Camille Dungy, who will teach a three-morning workshop on persona poems at the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference, July 28-30, has changed her workshop description. Here’s the revised one:

Telling Stories through Poetry

Forget what you’ve heard about not trying to be someone other than yourself. In poetry, we can inhabit all sorts of people’s experiences and come away with new insights about ourselves and the world. Whether we write straight from personal history or in someone else’s voice, participants will learn some of the exciting possibilities persona poetry offers. We’ll generate poems through in-class exercises and have an opportunity to discuss previously-written work. This workshop is appropriate for anyone looking for new ways to invigorate and strengthen their poetic voice.

Winner of this year’s Northern California Book Award in Poetry and many other awards, Camille is known for her expertise in the persona form.  For more information about the conference and how to register, check out the website.

by Maureen Eppstein

An essay by Tony Hoagland in the September 2010 issue of Poetry finally clarified for me why I find some modern poetry confusing. It’s meant to be, Hoagland says. In the essay he lays out two views on the function of poetry. The first suggests that poetry constructs perspective for the reader. He cites Wallace Stevens for the alternative view: “The poem must resist the intelligence/ Almost successfully.” 

“It’s the gong of recognition versus the bong of disorientation,” Hoagland says. He attributes the sense of vertigo aroused by reading poems by Stevens or John Ashbery to the complexities of modern life. “After all, our economic culture specializes in two things: surfeit and counterfeit. …Add to that our drastically increased sense of the corruption of commercial and political speech, and the instability of language---surely our resulting collective dizziness is a fundamental symptom of modern life, one to which poems naturally refer.”

When I showed the essay to my friend Jeanette Boyer, she commented: “When I was a little kid, I used to love spinning in circles, stopping, and finding the world all topsy-turvy. Now that would make me all too dizzy. Similarly, I find I prefer poetry that brings me a sense of stillnesss rather than a sense of vertigo.”

I agree with Jeanette. I’m much more attuned to poems in which the reader and the poet share a moment of recognition. At the same time, we both appreciated Hoagland’s essay for the clarification it provided.

Since I attended John Felstiner’s Soundings workshop last week, I’ve thought about the subtle gradations of difference between poetry and prose. Soundings is a program of Mendocino Coast Writers Conference in which, like a whale sounding, participants dive deeply into some aspect of writing. John’s topic was “Combing poems to learn bolder prose, & vice versa.” We looked at an example of poetic prose (an extract from Ellen Meloy’s The Anthropology of Turquoise). We struggled to reassemble William Carlos Williams’s poem “Iris” from a version laid out as prose. All the while, I was mindful of the genre changes I have inflicted on my own poems.

I am working on a memoir that braids three threads: the story of my sister, Dame Evelyn Stokes, whose work on Maori land rights issues helped transform New Zealand society over the past several decades by moving Maori culture, language and environmental concerns into the mainstream; my experience as a long-time expatriate who feels more and more a foreigner when I return to New Zealand; and my complicated relationship with my older sister.

I have written, and published,  many poems on the expatriate and sibling rivalry themes. Congenitally frugal, I realized that with a little work I could reuse these poems rather than hunt for other words to express my meaning. In some cases, it was simply a matter of removing the line breaks. In other cases, the intensity of the poem’s syntax had to be expanded to fill the more leisurely opening up of meaning in prose.

Here are two examples. My poem “In My Sister’s Garden” contains the lines:

Old cabbages, like pensioners, enjoy the sun.

Pansies purr round their stems.

To turn it into prose, I wrote:

A row of old cabbages sat like pensioners enjoying the sun, while pansies rubbed against their stems like purring cats.

A poem about the immigrant experience, titled “Metamorphosis,” has the lines:

We immigrants lie locked

in tightly-wound cocoons.

When the pain subsides

we will emerge

transformed.

In prose this became:

The immigrant experience is something like the metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly. Locked in tightly-wound cocoons, we slowly take on the coloration of the new country, hoping one day to emerge, transformed.

I felt a twinge of guilt about using my poems in this way. But then I thought, why not? Mozart and Bach did it all the time with their musical themes. It’s another way of making the images new.

by Maureen Eppstein

“Endings are tough to write. Harder than leads by a good bit,” says Andrew Todhunter. Author of several nonfiction books, including the PEN USA Literary Award-winning A Meal Observed, and dozens of articles for national publications including National Geographic, The Atlantic and The Wall Street Journal, Andrew is also a terrific editor and writing coach. He will teach the nonfiction workshop at the 2011 Mendocino Coast Writers Conference.

Andrew has been helping me with my first attempt at memoir, a narrative that weaves together three threads: homage to the role of my late sister, Dame Evelyn Stokes, in restoring Maori land rights in New Zealand; my experience as an expatriate observing changes to  my birth country that result from her work; and my complex relationship with my elder sister.  Not happy with my ending, Andrew sets me a task: “Your ending must magically and subtly summon forth all that energy and feeling, casting our minds back across the journey made, and quietly, without sentiment, transmute or transcend it.” He tells me to reread the endings of eight to ten favorite novels and memoirs. “Study the pacing, the rhythm, what happens to the voice. Take notes on how they work, mechanically, those endings you most admire. Many of the best endings are deeply lyrical and yet almost invisibly so because the language becomes so restrained and quiet and pure.” 

I pull books from the shelf, and in the last page of each, find sentences that sing.

From Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It: "It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.”

Joan Didion, in The Year of Living Dangerously, spoke of small things and large: “Leis go brown, tectonic plates shift, deep currents move, islands vanish, rooms get forgotten.”

Judith Barrington, who lost her parents in a disaster at sea, writes in Lifesaving how a movie that showed a fire at sea from the camera angle of the water dispelled her fantasy of saving her parents. “I knew at last the awful power of the water I would have encountered.”

William Styron, in Darkness Visible, a memoir of madness, quotes Dante: “And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars.”

I turn back to my manuscript, sit with it, meditate on Andrew’s words, and on the powerful story endings I have just read. I remember an anecdote about burying a dead fox that I used in an earlier chapter. I could pull that to the end, I think. A memory comes to mind, the sound of a bell being struck. Could I do something with that? Silently thanking Andrew for his insight, I reach for a pen.