One of the things I missed at this year’s Association of Writing Persons conclave – aside from a probable last chance to blow an obscene amount of money at Charlie Trotter (who has decided to close down his restaurant empire so he can go back to school for literature. Think about it) – was a panel on Carolyn Kizer and the magazine she co-founded, Poetry Northwest. They announced – and I have been allowed bean-spilling privileges on this – that their annual Richard Hugo Prize will henceforth be the Carolyn Kizer Prize. A great decision, I think – Kizer more than deserves the nod. And let me jut put in a plug right now for Poetry Northwest, which is a magazine well worth your time. And I’m not just saying that because they’ve been super indulgent about accepting my work. And I’m not under some quid pro quo arrangement to tout them because that first Carolyn Kizer Prize is going in a direction I Very Wholeheartedly Approve Of (cue trumpet obbligati). Seriously, it’s a great publication, eclectic in the great tradition of Pacific Northwest eclecticism yet stylistically rock-solid. If you don’t read it, you’re missing some good stuff.
My preoccupations of the week have ranged widely, from Pandora’s Box to Schroedinger’s Cat, from Yeats to the Upanishads, from birdwatching to Borges, Kalachakra to quantum mechanics. When I was relieved of the burden of trying to weave a basket out of those reeds by last night’s phone call about the Kizer prize, I thought, well, that makes it obvious. Let's talk about Kizer.
But in diving back through poems of Kizer’s (which are many, and many of which are too long to be done justice to in this space), two things happened. One, I found this quote:
“Writing about iambic pentameter is like writing a defense of breathing. When I was a child I had severe asthma. I would lie perfectly still and concentrate on the production of the next breath. It is both the most natural and the most concentrated activity I know. One breath and the pentameter line have the same duration.”
I don’t know why it surprised me to read this. Maybe because I’ve always thought of Kizer as being more notable for her themes and subject matter than her stance on the Great American Bicker between “formalists” and um, “free versists.” It was a common tenet of, for instance, San Francisco Renaissance poets (and it traces its heritage to Whitman, who I guess had one hell of a set of lungs) that the breath be the basic unit of poetry rather than the iamb, which was seen as artificial. And here’s Kizer, a poet who wrote both metrical and non-metrical poems, saying that for her, iambic pentameter was a breath-unit. It made me realize that it was that for me as well. I never had asthma but I have done years of yoga and I have done plenty of breath-based mindfulness meditations to help deal with bouts of panic attacks. And she’s completely correct about breath being simultaneously completely natural and completely “concentrated.” I thought about the yogic practice of pranayama – which in Sanskrit means control of breath – but I have also seen the term rendered as “expansion of individual energy into cosmic energy.” Chew on that for a sec. One teacher with whom I practiced taught a method of “circular breathing” not unlike the practice employed by wind instrument players. He also taught Bhastrika or “bellows breath” in which the sense of inhalation and exhalation are reversed – I think most of us conceive of breathing as beginning with inhalation and ending with exhalation. If you simply reverse these in your mind and see inhalation as the natural outcome of exhalation, it’s crazy how your entire energy changes. Try it. And I would love to hear from people about this idea of breath in relation to line and meter. Does changing the way you breathe change the way you hear poetry? Are you someone for whom meter comes “naturally” or do you have to “concentrate” on it? (Or choose not to? And if you are not someone who feels meter as a physical force, what does govern those rhythmic choices for you?)
Second thing: I re-entered a thought loop about what happens when you go back to writers at different times in your life. Who are the writers to whom you return again and again? And when you do, do you find they have changed since you last encountered them? Which writers have deepened in significance for you and which have become irrelevant? Have there been any that do both, in a cycle?
My theme for this week, friends, is the circle in all of its permutations. Eternal return and seasonal cycling, what we “circle around” without touching, what is circling, or encircling, us.More on this later; meanwhile, a missive from Ms. Kizer:
What the Bones Know
Remembering the past
And gloating at it now,
I know the frozen brow
And shaking sides of lust
Will dog me at my death
To catch my ghostly breath.
I think that Yeats was right,
That lust and love are one.
The body of this night
May beggar me to death,
But we are not undone
Who love with all our breath.
I know that Proust was wrong,
His wheeze: love, to survive,
Needs jealousy, and death
And lust, to make it strong
Or goose it back alive.
Proust took away my breath.
The later Yeats was right
To think of sex and death
And nothing else. Why wait
Till we are turning old?
My thoughts are hot and cold.
I do not waste my breath.
