An Alphabet of Influences by Amylia Grace A is for the alphabet of influences on my poetry and aesthetic. The more poems I read and write, the more I appreciate just how much goes into the making of good poetry which stands the test of time. Slipstream is my first collection of poems. In a sense, the poems therein document this particular moment in time and examine my relationship to the world and others as a poet and young woman coming into her own. In short, my aesthetic and poetry are works in progress, just like my life. B is for better. Every poem herein has been written and revised to the best of my ability. If I could've written them better, I would have. I hold to the wisdom of Samuel Beckett, who encourages us to fail better--and then to go on failing, only better and better each time. There is much to be learned from our failures, and we are wise to acknowledge and embrace our creative mistakes instead of feeling held back by them. C is for “The Comedian as the Letter C” by Wallace Stevens, a sprawling poem at the fusion of creative imagination and objective reality. A lofty intersection, perhaps, but Stevens’ poem is done in good humor and with an ear toward sonics. It showcases a wild wit and imagination alongside a copious vocabulary and Stevens’ rather obscure humor. His alter-ego, Crispin, is both serious and humorous and “The Comedian as the Letter C” is an homage to poetic invention and the musicality of words. D is for dictation. Following through on a poem feels a bit like taking dictation at times. I let what wants to come, come. I try not to enforce my will on a poem initially any more than a transcriptionist would. But good poetry is more than a dictate. We look to poetry when mere
summation will not do. Poems tap into that which is beyond paraphrase. There's a reason Keats wrote an ode and not a paraphrase or essay on that famous Grecian urn of his. E is for evanescence: that feeling good poetry brings us that taps into both the fleeting and the sublime. There's sense of something lasting there and yet you can't quite hold on to it or pin it down; as soon as you try, it dissipates like vapor. Therein lies the beauty and mystery of good poetry. F is for fiction. Namely, the relationship between the facts we encounter and the fictions we invent. Ultimately, what I seek as both poet and reader is an experience that rings true, regardless of its adherence to “the facts.” What’s more important in the poet’s rendering of the subject or experience and I am drawn to poems that challenge my conception of the world and our place in it. G is for German grammar. As a German major I learned just how maddening German grammar truly is: too many tenses, genders, exceptions to difficult rules. For example, a girl (das Mädchen) is neuter and a table (der Tisch) is masculine. But “G” should also stand for gratitude since learning the nuances of German grammar helped my writing and understanding of grammar tremendously. In addition, developing a new vocabulary in another language helped me look more critically at the origins and connotations of words. Jacques Derrida said "being is grammar," and I believe the medium of poetry is uniquely poised to explore the relational tug between humans, language and syntax in very distinctive ways. Since human knowledge of the world is almost always mediated through language, poetry can be a useful model for learning about the construction of reality itself. H is for home. Living as an expatriate in both Europe and Asia has greatly influenced my notion of poetry and place. As a teenager in Germany, I fell in love with Rilke and Paul Celan. I
have translated their poetry (albeit poorly), and consider the years I lived in Germany to be among the most profound of my life. Stuttgart, Eastern Berlin and Salzwedel, Germany have all felt like home to me despite being unable to shake the shadow of otherness that often accompanies expatriate life. I look to the poetry of expatriate writers like Kyoko Mori (Osaka, Japan to Green Bay, Wisconsin) and Michael Ondaatje (Sri Lanka to Canada) to illuminate the pleasures and complexities of life at home and abroad in ways only those who’ve straddled both worlds can do. I is for ingenuity and imagination: two essentials in contemporary poetry. Collections like Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife, Rachel Zucker’s Eating the Underworld. Jeannine Hall Gailey’s Becoming the Villainess and Anne Sexton’s Transformations transport readers from ordinary narrative poetry into fictional realms via persona poems which re-imagine ancient myths and fairytales in ways that amuse, delight and surprise. In "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” for example, Sexton notices how “those little hot dogs/were wise and waddled like czars” (7). Jeannine Hall Gailey’s poems of superheroes and comic book villains transform familiar characters like my favorite childhood heroine, Wonder Woman "from prim kitten-bowed suit to bustier/with red-white-and-blue stars" (18), and has her admitting to that which feels deeply personal by the poem’s final line, with Wonder Woman confessing: "I become everything I was born to be,/the dreams of the mother,/the threat of the father" (19). J is for Mr. Jensen, my fifth grade science teacher. Mr. Jensen taught me how cool it was to look at the world under a microscope. Poetry is my new and improved Mr. Jensen; it has a way of magnifying the world or some small piece of it in new and surprising ways. Some poems make us stop and appreciate these little pockets of the world too easily overlooked whereas other
poems (haiku, for example) seem to actually inhabit the very essence of the thing. Beyond even this, however, is the reality that contemporary poetry needs to be critically examined through a macrocosmic lens, as well. When it is, it becomes clear that our poems are engaged in important dialogue with other poets and artists, as well as with the world at large. K is for "Keeping Things Whole" by Mark Strand, which was the poem that made me fall in love with poetry. The magic of a Strand poem lies beyond the words themselves, hinting at something inexplicable and profound. For example, these lines: When I walk, I part the air, and always, the air moves in to fill the spaces where my body's been. We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole. (47) I can’t say why I love it so; I just do. I also give my "K" to John Koethe, Milwaukee's first poet laureate. Hints of Koethe's meditative, reflective voice can be heard in my poem Mitakuye Oyasin. Take the opening stanza, for example: The parts are unimportant; everything becomes whole in the end. Everything flowing into the next—like seasons; the years again rushing toward winter, toward meaning, toward ice. (32)
L is for Lorca, the master of duende, who reminds me to stay steady headed and down to earth in my poetry without over-intellectualizing. Lorca declared intelligence a frequent enemy of poetry “because it limits too much, and it elevates the poet to a sharp-edged throne where he forgets that ants could eat him or that a great arsenic lobster could fall suddenly on his head." I dislike poets overemphasizing wit and smarts at the expense of a deeper engagement with the poem. It’s a fine line between the banter of an Ashbury poem, the clever sonics of Matthea Harvey’s recent work, and vapid overkill. I believe true wit is understated. And of course, “L” also stands for that messy, beautiful thing called love. M is for Meadowlands by Louise Glück, a real touchstone for me. Glück explores the struggles interpersonal relationships bring, as in "Midnight:" If I were you I'd think ahead. After fifteen years, his voice could be getting tired; some night if you don't answer, someone else will. (26) Glück cracks the myths of family, marriage and gender relations wide open. She imbues many poems with her trademark wit (understated, of course) and acerbic humor. The opening of “Purple Bathing Suit” has one of my favorite zingers: I like watching you garden with your back to me in your purple bathing suit: your back is my favorite part of you, the part furthest away from your mouth (53)
In Meadowlands as in life, pleasure is found amidst pain, and readers are reminded that they are not alone in moments of grief or despair. N is for neurotic, which I am. All great poets are neurotic, I think, which often works out well for our poems. "N" also stands for naked. It's risky to put oneself and one's creative work out there, exposing one’s deepest concerns. O is for the oral tradition from which poetry stems. I am drawn to the narrative tradition in poetry because I love stories. I grew up among storytellers. My father is a great storyteller and musician who learned the art of storytelling from his father. Raised on songs and stories, my weekends with Dad were full of tales of the self-made man and stories from boyhood. Truth is, much of what made Dad's stories great were the embellishments. If our house cost $20,000 to build, in my father’s stories it became $2,000. We all knew he took liberties, but didn't mind. I learned the art of storytelling and the value of artistic license by listening to my dad spin his tales. As a result, I like the freedom I find when rejecting absolute adherence to facts and "what really happened." Dad taught me truth is subjective and more than a collection of facts. P is for publishing. Keeping in mind the publishable quality of a poem is not a bad idea. I spend a lot of time reading current poetry and journals both print and online. In this way I'm able to keep abreast of the pulse of contemporary poetry and notice what sort of poems are being published today. That said, as soon as I attempt to write something for publication, I’m dead in the water. Such pressure or restriction kills me artistically. While I’m aware of the type of poetry editors seem to be publishing today, I know the likelihood of earning heaps of money from my poetry is laughably small, so I might as well write what I like which is very often those things I hold deep within my heart or that which grabs hold of my mind and imagination. This is where
the best poetry comes from anyway. Trying to please others at the expense of one’s freedom or creative impulses rarely results in something resonant and lasting so I do not do that anymore. Q is for quagmires. Robert Frost who knew "the best way out is always through," and it is in this spirit that Slipstream was written. In essence, these poems are my attempt to be released from the quagmire of my own mind by writing right on through it. Slipstream contains intimacy without gloss, everyday moments without sentimentality. Thoughts that arise on a normal weekday morning are turned into compelling poetry, and I've looked to fellow Gen-Xers like Shaindel Beers to show me the way as she does in “A Brief History of Time." An excerpt: Now that we each have someone who knows how we take our coffee, that smallest but most telling of intimacies — you, black, three sweeteners; me, cream, no sugar — we’re each eating breakfast with other people who don’t drink coffee at all. There seems to be a message here, but I don’t know what it is. I’m no good at this love thing […] (26) R is for Robert Pinsky and rhythm. While his poetry alone is a sort of instruction manual in sonics and sound, reading The Sounds of Poetry has helped me move beyond meaning and narrative as sole focal points and pay closer attention to the musicality of words. Through Pinsky, my understanding and emphasis on sonics and the cadence of the lyric has broadened. Sound can make or break a poem, even in a single isolated line of poetry, regardless of meaning. S is for Anne Sexton, whose aesthetic echoes my own. She used troubling feelings and thoughts as the catalyst for poems; her hope, humble. She simply wanted her poems to be of some use to someone. Sexton mentions how her confessional impulse arises from the desire to
document the imagination, wit and experiences of one life, however long it may or may not last (interview). Brushing off the notion of describing her artistic aesthetic, Sexton simply said that she didn’t know anything more cosmic anyway so she might as well stick with what she knows (interview). T is for trust. Trusting my poetic impulses is an ongoing process. I have a tendency to be self-conscious and second guess myself, which limits liberation and the necessary freedom poets need from the confines of the self. I have not learned how to silence the nagging voices in my head that question my every move, but I have managed to stop listening to them most of the time. The poems in Slipstream are my strongest because I trusted my instincts and creative impulses. I discovered my poems wanted more play, less intellect, and let my subconscious to reveal the bigger, deeper subject for the collection. What came through loudly was a preoccupation with themes of loss, love, displacement and connection. In short is an embrace of the French notion of l'amor malgrÊ tout (love despite everything). U is for urge: the urge to write, to love, to confess, to be forgiven, and to forgive. I admit to a certain confessional urge although such a label is, in many ways, a misnomer. It rather pleases me to confess to things I've done (or were done to me) and those which are only imagined. Embracing both the autobiographical and fictional realms leaves the reader with the poem. V is for voice. In crafting this collection of poems, Slipstream has helped me to locate and strengthen my poetic voice. While imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, as a poet I’ve often felt like a poser and imposter. I knew what I liked in the poetry of others but was unsure how to get there myself. The first thing I did was started reciting poems aloud instead of reciting them in my head. Something about actually putting the words out there with my own
breath feels really good. Beyond how a poem sounds, though, lies a deeper hope: the hope that readers are able to stop and take a breath when experiencing my poetry: that they are again encouraged to meander, to wonder, to hope--and to know a thing again as if for the first time. W is for woman and the weight of our history (or herstory). It is my hope that the poems in Slipstream tap into the universal of female experience by way of the personal, highlighting the tricky relationships we navigate with our loved ones. These are poems of heft. They are also poems infused with candor via strong female voices. “Confessions of an Angler,” for example, features an unapologetic, spunky narrator full of snarky malfeasance, declaring: "I always catch/ him/with the same/old line, the live/bait cast./Right as he squirms/free/I hook him/again" (Grace 12). X is for x is for that unknown element in poetry that makes it timeless. It's hard to describe exactly what makes a great poem great. In Sally’s Hair, John Koethe declares "Poems are the fruit of the evasions/Of a life spent trying to understand. And Time makes poetry from what it takes away" (72). Good poems work, in part, because in the attempt at explaining it (whatever "it" is) to themselves, poets in turn explain it to us. If particular poems in this collection inform or entice readers in some way, I hope it's because the feelings and thoughts they invoke feel both new and familiar--that they contain within them remembrances of things long forgotten. Y is for you, dear reader. Without an audience, a poem has no life. Keeping "you" somewhere in mind is imperative, particularly in revision. I can't help but think of Naked Lunch by William Burroughs, an influence insomuch as it seared into my very being the importance of one's attitude toward readers. Unlike Burroughs who is downright hostile toward readers, I prefer accessibility and benevolence between writer and reader, poem and page. This is important. If
the reader is disregarded or addressed with animosity or even contempt, the poet not the reader has lost. If readers cannot find their way within a poem, the work will inevitably fail. I hope readers enjoy the journey and always know where they are in an “Amylia poem,” but not necessarily where they’re heading until they arrive. Z is for Zazen (sitting meditation), a practice I've taken up in recent years. I find meditation difficult, but make it a point to carve out space in my days to "loafe and invite my soul” as Whitman would say. Many of my best ideas for poems appear upon waking or dozing off. I’m usually sitting at my desk or on my chaise or in a plane when some nameless thing arises from that space between the worlds. There’s something important to be found in those very human, ordinary moments of pause. It doesn't matter whether we're on our knees praying to God or showering off the previous day's dust and dirt, in one way or another we find inspiration in ritual and repetition, standing cleansed and poised for another day of the poetry of human experience.
Works Cited Beers, Shaindel. A Brief History of Time. Cambridge United Kingdom: Salt Publishing. 2008. Paperback. Gailey Hall, Jeannine. Becoming the Villainess. Bowling Green: Steel Toe Books. 2006. Paperback. Glück. Louise. Meadowlands. New York: Ecco/HarperCollins. 1996. Paperback. Grace, Amylia. Slipstream. National University Thesis: MCW 670. May 2010. Koethe, John. Sally’s Hair. 1st edition. New York: Harper Perennial. 2007. Hardcover. Sexton, Anne. Interview with William Heyen & Al Poulin. New York. Sept 1973. Sexton, Anne. Transformations. First Mariner Books edition. New York: HoughtonMifflin. 2001. Paperback. Strand, Mark. Reasons for Moving, Darker & The Sargentville Not: Poems. New York: Knopf. 1992. Paperback.