years old her last visit to her neighbor Marianne Krebber before she died. The old woman was sitting at the table drinking tea while she told Eva that the night before a truck had hit the old linden tree in front of her house knocking off a great limb. She said she rushed down and stood in front of the tree. She could feel it suffering. She went into the house and looked up the remedy in her book Blumen die Durch die Seele Heilen — “Flowers that Heal through the Soul.” She found the recipe for “rescue remedy”: star of Bethlehem for shock, rock-rose for fear and panic, impatiens for stress and tension, cherry-plum for despair, and clematis for the feeling of being far away that often appears before becoming unconscious. She mixed the essences in water, dipped a towel, then wrapped it around the wound in the tree. She claimed the tree stopped bleeding and began to heal. She could feel the easing of the tree’s pain.

In the book, a violet that grows in wet soil is called Wasserfeder — water-feather.

__________

by Michael Simms

From the beginning of Western literature, there has been a dual attitude toward the source of poetry. The ancient Greeks saw the poet as a maker, and they also had the tradition of the poem being a gift from the muse. The poem is simultaneously made by the poet and it is given by a deity or spirit. In other traditions you see similar tendencies to equate inspiration with divine gifts or with spiritual enlightenment. Lorca’s duende, a supernatural force which comes to inhabit the flamenco dancer, is his metaphor for this possession of the poet by an outside spirit. The Buddhist principle of letting go of the ego in order to be at one with the cosmos; Keats’ idea of negative capability, a receptiveness to the poem; chance methods of composition such as those by John Cage and Jackson MacLow, the principle of simultaneity in which juxtaposition in itself becomes meaningful, such as occurs in the coin-tossing reference system of the I Ching; even Eliot’s objective correlative — all are versions of the idea that the poem is not something that is made but rather received by the poet. The poem stands halfway between the listener and the gods.

In the many creative writing workshops I’ve attended through the years, only once were the principles of imagination, inspiration, and creativity ever mentioned. In 1974, on the first day of class, Michael Ryan said that we would not be talking about these things, not because such things don’t exist, he said, but because no one knows anything about them, so there’s no point in discussing them. Incidentally, Bill Matthews said the same thing a few years later on the first day of class, but this time the subject that the teacher refused to discuss was rhythm. You have to understand that these are two of the best teachers, not to mention smartest men, I’ve ever known, yet, between them, they had ruled out as subjects of discussion imagination, inspiration, creativity, and rhythm. I wonder now why they ruled out these subjects which form the heart of poetry…. Perhaps the answer lies in their own uncertainty about these subjects. There are no definite answers the teacher can give, so — the teacher reasons — let’s don’t lead the students down a path where we have no map to guide us.

_______________

by Michael Simms

Let’s talk about where poetry comes from… or at least where one poem came from. I offer one of my own, not because it is an example of a great poem (it isn’t), but because I know the situation out of which it arose.

For a period of time a few summers ago, I kept a notebook in which I wrote everyday. Usually I did free-writing: scribbling down whatever came to mind as quickly as I could. During these sessions, which usually lasted only fifteen minutes or so a day, I didn’t bother to think about punctuation or line-endings or poetic form; however the words came out was the form of the piece and I usually didn’t revise. On June 18, I wrote a piece which I knew was not a poem, but which had an interesting tone and rhythm. I especially liked the last three lines:

darkness descends
and the birds become invisible on their branches
their nests like the thoughts of old
                               mathematicians.

The next evening, my wife, who is a psychologist, and I were talking about writing because she had been asked to contribute a chapter in a textbook of Jungian studies. I mentioned to her that I had been free-writing everyday for several weeks. She said, or at least I thought she said, “Yes, you have to write everyday, because you never know where a poem is sleeping.” The statement made a deep impression on me. I sat on the couch, stunned by the enormity of the metaphor. After a few minutes, I went upstairs to my study. After half an hour or so, I had this draft:

You have to write everyday
because you never know where a poem sleeps

It might be coiled around a branch
high in the air
a snake dozing in the speckled shade

It might be catching a few zees
in the attic

Aunt Zelda loved

or dozing in the picture of your grandfather
in his Sunday best
framed and ready to go
through generations of dust

It might be dreaming
in a story you loved
when you were a mouse
in a wall much larger than now

A poem is a box in a box
in a cloud a boy watches
thinking of sleep
and the one time he went fishing with his dad

But you have to let it happen. You have to listen real hard
The poem can survive if it knows
you’re looking for it
under the stones of the river
in the high ears of the corn field

I needed a strong conclusion, but I was stuck. I didn’t know where to go from the words “corn field.” Then I remembered the free-writing I had done the previous evening. When I wrote the last three lines at the bottom of the new poem, they fit.

I knew I had a poem, but it seemed rough. There were some things I didn’t like, such as the business of Aunt Zelda and the picture of the grandfather. Those characters seemed cliched and inauthentic. (On a factual level, the characters are inauthentic: I don’t even have an Aunt Zelda.) Also, some of the rhythms, line-endings, and shifts of perspective seemed awkward. So I went over the poem, reading it aloud to myself hundreds of times, recopying it dozens of times, each time changing a detail, sharpening an image, smoothing the rhythm, letting the poem emerge from the scribbles of my initial draft. After a few days, I had a finished draft:

Where The Poem Sleeps

You have to write every day
because you never know where a poem sleeps

It might be coiled around a branch
high in the air
dozing in the speckled shade

It might be dreaming in a story you loved
when you were a mouse
in a wall much larger than now

You may find a poem in a cloud
a boy watches, thinking
of the one time he went fishing with a bear

But you have to let it happen
you have to listen real hard

The poem can survive a night
in the woods alone, curled up
under an elm tree
after a day of looking for you

It can even be happy as a stone in the river
if it knows you are waiting for it to come home

And you are waiting
as darkness descends
and the birds become invisible
on the branches
                               their nests
like the thoughts of drowsy mathematicians

Shortly after the poem was published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the poet Maurice Kilwein Guevara, whom I had never met before, contacted me and said that he read the poem on his mother’s refrigerator. She’d saved the poem because it reminded her of her native Columbia.

_________

by Michael Simms

     Nowadays, many poets learn their craft in creative writing classes. We call them workshops in order, I suppose, to suggest a correlation with wood-carving or perhaps clock- making. And the best teachers do a great service to the students by emphasizing how a poem works, as well as how it could work better. As valuable as workshops are in passing on the craft to the next generation and providing employment for established poets, what is missing in creative writing classes is a way to talk about the real guts of the writing process. There seems to be a fearful cynicism in these classes that prevents people from discussing the way poems are actually made. For example, the word imagination is rarely mentioned. And the traditional language for describing the moment of receiving the poem seems antiquated and even a bit silly in a classroom where down the hall people are looking through microscopes at human cells or listening to a lecture about the statistical analysis of the behavior of white rats. A student who dared to name his or her muse would be summarily dismissed as a flake. It is ironic that almost any other idea, no matter how neurotic or far-fetched its origins, will be treated seriously in a writing class, but if a student dares to talk about the act of inspiration (literally, a breathing in), his classmates will roll their eyes and change the subject. I have heard the most paranoid paradigms of human relations — the idea that all heterosexual union is a form of rape, for example — put forward as critical interpretations of poems in graduate workshops, and yet a discussion of love — which seems to me the source of all great poetry — is met with yawns and snickers. What have we come to?

___________

by Michael Simms

Tradition tells us that muses are angelic creatures who descend from clouds, or drift like smoke through an open window — while my muse is a guy who walks into a bar. But we take what we can get, right? The sources of poetry are too uncertain for me to refuse any gift, no matter how unlikely the messenger. By the same token, a poet usually has to accept the form and scope of the poem as a given. One dare not say to the muse, “Thanks for the epigram, but really I was hoping for an ode…” If we refuse the gift, it may not be offered again.

_______

 Notes toward an understanding of poetic imagination

by Michael Simms

When I was a student in Iowa City, Stanley Bomgarten and I used to drink at a place called George’s a few blocks from campus. One morning we were celebrating Stanley getting fired from his job as assistant pastor at the local Baptist Church when a young man walked in and sat at the bar. He was tall and thin with short greasy hair. His eyes shone with wild intensity behind thick black-rimmed lenses. His cheeks were flushed as if he had a fever.

“Is your name Mark?” he asked. “No it’s Mike,” I said.

“Whatever,” he said, “God gave me a poem to give to you. You can publish it under your own name if you want.”

From memory he wrote these lines on a paper napkin:

When a man has tried his soul
as if it were open to loss or win
and felt the better for his trial
or felt he has traveled far
from accustomed ways

He is in the infinite heart
where the air is cool numinescence
in the sky. He begins to think
of the face he has seen
and his eyes begin searching
for the stars.

He handed me the napkin, got up, and walked out of the bar without ordering anything.

I asked Stanley what he thought of the guy. Stanley said he believed God really had given him the poem. I laughed, but when I realized Stanley was serious, I ordered another beer. We sat for a long time without saying anything. Then Stanley said his life was going to Hell.

It’s been thirty years since I heard Stanley moved back to his parents’ farm. Thirty years since I finished my degree and began wandering in my self-made wilderness. As for the odd young man with the poem, I never learned his name and I never saw him again.

___________

by Michael Simms

A few days ago, an old priest who was a colleague of my wife’s passed away, and my wife came home from work angry at the world. I was worried; Eva doesn’t anger often, and her grief seemed huge and unbearable. I couldn’t console her, so I asked Scott Staples, a friend who knew and admired the old man, to stop by our house. The three of us sat in the kitchen, Eva sipping milk, Scott and I icewater, toasting the old priest’s life, remembering picnics at his farm, his love of poetry, his kindness to Scott during a painful divorce, the old man’s struggle with homosexuality, his coming to peace with desire in his final years. His last weeks were spent in a hospital bed, ranting fragments of Shelley and Yeats, mumbling worries about his fall classes, ripping at his clothes full of bees, he said.

In the long shadows of the kitchen, we lifted glasses to the old man, his love, his fear, the final blessing of death, and as William Stafford says, we thought hard for us all.

***

For ten years I didn’t write. Other ambitions that seemed more important at the time called to me. I raised kids, taught school, built a business, and learned how to be a grown-up. Although I wasn’t writing, I did feel the pull of the spirit toward a life of the imagination. I prayed, I read philosophy, I took my kids to the art museum. I had long conversations with friends that lasted well into the night. I felt love and fear, and I experienced an occasional insight into larger patterns that inspired awe, but these feelings and insights disappeared without my recording them. A stone falls into the water and the ripples push out to the edges until the surface is smooth again, leaving no mark.

What I missed most was a sense of completion. When I write a poem, the desire for a pleasing aesthetic experience compels me to fill in the details, to continue the rhythms, to find closure. Without artistic ambition, the reverie stays half-completed, unsatisfied.

The last six months I’ve been writing like a madman, poems tumbling out one after another like a family of circus acrobats. Every poem I haven’t written over the last ten years is standing in line at the door, waiting for its name to be spoken.

***

So we write poems in order to give form to our imaginings, to make discoveries in our emotional terrain, to understand life in a way that nothing else makes quite as clear. And poems live in the vital center, made of the raw stuff of life. They reside in every small important thing we do: holding a newborn baby, teaching a child to read, consoling a friend in grief.

But why read poetry? What can these exploratory images and extended rhythms mean to someone other than the writer?

During my ten years of silence, I often read poetry for pleasure. Many poems delighted me with their music, wit, and color, but a few I kept returning to because they gave me something more than merely postcards from the poet’s inner travels. Epiphanic narratives such as James Wright’s Northern Pike, Naomi Shihab Nye’s Coming to Cuzco, and Jack Myers’ Jake Addresses the World from the Garden gave form to my own awakenings. I need these poems the way a vine needs a trellis. We might say that poets, in devoting their lives to the act of imagination, engineer the soul of our culture, designing and building the spiritual scaffold we must all climb as we struggle toward the light.

_______

by Michael Simms

For thirty years, I’ve been reading Lyn Lifshin’s poems in independent literary magazines across the country.  I admire her integrity as a poet — she’s always true to her voice and vision – she never sounds like anyone else.  Here are three of her recent poems:

Salsa

it’s the moves

not the man. He

could be the size

of a 12 year old

but he’s got the

beat in his body.

Who cares if he

is hardly up to

your nose. He

was shaking his

booty.  He can get

you to shake

yours too so any

black tulips

pulling you

down go dust

and vanish and

if they try to

return, he’ll

luga palooga

them, slam them

north with a

wild hip

The Man In Front of Me Has Run Out Of The Metro Station

He had just the right

look and carreid the

same book I’m reading.

He might have just

left his wife.  He might

have never wanted

a woman. Or wanted

a woman like me. But

he got off at Union

Station, vanished into

a cab. I didn’t see his

face, only his fingers

but he’ll come to me

in dreams where

he won’t slip away

In Virginia, Hardly A Leaf Gone Red

as ice blasts, cold

reels up the ropes of

summer. No hazy

moon this morning.

Leaf scent, cold

wool. Some mornings,

like today, I can’t

read any more bad

news. “Joy,” my

mother’s favorite

perfume on my wrist.

All that remains of

her above earth 

_____

by Michael Simms

(The chair of our English Department recently asked me to write an explication of ”fair use” of copyrighted materials.)

                Much of the great literature that we want our students to read, for example, Shakespeare, Milton, Emerson, Dickinson, and Twain, is in the public domain — that is, not protected by copyright.  Any work that was published before 1923 can legally be copied and distributed to our students without restriction. However, most of us want our students to read Modern and Contemporary literature as well as the classics.  For work published after 1923, including new translations of traditional literature, copyright restrictions apply.

                The United States Constitution gives Congress the power to secure for “Authors… the exclusive Right to their respective Writings…” and authors may assign all or part of their rights to others, including publishers and agents.   The Federal statutes regarding copyright can be found in Circular 92:  Copyright Law of the United States and Related Laws, contained in Tıtle 17 of The United States Code updated October 2007.  The entire 311 page document can be found online:  http://www.copyright.gov/title17/

                As English teachers interested in exposing our students to good writing, discussing literature in our classrooms, and quoting texts in our critical and creative writing, we should pay special attention to Section 107 — the “fair use” passage — which outlines what we are allowed to do:

 § 107 · Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use40 Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include— (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copy-righted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

 As you can see, we’re on safe ground if we’re quoting a short passage in a review or critical article, as well as using a quotation as an epigraph to a poem or story; and we are also within our rights when, as part of our classroom teaching, we photocopy or post on a website a short piece which is part of a copyrighted text, for example a single poem or page from a longer text.

                However, it is equally clear that there are limitations to fair use.  Notice that the limiting principles include (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copy-righted work as a whole.  In other words, if we were to reproduce without permission a significant portion of a copyrighted text, for example an entire short story in a book-length collection of ten stories, then we would be violating copyright.  Also notice (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.  In other words, if we are reproducing copyrighted material as a substitute for students buying the book, then we are in violation of copyright.  Also prohibited would be putting together an anthology of copyrighted material over the course of a semester — for example, handing out a poem each week to students over the course of a semester in lieu of assigning readings in a published  textbook.

                Violation of copyright is a serious offense carrying severe civil and criminal penalties, including fines and up to 10 years imprisonment (see Appendix F of Title 17).  Although it is hard to imagine the FBI rounding up English teachers en masse for over-use of their department copiers, similar infringements, such as trafficking in bootleg CDs, counterfeiting brand-name merchandise, and illegally downloading music and films from the internet – all of which are covered under Title 17 — have been successfully prosecuted in recent years.  Thousands of parents of Napster-using teenagers were shocked a few years ago to discover they were being sued for tens of thousands of dollars by a consortium of music publishers; Microsoft and Disney have lobbied the Federal government to include enforcement of intellectual property issues in trade negotiations with China.   Copyright infringement on the internet has become so common that many companies and universities have set up websites to streamline the processing of claims against them.  The pattern is clear:  corporate America and the Federal government take intellectual property issues very seriously. 

                Significantly, the owner of the copy machine can be held liable in addition to the person using it.  So, not only is the individual teacher subject to civil suits and criminal prosecution, but the university (or the local Kinko’s) is liable as well.

                Fearing lawsuits from publishers and damage to their reputations, many universities, including Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, strictly limit instructors’ use of copyrighted material.  If the instructor wishes to use text taken from a published source, he or she must submit a “course packet” to the officially recognized printer (usually the campus bookstore or a local copy shop) who applies for permission to the copyright holder, negotiates a fee, reproduces the text, and sells copies of the course packet to students.  The advantage of this system is that the instructor can customize the course materials while protecting the copyright holders’ intellectual property.  The disadvantage, of course, is that students are required to pay for shoddily printed, sometimes unreadable, texts which cost as much or more than a published book.

                Besides the course packet strategy, what legally sanctioned options do English teachers have to bring poems, stories, and essays to students?

•  We can order books through the campus bookstore and require or suggest that the students buy them;
• We can place books or magazines on reserve in the university library — not only paper texts but also legal digital versions of texts sent from publishers;
• We can use email, Blackboard and Facebook to provide students with hyperlinks to whole articles, either on public sites like the NY Times or via the many full text databases that our academic libraries now provide;
• We can read the literature out loud to the students;
• We can reproduce short passages and distribute them to our students via the internet or printed copies;
• We can request permission from publishers to reproduce longer passages.

                 Copyright laws exist to protect authors from unfair use of their work, and authors and publishers are entitled to compensation for their efforts.  As writers and teachers, we have an interest in respecting those legal rights while setting a good example for our students.

 Michael Simms is the founder and editor-in-chief of Autumn House Press, as well as a lecturer in the Creative Writing MFA program at Chatham University.  The article above is for general information purposes only and is not intended as legal advice.  Peter Oresick contributed to this article.

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by Michael Simms
Editor-in-Chief of Autumn House Press and Coal Hill Review