hall and of course to tom ron and mary jane for establishing the sunday poetry series i've viewed a few of the videos the videos of some of the previous lectures  and they're wonderful and i think it adds a lot to the conversation about literature in vermont and time or didn't tell you but the lectures will be gathered together after the last ones given in to an an and so i spent a lot of time writing this lecture and i will be reading it rather than delivering it extemporaneously and it'll be about forty minutes in total about ten to twelve minutes reading poems and another thirty talking about them and talking about my subject which is i guess it's supposed to be the art of concealing and revealing and poetry and so i'll begin you have the poems at hand and i'll stop and i'll read a few of them and i'll ask for volunteers to read a few of the longer ones the art of concealing and revealing in poetry our great grandparents of american poetry emily dickinson and walt whitman gave us conflicting advice about poetic craft dickinson famous for her compressed metaphoric sometimes cryptic lyrics advised poets to tell it slant she said tell all the truth but tell it slant where is whitman the poet of expansive journalistic detail and robust narrative told us more or less to tell it straight our grand forebears then have set us on a course ever since tacking between what i'll call lines of poetry that conceal and lines that reveal i wish i could say that the verbs conceal and reveal lead to their nominative their noun forms concealment and revelation but it's not accurate since both methods one that conceals and one that reveals may equally produce revelation or obfuscation for instance perhaps the apparently straightforward might take a straight to the heart of revelation or to paraphrase emily dickinson sometimes the truth is too bright for human eyes in the truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind but generally generally though i'm sure you can all think of one hundred exceptions to the rule we can offer the following proposition poems that tell it slant that is poems of concealment often have at their heart a secret a difficulty a terror a suppressed desire an embarrassment and enchantment that only slowly and with great resistance or great slyness comes to light and conversely the poem that openly reveals itself often overtly aspires to revelation or at least to telling it all telling it expansively with great heart heat in spirit the former poem of concealment is often lyric analogic meaning its metaphorical fragmentary or otherwise experimental in form shifting time frames or perspectives for instance while the latter poem that overtly reveals itself is often narrative conversational straightforward in its exposition and more traditional in its unfolding for many poets including myself we could probably locate both types of poems in there after all poetic form and by form i mean all of the elements of craft that are marshalled to produce a specific effect of thought or feeling on the reader all of these should change depending upon the goal of this specific poem at hand at least this should be so for free verse poem in which as robert  form is never more than an extension of content and his friend and fellow poet denise leverage of corrected him form is never more than a revelation of content how does it do this how does it in the long form deploy not only stances and lines and line breaks but also sounds in rhythms rhetoric and diction to achieve all it hopes to achieve let's take a look at several poems that i will that will i hope reveal to us what is sometimes concealed the craft that underlies it undergirds the magic because the sundog lecture series is based in vermont i've decided to use mostly poems by vermont authors to make my point and perhaps it's easiest to begin with one's own poems because at least to some extent one knows or thinks he knows or remembers the triggering impulses that lead to the poems first cadence phrases and subsequently lead to decisions about how the poem unfolds in unpacks its content either disarming conversational and straightforward or with considerable resistance contradiction a researcher and overall obstruction of meaning in my case i'd like to look at two poems from my third book this far from the source a book largely set in vermont these two particular poems offer i think contrast in methods of composition one whose poetic maneuvers overtly favor concealment and the other who poetic preferences seem to favor over it narration and so now we're going to take a look first the more difficult poem while we're still fresh the poem of concealment told we and so you can read along with me as i read we pee wee's under the eaves it song wheezy or than phoebe's both of them inside my head i think they use the same nest just as cat bird and thrasher are wheezy or than mockingbird just as mothers we see are and sister father more mocking than his sons it's hell in full sunlight to see things out of the shade glaring hurtful to the eyes as magic gas come from the bedrooms first sisters then mothers where father flies between them little competitions border songs and nesting sites and who's to bed with whom i see it clearly now lower the field glasses and listen listen hard yes he's singing to a mocking song to keep his sons from the breeding ground flitting between two nests for all he's worth flitting mocking to keep  so what's his poem about and if it's cryptic why is it cryptic often as i noted above the poems form is related to its content in the case of this poem the content is about possible incest in the family something half remembered or only surfacing in memory as the poems protagonists in the midst of birding lowers the field glasses he's using to look outwardly to identify birds flashing around him and suddenly he sees in interior scene flashing in his memory imagine an imagination he doesn't seem to be able to look at it directly as he says it's glaring hurtful to the eyes it's something like bird movement that one sees best out of what we call the corner of the eye in any case the protagonist resistance to seeing his father's incestuous behavior straight on is mirrored by the poetic technique one the lines in stanzas are fairly chiseled in tight keeping things tamp down in place and secondly the emotionally volatile subject matter incest let's call it the primary subject matter is engaged in a very limited way through the secondary subject matter bird behavior in particular nesting in meeting behavior in other words the poet comes at the uncomfortable material through analogy and inference telling it slant rather than through straightforward narrative exploration and exposition but as i noted above just because a poem favors methods of concealment doesn't mean that it might not end in revelation and indeed here it does i hope the speaker in this poem we s seems to come to some understanding of this past his father's sexually competitive behavior with the son and possible incestuous behavior with his daughter looking back at this poem written a decade or more ago i see how the poet a younger version of some version of myself came at the poem and poetic revelation as much by sound as by sight finding the site to glaring he remembers instead a sound the sound of his magic gasps apparently both sister and mother have asthma and father races between them perhaps ministering to their needs but that asthmatic gas also has an uncomfortably close sound cousin in the gasp of sex and before the human we we've been listening to we see bird calls with weasely name birds pee wee and phoebe's and thinking about how some birds have rather intrusive nesting behaviors and habits so this confusion of calls and nesting sites mixes with the confusion of roles and who's to bed with hume whom in the human habitat finally from the adult perspective our poet birder lowers the field glasses and listens listens hard and as you would say the revelation is at hand he suspects is father of incest and he remembers hears his father's mocking song whether literal or metaphoric we're not told but it's a song that now from this distance seems designed to have kept his sons from the breeding ground and has in some way undercut their ability to grow fully into their adult masculin the speaker concludes that he is in a state of arrested development and development to keep us fledglings always always this is hard to admit both the possible incestuous violations in the household as well as the ongoing emasculation the speaker feels because of his father's illicit actions so the technique of the poem favors concealment in direction and analogy over candid straightforward disclosure ok so by contrast the second poem we're going to read which is called teenager nineteen seems like an open book a youthful confession and much of it is but not all i'll go to my second water i have three bottles down here douse himself in brute and but not would we gather our cotton underwear and hands that had no no harvest parade across campus waving them like flags or clouds or dreams drifting toward our future or was it their panties we were after to snatch from clotheslines tumbling dryers open drawers or that barely imaginable triangle where radars jammed and things went wildly off course this stiff wind held far off towns and clouds gunmetal gray as dusk closed over when finally we will read of it bursting flashlights powering holes in the night sky ready to divvy up whatever loot we'd find when it short we were strapped in ready for the long ride to manhood or wherever we thought we were going the leaders relayed t change in plans the radio news that monks had wrapped themselves and robes of flames and soldiers wrapped in body bags were flying home and now this this rumor grown to legends and legend to life until we all tasted metal in our mouths and something else hot and desperate and large undeniably among us that was not us alone and four names were on our tongues for names as we marched away from our teens and toward that strange country called twenty and as for me a fifth name was on the wind that night a name marching toward me across the college green  candle cupped in her small hands and whether i got in her panties that night i cannot say for the wind was up and the rain came down and we cupped our candles for all we were worth trying to keep that guttering flame going as long as we could for the four dead and ohio so unlike the other poem we s which is lyric and metaphorical in style teenager nineteen is straightforwardly narrative and often literal  free verse alternating between ten and twelve syllables in the beginning going to fourteen to sixteen syllables later on it's very long lined unrolling the story unlike weeds which is very chiseled the poem opens with initial contract with the reader seems to promise inaccessible amusing light hearted tale but i hope part of the success of this poem resides in its sudden and yet well prepared shift in tone and focus from the comic to the tragic from the personal to the political the results of which deliver a lesson to the protagonist in terms of the relative value of what's important in life as noted above the poem is mostly literal in its description but a few pieces of detail in the first half of the poem are will coiled and i hope spring open in the second half of the poem for instance the roommate who do himself and brut him by naca anticipates the monks who wrap themselves in robes of flame and the boys cotton underwear that they wave like flags or clouds or dreams drifting toward their future  resonance in the poem second half with the soldiers wrapped in body bags and finally the sexual radars that cause things to jam and go wildly off course under the clouds gunmetal gray anticipates the deaths from the vietnam war and the kent state killings and the poem second half undergirding it all is the question what is it to achieve manhood and to mature into an adult world that contains both sex and  in the midst of this rather straightforward narrative there are meaningful pockets of resistance if not outright concealment the most obvious being near poems and when the narrator says whether i got in your panties that night i cannot say in the antic hormonal mood of the poems first half the narrator sexual desires and exploits take center stage and readers might expect the climax of the plot to reveal his personal success with the panty ra but of course the plot has been altered by the events of the poem second half and now it is almost irrelevant to know how the narrator is personal conquest turned out its importance pales in the face of the larger historical moment they've suddenly found themselves in so the poet if i can remember back at all to the decisions i made in tooth two thousand and five or so a decade ago the poet chooses to conceal this information notice that's concealment in a poem that otherwise favors overt disclosure i should also note that there is quite a bit of metaphorical language in this poem especially after the literal narrative beginning and the literal narrative and then which details are rather straight forward so i guess the province of the analogical the metaphor is not only reserved for poems of concealment but the nature of these metaphors in teenager nineteen does favor revelation rather than concealment they set up the second half of the poem as i've already suggested the metaphors of sex as jamming radars or underwear is flags or clouds that are gun metal gray or even the troop of teenage boys being strapped in and ready for the long ride to manhood and ready to power holes in the night sky all work to help the reader and to spit the sudden shift to the vietnam war and the kent state killings in the  half as the poet tony hoagland has said of metaphors some of them an act of clarifying purpose he calls it a social purpose which is to further refine for readers the literal level of the poem and hoagland cites the poems of bill matthews conversely hoagland says other metaphors take the reader further away from the literal action the literal story in the poem and they lead us in a new sometimes mystifying sometimes more interior and private direction further from the initial narrative into what hoagland believes is a more anti social vision and he cites the poems of larry levis here hoagland's model i'd say that in teenager nineteen the metaphors and act as social purpose that is after all the poem wants to engage a historical moment that many americans remember and about which they feel strongly and the poet wishes to reveal to clarify and share it perhaps the grandest act of the sharing in the poem to my way of thinking is when the language goes symbolic and mythic where he says something hot and desperate and large undeniably among us that was not us alone which tries to place this event in its largest historical and universal context and it references and us that was not us alone which clearly invites the reader into the poems occasion ok let's turn to now a couple of poems written by other vermont poets other than one and i'm going to we're going to get to one by martha's y and one by hayden karoo thing and i want to look at a few sections of kreutz magnificent poem called marshall washer which all vermonters should know by heart it's about an old time farmer he befriends right here in johnson vermont where lived for twenty years and i've chosen a rather long excerpt about three sections of it it's an ode to farming and so i'm going to ask for other people to read this while i cut a break here there are three sections more or less all of section one and part of section two and part of section four and so maybe we could have three readers will this be able to be picked up by the the mikes ok who would like to read the first section ok this fellow who would like to read the second ok over there fine so and then the third one close it ok great so we have three readers and we'll have the mike specially scurrying between you as as we go and this poem it's called marshall washer as you wish but you want to stand next to the microphone the microphone is right beside you following you ok thanks it's a wonderful poem isn't it and that's only two and a half sections of a six section poem you owe it to yourself to go find the other three and a half sections i believe that equals six yes ok so obviously this is a poem that reveals rather than conceals concealment would leave us with some nostalgic romanticized image of those red bar and so admired as emblems but cru once nothing to do with the emblematic he wants to strip away concealments and show us the unvarnished truth he says but let me tell you how it is inside those parents like whitman caruso offers copious detail in section one with a kind of journalistic precision caruso reports about cows cow barns cow shit and cow shit farmers and notice how crude treats them collectively generically as they these new englanders are farmers at this point he's sort of further away from them and then in section two he shifts to a more personal specific observations about his farmer friend marshall washer first marshall's appearance and daily actions on the farm second his speech in other words first karoo thin gauges cite the phrase i see a man is repeated three times in the first fourteen lines weaving the site based imagery together and then second crude engages sound specifically language marshall's unusual look q sions and karun poetic interest in them the purpose of these copious details is to make farming the physical physical sensation of it from its backbreaking labor to its overpowering smells the language of it the unending routine of it available to readers who are not farmers further proof is aware that martial washers way of life is endangered fading out and he wants to preserve it at least in a poem for future generations he wants us to understand the bond eternal between room and land  and to understand how a throwaway derogatory phrase like how shit farmer can under the right conditions where there is a poet spokesman become a moniker of respect and a thing of absolute importance i suspect that caruso who can write a very tight lyric poem when he wants to chose this rather straightforward long lined form because he wanted to honor marshall washer himself who would be a pragmatic no nonsense straight shooter given to long hours of labor for all of straightforward description of the farming life there are acts of concealment in a poem and this poem for instance though there's a wealth of outwood just scription about marshall what he looks like and the manner in which he expertly performs each day's farming chores there is less dialogue usually just a few phrases that establish marshall's rootedness in the past he says i didn't mind it for i didn't noticed it dreamed for drained and many other from mill year look you sions but i have looked them up they are in the dictionary standard speech of last times he is rooted in history as in the land if there is limited dialog there's even less character and now asus that inner x exploration of a man's psychic terrain i'm sure this concealment is on purpose and purposeful as crude says at the end of section two i see a man falling asleep at night with thoughts in dreams i could not infer and would not if i could in his chair in front of the television and notice that while crude tells us what he sees i see a man falling asleep in his chair also tells us for the first time what he cannot see thoughts in dreams i could not infer so there's a consumer at there and again at the end of section four he says yet never did marshall say the thought that was closest to him privacy is what this is not read to since not minding one's own business but a positive sense of the secret inner man the secret identity and so concealment of marshall's secret inner man occurs both because it honors marshall's desire for privacy and because caruso would have had to invent and perhaps err in inventing what he did not know what we know of martial we know from a wealth of external detail the same detail available to crude himself to mull over and make our evaluations of this farmer based on his actions more than his  words we're just going to have time to do one more poem rather than the three i had left and this is going to be the one i told you about it's by martha is why and i want to contra with caruso a poem written right here in johnson vermont with martha's wax poem who lives just down the road a piece in hardwick vermont and her poem is called dictum it's a tight short line three stanza poem which i originally published in the green mountains review a literary magazine i edited for a quarter century and it's somewhat the norm from arthur is why here it is in its entirety dictum this morning i find written on my stones the laws of happiness no runes plain english truly my meadow but i'll tell you to that's one no fool you know already just how these teasers run they take themselves back and leave you exactly as before but in the shimmering vic you ity so you won't mind that the next one says read your own stones and that the third there are always three says just before it does we vanish so i think that martha's y definitely tells its slant in fact for a long time now i've called her the emily dickinson of hardwick vermont and she delivers her delights in a wisdoms in a way that as is almost over before it starts before the reader can blink or think to render a guess at the riddles fiercely idiosyncratic and private martha's wired tells us in essence to go find their own damn riddles and the answers to them we know the formula she says no fool you know already just how these teasers run but each iteration of it is individual nevertheless she's willing to throw us a bone or a stone of commonality a common the little good it does us to know it it's a wheat a stone perhaps it's as well to conceal rather than to reveal it or to reveal it gradually so what poetic maneuvers does is why use to mirror the poems content how does her form reveal or conceal the content here where we could point to the brevity of the lines in the stanzas we could point to the line breaks themselves several of which are in jammed and jam and so are run on lines suspended and they create suspense and uncertainty in incompleteness since the resolution of the thought with semantic sense the meaning must wait until the next line and from the poem's opening line there's already suspense and suspension she says this morning i find written on my line break right and the completion of that phrase in line two though it completes the thought might still be mystifying written on my stone it's not exactly the noun we might have anticipated and then we're further surprised and delighted by what's written on them nothing short of the laws of happiness two lines into the poem and we're already immersed in a realm that seems enchanted and mysterious as i've said a poet's diction word choice also contributes to mood of open access or concealment martha's wags third line offers the word rooms an ancient word that suggests unreadability and concealment its etymology goes back to old norse and old english and i mean secret mystery hidden more but she negates it by saying no rooms and then plain english so perhaps she's already offering us a chance to participate in riddles and mysteries everyone should be able to decode the laws of happiness if they're written in plain english of course the difficulty is in discovering our own stones in our own meadow and therefore our own riddles and answers again zweig is highly idiosyncratic and she suggests that the laws of happiness are an individual rather than a collective affair perhaps that's why the two in jan mince and stanza one feature the first person pronoun my and i'll write and the two markers of personal ownership are my stones and my meadow or if not ownership at least a personal relationship to place objects in materiality his wife says that the laws of happiness are written on her stones in her meadow but i'll tell you to that's one and i said as i said earlier the poem and its meaning seems to zip by before we can comprehend it on the one hand we're happy for this social moment and which is why promises to tell us something important the loss of happiness but then it seems we've missed what she was about to reveal to us she says that's one one want what revelation did we just miss and so we must double back and figure out what advice she might have given us she won't tell us the specific laws she says go find a but instead she will infer the general principles that the laws of happiness seem to be specific to each individual this is at the heart of dictum the individual nature of mystery as well as the in an inevitable answer to all riddles we have an s and vanish and perhaps this is the reason for her obliquity each of us must do our own work and discover happiness on our own terms and given the time i will have to stop there i had many more things to tell you but if you just take a look at david horowitz poem verses marianne salman's you'll note that huddles seems to be the one that reveals itself up front and marianne salmon is a very mysterious and difficult poet maybe a very happy to end here so i'll take questions after that after this thanks well she's you know i mean the dictum is is it's usually something that is given to us as a statement as something that we're supposed to be given as a pronouncement and what she seems to be pronouncing it's more difficult  would suggest that which is going to tell us something straight up and easily accessible and it isn't i think i mean i think over repeated readings you get the sense that what she's talking about is the individual nature of the laws of happiness and that each of us in our own meadow has our own stones which if we can just read them will give us the loss of happiness that is her dictum but she comes at it you know slant  dickinson sess and i think martha for many reasons does that this particular poem i guess i would say asked for it it's a it's a real poem and i think she is being a little deceptive poems they were published as poems but they also they all which one in particular i mean they all partake of some of the elements of poetry from heightened language to imagery to they've been trying to answer the question what is poetry for several thousand five thousand years or you know starting with and you get our sporadic writing about what a poem is going back to the ancient chinese and through the greeks and romans and so forth so lots of people from aristotle onward to surf ellipse sydney to you know to pope and onward to our twentieth century with eliot and pound and you know every generation tries to revisit that question what is a poem why is  poem and it has something to do with mystery and you know there are things you can talk about like the elements of craft whether it has imagery in metaphor and some kind of sound r and whether it evokes a feeling but there are some other parts that are harder to talk about you know what is the how does it enact some kind of mystery or spirit moves us as emily dickinson said a poem or should i know a poem when it takes the top of my head office at how she said it and i say it's usually when it makes my socks fall down or wiggle around my ankles but so there's a visceral feeling to a poem i think and you know some of the best poems are in pros i'll either take it out the next draft or you can write that  journalistic style like a whitman poem or a narrative poem like you know like frost or b h fairchild or sid liza or david huddles i mean there are a lot of narrative writers david but bill and jude divine there are many narrative writers in this state and then the question there is to how many details or too many details what are they doing in the poem it's an individual choice yeah yeah and there and the plants did change the weather i met that that girl across campus is probably an invention and you know i think you start if you're doing autobiographical detail at all  it changes over time for me the the design of a poem asks certain things that i didn't start out to accomplish and you know we start with a story that we have but it may not be equal to the task of of compelling pomo as you start looking at the way the images are going and even this the sounds of the poem you may change things if you're writing in rhyme the end words might might you know announce themselves to you but always there's some other kind of thematic and artistic purpose that i think starts to you know announce itself and sometimes override whatever the autobiographical details are  well over with their first draft i think it's i i can't remember back to the initial draft but as it appears as it is it you know is now and certainly starts out as a panty raid poem and then gradually shifts in tone and really in tone and texture to a much more serious poem about the vietnam war and the kent state and you know i think however it started i at some point found the plan of the poem you know it wouldn't do to you know start with the kent state killings and then go back to panty raid right i mean what a horrible person that that person would be so it worked better the other way