Moonlight Musings

Surviving April: 
NaPoWriMo and all that 

Well it could be worse. It's not NaNoWriMo (National Novel-Writing Month) where would-be novelists must churn out thousands of words a day (not necessarily with much attempt to make them good words). 

I did that one year; which was, well, educational � but never again. After all, I am no novelist; I just wanted to get more idea of what writing one would be like, for the sake of my writing students. I managed it with lots of coffee and chocolate, weight gain, sleep deprivation, and a very obliging husband who did everything else that needed doing. I produced an incredibly bad novel and a great lack of interest in trying to improve it. That was actually my second attempt at a novel. The first, years earlier, soon bored me so much that I abandoned it. If your writing bores YOU, not much hope of it interesting others.

It happens that � for no particular reason � I've never actually done NaPoWriMo, meaning the site of that name from whence prompts issue daily for the month of April. But there are other, similar sites which I have tried. April is National Poetry Month in the USA, which means that online it becomes international (just as NaNoWriMo does, later in the year). Everyone signs up to write a poem a day, at that site and/or various others. For some years I participated at Poetic Asides, but so many people joined in over the years that it became too unwieldy for me. Nowadays I play in much smaller groups, where there is some chance of finding time to read other participants' gems and them read mine � on top of finding time to write a new poem every day.

The aim of NaNoWriMo is not polished work but the completion of fifty thousand words. (Amazingly, some people do produce publishable books.) I suppose it's the same with Poetry Month: the requirement is simply to produce a poem a day. However, we poets do like to make our pieces as good as we can in the time available. It's not the length, it's the poetics! In fact, at Poetic Asides, there are now acclaimed poets judging each month's offerings, and an annual anthology of the winning poems.

I know a number of you do participate in April Poetry Month, at one site or another (or several!) while a number choose not to. I have been making resolutions that this year is my last. I always start off well enough, pleased with new, exciting prompts. Then there comes a time, somewhere past the halfway point, when I find myself writing stuff that seems like drivel. Of course, at a poem a day, they must all be regarded as drafts anyway, but even so.... Readers don't seem to agree with my low estimation of those poems, but The Disempowerer in my head says, 'They are just being kind and polite.' At that point every year I make the same resolution: this is the last year I'll do this.

But then, every year, as we near the end of the month, some gear shifts and I start producing things that I am, to my surprise, very happy with. I even start getting inspired to extra poems that aren't prompted! So then I wonder � what if I just kept on forever, writing poems every day? Would I get really, really good at it? And I put the decision to stop on hold again until next April, by which time I am once more raring to go.

I don't, however, continue writing every day � by the end of the month I am ready for a break and keen to do other things, such as clean the house and weed the garden. Perhaps even get out and about a bit. A month-long commitment, even if it's not for thousands of words of prose, tends to interfere with the rest of life. 'We need some life to put into our art,' I used to tell my writing students, advising them not to chain themselves to their desks. After seven decades of living, I have many memories which I can surely use in my writing, but it isn't quite the same. 

And what about revision? Everyone says it's vital, and I agree. When I'm producing a poem a day, I don't spend much time on revising. Even creating just a few new poems a week, as I respond to the slightly less frequent prompts that happen in other months, leaves little time to revise. Luckily, the problem is the solution. (Well, almost.) Because of writing to prompts � not to mention having been engaged in the making of poems for roughly six decades so far � I get progressively quicker at matters of craft. 

I guess we all do a bit of immediate revision at the point of creation; they are not really FIRST drafts we post. We get adept at producing quite decent poems quite fast. Some enviable people seem always to be outright brilliant! 

All the same, there is delight in returning to an old draft years later � or even a piece one had thought 'finished' � and seeing at a glance just what it needs to become as good as it can get. Or, if it's really in a desperate situation, finding a completely new approach to revive the poor thing. There's even satisfaction in the worst-case scenario, deciding to let some die quietly.  (You know they then become compost for new growth, don't you?) 

Well, it's only one month in the year. Why not go for broke, just one month of the year? (No, don't tell me about November at Poetic Asides, where they not only write a new poem a day all over again, but this time weave them around a theme so as to produce a new chapbook, with the possibility of getting it taken up by a reputable publisher ... I told you not to tell me that!)  

But what is one to do with all those April poems? All those years of April poems? Make chapbooks? Collect them as Christmas presents for friends and family? (The ones who want to read my poems have probably seen them on my blog already.) Just leave them on the blog, letting that be my magnum opus? Take them off the blog soonish (to avoid accusations of prior publication) and/or revise, then submit to prestigious literary journals and anthologies? 

Maybe what to do with them is a different question; anyway it only applies if we do keep producing hundreds of poems every year. The question I am trying to explore here is about the value or otherwise, to us as poets, of participating in Poetry Month. And there is the further question of whether we should � or could � keep up that pace of creation all the time.

I don't know. Perhaps it would be good for me to take a long break from writing new stuff and start some serious revising, even some culling. Perhaps I could make a whole lot of collections around themes? Or forms? (I really fancy the idea of a book of haibun, when I have enough of them.) And yet, not writing new poems at least sometimes would get boring, I think. Creation is exciting!

April Poetry Month is thrilling, challenging, daunting, inconvenient, impractical ... and, unquestionably, productive. This May I do plan to ease off on the writing for a bit. But has it swiftly become such a habit that I'll have withdrawals? We shall see.

And then in June.... Well, you see, some weeks back, before April began, I accepted an invitation to be guest poet for a month at a blog of Aussie poets, where the idea is to post a new draft every day. I must have been mad! At least I have given myself a month in between. And at least they are only supposed to be drafts. (In the habit of quick composition, will I be able to leave my posts as actual first drafts, I wonder, or will I be impelled to tinker?)

I'm glad anyway that we at Poets United have no plans to start hosting our own poetry month. Midweek Motif and the Poetry Pantry, interspersed with articles about poetry and poets, allow for a nice balance between frequency of writing and leisure to craft the work � particularly as we can dip in and out as we like, according to what else is going on in our lives. It allows for those sweet moments when the Muse may whisper in our ears, unprompted.

What do you think, United Poets? Is Poetry Month a blessing or a curse, a chore or great fun? No-one twists our arms, so I guess if we do it, we must really want to.

Feel free to share your thoughts.

Moonlight Musings

What Shoulders Do You Stand On?
� Stylistic Influences  

Do you like your poetry strict or random, sparse or ornate? Do you have one distinct style or many? 

And have you drawn on the work of other poets to expand your range? Probably we all do that, whether consciously or not. In my case it is often intentional.

When I was a much younger poet than I am now, my poetry was lush, sensual, full of metaphor and imagery, sometimes mysterious.  

Somewhere along the way I was introduced to haiku and fell in love with the great haiku masters: Basho, Buson, Shiki, Issa. (Basho is my first love, and I think many regard him as the greatest, but the others are wonderful too.) I began to want to pare my own poetry back, to find a way to write with their simplicity and transparency. I wanted my poems to be like glass, that the reader could see straight through to what I was describing, as if the words were hardly there. I wanted the words to be clean, clear windows, so the reader would not even notice the glass but see only what it showed.

I decided that the way to acquire this kind of clarity and immediacy was to learn to write haiku myself, so as to bring those qualities to the rest of my poetry. And so I began a journey which has lasted seven years so far. I don't know Japanese, so I have had to try and learn from haiku written in English, either original or in translation. In fact it's interesting to compare different translations of the same haiku master: it gives you the essence of what the poet was trying to say, somewhere beyond the varying interpretations. 

I discovered that the haiku is at once the easiest and most difficult form to write. Anyone can write three lines of observation of the natural world. It's not hard to do it with the syllable count of 5/7/5 words per line. After I read that 'syllables' in Japanese are much shorter than in English, so that our 5/7/5 haiku are unwieldy by comparison, and that many serious haiku writers in English now go for short/long/short lines instead � well it was easy enough to do that too.

But to write a haiku, a real, actual haiku � oh, that is so difficult that it often seems almost impossible. 

What makes a haiku? There are certain rules. I tend to think, now, that 5/7/5 is the least important. 

They must deal with nature. There should be a season word (a kigo) which identifies the season being written of in a way that readers will instantly understand, but which does not specifically name the season. Metaphor and simile are to be eschewed. Haiku don't rhyme, and they don't have metre. In many ways they are about as different from Western poetry as you can get. Some experts differentiate haiku from poetry altogether, as a separate and distinct art form.

There is traditionally a 'kireji', a word where the haiku makes a sort of turn. Some contemporary writers use a dash after the kireji, or even instead of it. It is often said that there should be a juxtaposition of two images. This is done without explanation; the reader is supposed to fill in the gaps. The haiku, if I understand correctly, demands the engagement of the reader. It is as if it makes a suggestion, and invites readers to find their own experience of what is suggested.

Is this getting to sound a bit mystical? Perhaps it should. Of all the definitions of haiku I've ever read, I most like Natalie Goldberg's in Writing Down the Bones where she says that it should give the reader a tiny experience of God. We could call it by a more familiar term: an 'Aha!' moment. And that, for me, is where the real difficulty lies.

I don't worry too much about season words. Haiku are international now, and different countries have different ways of denoting the seasons. In Australia, for instance, we don't see many of the cherry blossoms which, in Japan, mean Spring. If we put lorikeets in our haiku, Australian readers would know the season, but perhaps few others would. As we can't make the season universally recognisable, I don't try. Well, I sometimes just name the season, if it seems essential, or say something obvious about heat or cold. 

I do like the juxtaposition of images/ideas, though. And I hope I give my readers some 'Aha!' moments.

Haiku are very like a form of writing shared with the world by author / psychotherapist / Buddhist priest Satya Robyn: 'small stones'. Many of you will be familiar with them, but for those who aren't, small stones are brief observations of the external world, keeping oneself and one's reactions out of the picture. I embraced small stones too for several years, and still like to write them occasionally. Being a poet, I naturally put them into verse most of the time, although that is not a requirement. 

These practices worked. While I still struggle to master haiku � and expect that to be a lifelong quest with no guarantees � my other poetry did become, as I desired, plainer and simpler. I liked this effect. I thought that I was attaining the greater clarity I had sought. For a long time I was very happy about this. Then eventually I noticed, with alarm, that my poetry now lacked metaphor and had even lost some musicality of language. The pendulum had swung too far.

Having become so immersed in this understated, subtle style, I wasn't sure how to find my way back to a richness I had lost. Then I came across the Magnetic Poetry site which functions as a random generator of lines and phrases (based on the old fridge poetry idea). What a joy! If poetry is playing with words, here's the ultimate in playfulness. You can create all sorts of music and imagery without any real meaning. Or if you do manage meaning (which is not entirely impossible) still it's a bizarre, unexpected meaning. There are all sorts of strange twists and turnings. Simple and transparent it's not. 

Playing with this opened my mind up again to magical, musical word-play, to metaphor and mystery. Even when I'm not playing with this random word generator, I think more colour and drama is finding its way back into my verse. 

Is there a happy medium? If I work it right, shall I find my way to a balanced style with just enough transparency along with just enough imagery? I do hope not! That already sounds far too dull and proper. I think it's more interesting, to me at any rate, if I have a range of styles to suit the needs of particular poems. It was one of the haiku masters. (Shiki? Issa?) who said, 'If your writing doesn't interest you, how can it interest anyone else?' (Or something like that.)

In the same way, although I prefer to work in free verse (when I'm not trying haiku) I do also like to play with form. It's good to learn from the masters, I think. When the modern master, Samuel Peralta, was hosting the FormForAll posts at dVerse, he gave us examples of all kinds of sonnets from the older masters. He made it sound easy, and so it was. I'd always been in awe of the sonnet before and thought it beyond me. It was a delight to find I could do it after all � indeed, could do various kinds. 

Some free verse poets have an enviable ear. They seem to just know instinctively how the lines should fall so as to create poetry and not chopped-up prose. And there is room for all sorts of variations of style and mode within that criterion. But for many of us it can be tricky. After the years of experimenting with haiku, my poetry had in fact become prosy! Exploring form was an obvious strategy to try and restore the balance. I haven't stopped writing haiku � nor small stones � but I don't do them so often now. Instead, I play with other forms more than I once did.

Writing tanka was a nice place to go from haiku: still Japanese, with some of the same delicacy of touch, but romantic, with room for music and metaphor. Another option I've grown to love is the haibun, that mixture of prose and haiku which Basho himself initiated. It gives me a chance to make my prose poetic, in contrast to the verse becoming prosy, another way to counteract that trend. When I'm not thinking about line endings, rhythm etc. I can pay even more attention to heightened language and perhaps get the hang of it once more.

It's a great gift to have poetry communities such as this, which, with their prompts, give us the opportunity to try different ways of making poems, adding to our tool-kits and refining our craft. The presenters often introduce me to forms I didn't know before. It's fun to try something new.

You'll note I asked 'what shoulders' rather than 'whose'. If we began to list all the individual poets who have influenced us over the years, it would surely take a lot of space. In any case, such preferences are individual and subjective. Let's not debate the relative merits of Yeats and Yevtushenko, Piercy and Plath. Some will thrill to one, some to another, most of us to a number. Let us be grateful to all who came before, to show the way and sometimes break new ground. 

[I'll give you one tip. When you find a poet you admire, copy something they've written. I don't mean parody them, though that too can be a good way of learning. No, I mean copy down something of theirs by hand, word for word, exactly as they published it. In the process you will find yourself noticing how they did it, their tricks and techniques. 

If I remember rightly, that advice originally came from Stephen King, for fiction writers.]

I wonder what styles and modes of poetry have influenced you, what ways of making poems have inspired you to want to try your hand at something similar? Do you love simplicity or ornamentation? Brevity or discursiveness? Boundaries or wildness? Or do you want the lot?


Feel free to share your thoughts.

Moonlight Musings

Poetry Is Theft

... said some poet, once (it may have been Keats). Many others have quoted it since without attribution, so we don't really know who originally said it. Which rather fits the assertion, doesn't it? Everyone stealing the line, I mean, until its origin is lost or at least becomes uncertain.

What is theft; what is borrowing? What is legitimate allusion; what is illegal and fraudulent? 

Complications of the Internet

In our digital era, where students and researchers use Google and Wikipedia etc., it's easy to copy and paste information. It has become the norm. When is this legitimate and when is it plagiarism? I think it depends whether the source is acknowledged or the material is passed off as your own. When in doubt, err on the side of caution!

In practice it's not always easy, as I find when researching material for The Living Dead and I Wish I'd Written This. Sometimes I give a direct quote; that makes attribution easy enough. But when I paraphrase, and mix information from various sources to make the article more readable, it can get tricky. 

I rely on stock phrases like, 'Wikipedia tells us'. The penalties for breach of copyright, a closely related matter, can be severe. I don't know if the same applies to cases of plagiarism, but a guilty finding would destroy one's reputation as a writer, which many of us might regard as even worse. Even an innocent lack of attribution might cause a student to fail an exam. (Ignorance is seldom an acceptable excuse; we are supposed to check these things.)

However, that's more to do with matters of scholarship. Let's bring the focus back to poetry.

The unwritten word

I read somewhere, once, that some societies don't care about authorship of poems; they just love the poetry. So it doesn't matter in those societies, is not a shameful thing, if one poet uses another's lines and passes them on, perhaps interwoven with his/her own. It's not an intentional fraud, simply something no-one worries about. But these tend to be societies of oral poetry ... or so I read. Asia, the article said, or Russia. 

I don't know about that. Is there somewhere in the world, still, where poetry is only spoken and memorised, never written down? Lots of 'spoken word poetry' happens right now in the Western world, we know � but it is usually written as well. And the Western world is where we take pride in original composition and like to put our names to our creations; even the rappers do that.

I am ignorant of a lot of world history; for instance I know almost nothing of Arabic poetry, or African. So I am open to being educated on this subject. Maybe there is still a tribal culture somewhere, where poets are not proprietary � but in Russia there is a long tradition of poets putting their names to their work, even in the days of Stalin's gulags when it was dangerous to write any poems that didn't toe the party line. In China, Japan, India, Indonesia, etcetera, poets have claimed their writings for centuries, and still do today.

It's true that, before written language, or before the ability to write was widespread, the oral tradition and memorisation were the ways poetry was disseminated and retained, in Europe as much as Asia or any other continent. But whatever happened in ancient times and wherever it happened, for a long time now authorship has mattered to us. I certainly like people to know that it was me who wrote what I wrote.

What's in a name?

So where does that well-known poet, Anonymous, fit into this discussion? S/he wrote such good things! I'm glad they've been preserved for us. But no-one has tried to steal them; it's just that the authorship has been lost. I'm sure, if it was me, I'd rather have something of mine out there with no name on it, getting read, than have it named but unseen. What I would seriously object to, though, would be someone else putting their name on something I originally wrote and passing it off as theirs.  

And yet, we do learn from each other, and borrowing is a well respected tradition too. So when is it allusion and when is it plagiarism? 

Case histories

These thoughts arose when I featured the wonderful Aga Shahid Ali in a recent 'The Living Dead' post. I was startled to discover that his poems were full of allusions, none of them attributed. 

But they were very well-known allusions. The particular poem I featured was a ghazal about rain, which ended with the line, 'No-one has such small hands, Shahid, not even the rain.' Who wouldn't immediately think of e. e. cummings's 'No-one, not even the rain, has such small hands'?

It's interesting to note that Ali has not quoted cummings perfectly; he has slightly altered the line � and yet it is instantly recognisable. His work is peppered with similar examples. As both poet and academic, moving in very literary circles, he must have fully expected that these allusions would be recognised. He wasn't trying to deceive anyone into thinking they originated with him; they were intentional homage. As I said, the originals were very well-known. 

A rather different case happened in Australia last year and caused a scandal. A respected poet was found to have used a number of lines from other poets, without attribution, usually changing them slightly. They came from good poets, but from work not all that widely known (though it was out there, obviously, to be found). He did try to play the 'allusion' card, and also to suggest that these phrases were in his head but he had forgotten their origin and thought they were his own. And haven't we all had that experience? A line pops into your head and only later you realise it was a memory of something you read. Or, even worse, you don't realise until someone points it out. How dreadful if you were unjustly accused of plagiarism on the strength of it!

(I remember my dear husband, Andrew, showing me in delight a charming story he'd found on his computer. 'I must have forgotten writing it' he said � a feasible surmise, as he was indeed getting forgetful in his old age. Fortunately, I wasn't. I was able to remind him that a friend had sent it to him. It was true that their writing had similar themes and styles; that's why she wanted to show it to him. So it was a fairly easy mistake for him to make. But imagine how hurt she would have been, and how mortified he would have been, had I not been around to stop him sharing it with the world as his own!)

The trouble was, in the case of the Australian poet, there were so many such instances in his work. It stretches credulity to think someone could be that forgetful! And even if these instances were, as he also (contradictorily) claimed, intentional allusions, they were not well-known like Ali's, so he should still have identified his sources. (Even Ali was assuming a particular, poetically erudite audience. In theory he could unintentionally have deceived others.)

In an even more extreme case, a poet I know had her identity stolen online. Another person not only created a presence in her name on blogs and networking sites, but also stole and posted her poetry there. I don't know if the poet or the poetry was the primary target of this deception, but the poetry was part of the identity of course. The police were brought in and the thief was stopped, but the young poet was traumatised for a long time afterwards. She doesn't post her work online any more, which is our loss.

Those are extreme cases, though. We are much more likely to trip ourselves up without meaning to.

The accidental theft � or accidental give-away

The 'remix' is a popular method now. There are also the erasures and cut-ups which have been around a while longer. And there is all the 'found poetry', which can sometimes be found in other people's writings. I think these are valid methods, and I have played around with them myself from time to time. I am careful to acknowledge what I am up to and where I got the source material.

It gets even more complicated than that. In recent decades writers have started 'asserting their moral right' to be acknowledged as author of their published works. I understand that this is meant to prohibit anyone from altering that work without permission. This seems to be the opposite extreme from another recent practice: sharing one's writings online at sites where other people may come in and edit them. 

No way is anyone going to do that to anything of mine! All my docs in online storage are private, thanks. But, again, my writing is poetry, memoir and related matters, not scholarship. On the other hand, I can well imagine that scholars might have to be particularly careful not to get their stuff misappropriated. 

It's a minefield, isn't it? 

What can we do?

We may exercise great care to ensure that we ourselves are not stealing, but how can we protect our own work from theft? We're a community of blogging poets: our work is out there for anyone to take.

I think, if someone wants to steal it, we probably don't have much hope. The identity thief I mentioned above would not have been caught if she had not also used the poet's actual name and pretended to be her. However, it seems unlikely. 

Because we make our work so public, and participate in a community, anyone who wanted to enhance their reputation would probably steal something less recognisable. Anyone with such considerations would probably not be playing at this grass-roots level anyway, but would have their eye on academic standing or cash prizes. Some of us may do that too, but we are also willing to share our work here, whereas anyone motivated to steal other people's good lines would have to be focused on status and ego.

I think we are more likely to have to guard against the possibility of innocent / ignorant stealing. Most of us do have copyright statements on our blogs, or even on every individual poem. We can only hope it will give people pause and stop them from blithely sharing something that impresses them without asking first.

If they did, you might never know. But if you should find out, the fact of having a blog with dates and actual readers could help in any legal case. Dates can be faked, but if 20 people say they remember reading it on your blog last year, that must carry some weight. You could go one better, by emailing your work to someone, if only to yourself, or putting it in (dated) online storage. You could keep dated copies of all your drafts too. You probably don't need to � but you might.

(A poet friend of mine is also an artist, and one of her sketches appeared as an illustration in one of her books. Some years later a schoolgirl's prize-winning painting was exhibited in a small-town art gallery � where someone who knew the poet recognised that it was her sketch, only slightly altered except for the addition of paint. It turned out that the school art teacher had photocopied a lot of drawings he liked the look of, and given them to his students to play around with. The young girl had no idea about copyright, though the teacher should have. My friend didn't ask for any financial compensation, but her lawyers did insist that the Gallery display a notice saying that the painting was based on her sketch, which it did. I imagine the teacher was told to be more responsible in future!)

I see that a few Poets United people have the 'Copysafe' notice prominently displayed on their blogs. Does that work? And if so, how? I've always wondered.

What about the Creative Commons option? I haven't used it for my own work, but have sometimes been glad of it to get access to other people's (for legitimate reasons, such as to use in I Wish I'd Written This). I imagine that all the detailed wording, combined with free use of the material, would encourage people to make proper attribution. If anyone has licensed their work in that way, what is your experience?

Is poetic theft an issue that affects you? Concerns you? And what, if anything, do you do about it?

Feel free to share your thoughts