Category: things I’ve learned

A Poetry Handbook, Mary Oliver

*A Poetry Handbook:A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry, Mary Oliver. 1994.

About the Book

Oliver is a contemporary American poet and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. I’ve dipped into a number of books that offer guidance regarding reading and/or writing poetry, but this short (~100 page) book is the first to hold my attention until the end. 

The book marches through the preliminaries quickly. A short introduction takes up the question of which aspects of writing poetry can taught, and which cannot. It is followed by very brief chapters, 2–5 pages each, on preparing to write; reading poetry; and imitation as an approach to learning the craft. Then the book turns to a series of topics taken up in chapters (short, if not as short as the first) like “sound,” “the line,” “forms,” “free verse,” and so on. The strength of the book for me, besides its admirable brevity, is that it uses copious examples to illustrate its discussion. This might turn out to be my favorite book of the year, although since we are only a few weeks in that is a bit rash to say. 

Unsystematic Notes

In what follows I will not attempt a tour of the book as a whole, but will just highlight what I found especially apt for my purposes (which, I will say, are not aimed at producing poetry, per se, but rather at strengthening the lyricism in the essays I write). 

Sound

The first two chapters on topics are on “Sound” and “More Devices of Sound.” These, I think, are my favorite bits of the book, both because I learned a lot, and they are as applicable to lyric essays as to poems. Beginning with the observation that phrases have sonic qualities independent of their semantics (‘Hurry Up’ has a different feel from ‘Slow Down”), she then takes an analytic approach, breaking down letters (or clusters of letters) into groups: vowels and consonants; the consonants further divided into mutes (b, d, k, p, q, t, chard and ghard) and semi-vowels; and the semivowels into aspirates (c, f, g, h, j, s, x), liquids (l, m, n, r); and vocals (v, w, y, z).

All this is drawn from an 1860 grammar book that Oliver had on her shelf. The point I take away is not that all of this is hard and fast, but that it is worth paying attention to the “felt quality of sound” that words have. “Hush” (with aspirates) feels different from “Shut up” (with mutes). “Rock,” with its mute ending, feels different than “stone,” with its liquid ending. Then she goes on to look at the role these sounds play in Robert Frost’s Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening. I don’t resonate with everything she says about the function of sound in this poem, but it offers, for me, a radically different lens which I hope to apply to my own work. 

The next chapter, “More Devices of Sound,” take up multi-word devices. Alliteration, consonance – where both initial and concluding sounds correspond–and assonance, where the vowels echo one another, as in: 

“and land so lightly / and roll back down the mound beside the hole.” 

The chapter also takes up onomatopoeia, repetition, and rhythm.

The Line: Rhythm, length, etc.

After sound the book turns to rhythm, with the chapter on “The Line,” introducing the notion of feet (stress patterns) and line length. The book argues that the iambic stress patterns is most common in English (and thus other patterns sound more “composed”), and that pentameter (five feet) corresponds most naturally the patterns of speech and breathing (in English), and that use of lines longer or shorter (especially when they are breaking a norm established in a verse) have an impact on the reader/listener. They may at times emphasize particular feelings such as surprise or deliberation, or they may simply, by adding variation, make the verse livelier. But for a line’s length or rhythm to have such an effect, the writing must first establish a norm: Here is what Oliver has to say about the effect of rhythm in general:

The reader, as he or she begins to read, quickly enters the rhythmic pattern of a poem. It takes no more than two or three lines for a rhythm, and a feeling of pleasure in that rhythm, to be transferred from the poem to the reader. Rhythm is one of the most powerful of pleasures, and when we feel a pleasurable rhythm we hope it will continue. When it does, the sweet grows sweeter. When it becomes reliable, we are in a kind of body-heaven. Nursery rhymes give this pleasure in a simple and wonderful way. 

—ibid., p. 42)  

Oliver also considers different types of rhymes, and the effect of different types of line breaks (enjambment). These topics interest me less as they are not so applicable to essays. Still, one of Oliver’s concluding comments seems worth bearing in mind with respect to how it might apply to an essay:

Every poem has a basic measure, and a continual counterpoint of differences playing against that measure. Poems that do not offer such variations quickly become boring.

—ibid., p. 56

Other Topics, mainly poetic

The next four chapters discuss, respectively, verse; free verse; diction, tone and voice; and imagery. I found these chapters interesting, but not particularly applicable to my ends. The final three chapters return to process – revision; and workshops vs. solitude – and offer a concluding chapter offering Oliver’s thoughts on how to write and live as a poet. Mostly these did not speak to me, though her comment that poems may suffer from having too much – brilliance, or metaphor, or detail, or… – is worth noting. Pictures need frames; gemstones need settings. 

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Thoughts on “Of Fragments and Segments” by Heidi Czerwiec 

I was ambivalent about this piece. It made me think, but much of the discussion seemed toassume that very personal metaphoric uses of terms like “fragment” and “segment” had some kind of inter-personal validity, …which I doubt they had. But still, it was interesting to think about how (or whether) you break an essay into pieces, and what sort of work that separation does.

Here is the original essay: https://hippocampusmagazine.com/2022/04/craft-of-fragments-and-segments-by-heidi-czerwiec/

Some thoughts:

  • Fragments are natural and respect the object; segmentation/cutting imposes an external / artificial agenda.
    First, the reading of “fragment” as “to break” seems etymologically valid, but the notion that breaking (in fragments) is somehow more violent the cutting (as in segment) is, at least on a physical level, dubious.
    When things break – think about minerals, but it can apply to any material object – they break in accordance with their structures. Often this is because material objects have an intrinsic structure, that includes planes of ‘weakness’ along which they will fracture. When a material object “breaks,” it breaks in the most ‘efficient’ way — it uses the minimal energy to break, and, when it breaks, it is releasing tension that is distorting the structure of the object. In contrast, cutting ignores internal structure, and imposes an external agenda on what is being done. Breaking is true to the structure of the object being broken; cutting ignores that structure, although in some cases, surgery for example, the surgeon may take that into account. 
  • It feels to me like much of the essay is wallowing in metaphor, or at least treating personal metaphors as though they have some kind of agreed-upon interpersonal validity. I’m not convinced that authors who talk about segmentation really have distinct meanings in mind relative to those who talk about fragmentation.
  • The final paragraph seems on the mark to me, but I’m not sure it really follows from the previous material: 

It appears that the more white space – the less “whole” the text appears, the more fragmented, the more visible the breakage – the more charged that space becomes for the reader. That also means more work on the part of the reader. Ultimately, it doesn’t seem to matter whether the reader considers the pieces segments or fragments.

  • The crux of the issue: To me, the crux of the issue is ‘what work does the white space do?’ 
    • Help the reader understand the temporal and topical structure of the text, understanding that the white space is parsing the essay into chunks of some sort?
    • Give the reader time – a beat or two – to assimilate what has been said
    • Signal the reader that it is time to pause and draw meaning from what has been said – that if the dots have not been connected it is now the reader’s turn?
    • Save the author from having to craft an explicit transition from one fragment to the next?
  • Interpretation of Fragments. Mosaics, and collages, and cubist and pointillistic paintings, work because the individual elements can be perceived as wholes, and simultaneously apprehended in parallel to form a larger pattern. Segments of text don’t work this way – interpretation is serial and plays out over cognitively meaningful lengths of time… Re-membering, and re-calling are important, as is the author’s provision of signposts that will help the reader…

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Reflections on Nine Drafts of an Essay

7 March 2024

This evening I had a productive discussion about the process of developing an essay. I was allowed to look through a series of drafts the led to a just-published essay, and discuss the author’s process with the author. Although different people obviously have different processes, it was a great exercise.

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Learning by Answering Questions (Reddit)

TEMP Reddit Journal Entry

Over the last couple of years I’ve become aware of a new way in which I learn things. It is a sort of consolidative learning.

Since I’ve retired, one of my activities has been to learn about geology. That mostly involved taking classes or reading books; occasionally it happens via going on field trips, but those are pretty few and far between. But, over the last few years, I’ve become of a new way I learn things – or perhaps it is better to say consolidate what I already know, or connect the dots…

Geology Subs

It involves reddit, which I visit nearly every morning, in response to the daily email that alerts me to new activities in the subs I follow. These are primarily geology-oriented subs like “whatsthisrock” “askgeology,” and “rockhounds.” Initially I visited because I wanted to get better at identifying field specimens of minerals, and identification requests, and the ensuing discussion, make up a significant portion of the content. After a while, I began weighing in on the debates, and came to recognize areas – such as mafic igeneous rocks – where I had something to contribute.

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Writing Exercises, 1 (From OBE)

I am trying to focus more on applying what I notice in reading essays to my own writing. Here are a set of prospective exercises I’ve generated after re-reading selections from the Oxford Book of Essays with KC :

  • Superposition. Providing differing points of view on the same thing/event/space to convey uncertainty/ambiguity. [cf. The Haunted Mind, Note 3, offers alternate PoVs: Is the sound of the bell from the dream or the world? Is the author is in the space of the dream or are the dream figments in the bedroom?]
  • Minor Key Interlude. A description of a train of thought, or conversation, that in response to some happenstance moves into a minor – dark, distressing, depressing – mode, and then, through more happenstance or perhaps intentional effort, moves back out of it. Attend to the inflection points. [cf. The Haunted Mind, Note s 6 & 7, where hypnagogic turn dark when being swaddled in bedclothes evokes a corpse in a shroud, and then attention to everyday objects serves to vitiate that line of thought].
  • Animated Trajectory through Three-space. Convey the sensation of a 3D environment by allusions to its structure; by agents moving through it; by objects falling and bouncing; by sound. [cf. The Acorn-Gatherer, Note 2, on the rooks moving about in the tree].
  • Persuasion via vivid description and inserting oneself into the scene. Vividness, particularity and layering of detail makes a description more convincing, and then with the describer injects themselves into the scene as describes themselves in the act of seeing and feeling. [cf. The Clergyman (Beerbohm)]
  • Zoom in from Safe Distant Anonymity to Too-Close Intimate Proximity. Zoom in on people interacting. Begin with a comfortable distant overview (e.g. momentary distant glimpses), and then zoom in to show the fine-structure of intimate and not-entirely-easy interaction, whether wanted or not (e.g. continuous up-close eye-contact). (cf. Insouciance.)

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EP #3*: Favorites from Best American Essays of the 20thC

Thursday, 25 August 2022

My favorites from the Best American Essays of the 20th Century:
The Brown Wasps, Loren Eisley – 1956
Perfect Past, Vladimir Nabokov – 1966
Stickeen, John Muir – 1909
The Search for Marvin Gardens, John McPhee – 1972
Total Eclipse, Annie Dillard – 1982

And essays which weren’t quite favorites, but which I found instructive:
Pamplona in July, Ernest Hemingway, 1923
Putting Daddy On, Tom Wolfe, 1964  
The White Album, Joan Didion, 1970

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Things I learned from the 2021 Loft Essay course

16 August 2021

Things to pay attention to:

  • Telling details: One telling detail is preferable to many details
  • Embodiment. Emotions and actions work best when embodied: gaze, gesture, posture, proprioception, proxemics
  • Scenes. Scenes should vary in length, and be interleaved with summaries. This gives rhythm and weighting. Think of a scene as a spotlight. 
  • Language: avoid ‘to be’s. Avoid “is” “are” “have” etc. and limit use of adjectives. 
    “To be” is the weakest verb. Not “He is tall” but “He smacked his head on the door frame”
  • Language: avoid distancing: Avoid habitually using filtering/distancing language such as “I noticed,” “I heard,” “I saw,”  
    (That said, sometimes you may want to use it to distance yourself, as when you are uncomfortable and don’t want to be in it.) 
  • Language: avoid adverbs. Use actions and embodiment rather than adverbs:
    “Yeah,” she said, stroking his bare arm, “that’s what I heard.” vs. “Yeah,” she said gently, “that’s what I heard.”
  • Support reader inference. There is something about readers being able to figure something out on their own that is very rewarding.
  • Revising Tricks: Print it out in a different font. Read it out loud and notice where you stumble, speed up, lag, etc. Replace “to be’s”

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The Checklist Manifest, Atwul Gwande

15-Sept-2011

The book discusses the use of checklists, both in the author’s domain of surgery, and in other domains such as aircraft piloting and construction management. It makes and documents claims about the ability of checklists to significantly, and sometimes radically, reduce errors and increase success rates.

I see three main lessons in the book, one obvious, and the other two less obvious.

The Obvious Lesson

The first and obvious lesson is that checklists can serve as a powerful tool for buttressing unaided human cognition. Even experts are prone to forgetting or overlooking steps in task, and using checklists can make a massive difference in the quality and valence of a task’s outcome.

But on the other hand, as example after example in the book showed, the items on the checklists that are making such a difference are obvious. For example, in the pilot’s checklist for what to do during “Engine Failure,” the second item – in large print ­– is “Fly the airplane.” Similarly, in checklists used in hospital, checklist items are things like “Confirm that the patient has verified his identity,” and “Confirm that all team members have introduced themselves by name and role.” Checklists are not being used to keep track of complicated things, or hard to remember things, or things that their users don’t know well.

The Important and Easily-missed Lessons

Instead, checklists are being used to ensure a group is working together in an effective way. Checklists are being used as scaffolding to support group processes, not so much individual cognition. This brings us to the second and third lessons I took from the book (lessons which I do not think were emphasized nearly enough): checklists are used as part of a shared, social practice rather than as a solitary tool.

The second lesson is that going through a checklist was a group activity, and it is this collective activity that leads the group to reflect on and prepare for the group’s task; it also facilitated (“activated”) later communication within the group and appears to have increased group affinity and commitment. This effect is explicitly invoked in checklists that highlight communicative activities (“the submittal schedule” — who should talk with whom about what and by when) rather than instrumental activities.

The third lesson is that when a checklist is adopted as an organizationally-sanctioned activity, it has a side effect of requiring that the organization’s infrastructure, on-hand resources, and staffing be configured to enable the checklist to be successfully executed. This function was facilitated, in one deployment of checklists, by making an on-site executive part of the team responsible for deploying checklists. The executive was able to reconfigure the organization’s supply base so that needed materials were on hand, and further was able to persuade a supplier to package materials needed to execute the checklist together. Thus, ultimately, the checklist worked to reconfigure the organization and its supply chain.

Details

page 7-10. Philosophers essay on errors distinguishes between errors of ignorance and errors of ineptitude. The first seem more forgivable than the second, but in the context of performance of complex activities under time pressure. the latter seem inevitable.

page x. A patient in an intensive care unit undergoes 178 procedures a day.

page 38. Using a checklist to make sure 4 steps were carried out reduced the 10-day line infection rate from 11% to 0. Other examples showed reductions from 41% to 3% for untreated pain, and 70% to 4% in improper procedures for those on mechanical ventilators (resulting in a 25% decrease in cases of pneumonia).

page 43-44. In the Keystone initiative, getting project manager and executive participation in checklist roll out was key. Executives made sure that the required chlorhexidine soap was available (previously it was available in only 1/3 of the ICUs), and that required sterile drapes were stocked. After a while, the supplier of lines was persuaded to produce a kit that had both the soap and drapes in it.

page 46. In a checklist deployment to hospitals to reduce cardiac arrest fatalities, checklists were deployed to first responders (rescue squad personnel) and first coordinators (hospital operators) even though they were the least powerful. This enabled the organization to prepare by being alerted ahead of time and mustering the needed skills.

pages 65-68. The building construction checklist of both instrumental tasks (put together by 16 disciplines and looked over by subcontractors), and communications activities (“the submittal list” – who talks to whom when about what). By ensuring that the right people are charged with talking at the right time, you radically lower the need for a single person to understand all the details of what is going on.

pages 76-80. Walmart and Katrina and empowering store owners. And Van Halen and brown M&M story as a procedural integrity check.

pages 95-97. The Proctor and Gamble soap in India study. The use of soap was made more systematic, and more pleasant.

pages 99-100: “Cleared for Takeoff” checklist for ensuring timely administration of pre-operative antibiotics. A mechanical forcing function (a metal tent stenciled with “cleared for takeoff over the scalpel that served as both a prompt and a legitimation of the nurse’s role in the process. Increase in proper antibiotic administration went from 60% to 89% (3 months) to 100% (10 months).

page 103. “‘That’s not my problem,’ is probably the worst thing people can think, whether they are starting an operation, taxiing an airplane full of passengers down the runway, or building a thousand-Foot skyscraper. But in medicine, we see it all the time.”

pages 107-110. Introductions among team members increase team affinity and empower lower status members to speak up. “When nurses were given a chance to say their names and mention concerns at the beginning of an operation, they were more likely to note problems and mention solutions.” Employee satisfaction rose 19% and OR nurse turnover went from 23% to 7%

page 120. Good vs. bad checklists. Would be nice to know more about this, rather than the obvious and rather sloganish comments in the book. …Nice point about getting leadership to adopt checklists first.

pages 154-155: WHO Safe Surgery Checklist results. Double-digit reductions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOGJMOMHDJk

http://www.safesurg.org/uploads/1/0/9/0/1090835/surgical_safety_checklist_production.pdf

page 177. Item 1 on the checklist: “Fly the airplane.” … “The checklist gets the dumb stuff out of the way, the routines your brain shouldn’t have to occupy itself with.”

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