Forms of Feeling Poetry in Our Lives
Nonfiction by John Morgan
Salmon Poetry, June 2012
ISBN-13: 978-1-907056-91-8
Paperback: 166pp; $21.95
Review by Cheryl Wright-Watkins in New Pages, September, 2012
This book is ostensibly an essay collection, but poet and creative writing teacher John Morgan has also filled the pages with poems, biographical information, journal entries, book reviews, interviews, and reading and writing instruction. These various elements within the same volume combine to create an intimate portrait of the poet and his spirituality, teaching methods, family life, writing practice, and interactions with nature and place.
Morgan’s credentials include a BA from Harvard, where he studied with Robert Lowell, an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop, and several prestigious literary awards and fellowships; however, despite his impressive accomplishments, Morgan frequently reveals his humility, exalting the book’s veracity and the writer’s authority. For instance, in the essay “Why I Am Not a Novelist,” in which he explains his arrival at poetry after two failed attempts to write novels: “You see before you no superhero—just an ordinary, striving, fatherly, husbandly figure, trying somewhat bumblingly to make his way.”
In this expansive portrayal of a poet, his life, and his work, the reader understands that for Morgan, poetry is a way of life. He reveals how writing poetry has helped him emotionally deal with several difficult events, including his wife’s miscarriage. He includes three of the twenty-four sonnets he wrote in response to his son’s sudden, serious, chronic illness to demonstrate the “true sonnet feel of powerful emotions being controlled by form.” He explains his affinity for poetry: “Poems are like messages in bottles hurled into the sea from a cliff and we may never know when one reaches some distant shore and is taken into a reader’s heart.”
Morgan shows a number of his poems in various stages of revision, explaining in detail how and why he made particular changes. He generously shares his philosophy about poetry and includes detailed accounts of his writing process, quoting classic and modern poets as well as his own original work. As a bonus, he suggests several writing exercises.
One of the most instructive essays is a close reading exercise. The essay opens with William Stafford’s poem “Traveling Through the Dark,” which Morgan recommends reading several times before beginning the exercise—a reading guide composed of twelve questions, followed by Morgan’s expansive answers to these questions. These questions encourage the reader to examine word choices, tone, mood, sensory details. I’ve never studied poetry, but I found this exercise helpful to my creative nonfiction writing.
Morgan confesses that during the four years he spent writing his failed novels, he took LSD on two occasions, the second time two weeks after the first. He describes the experiences in explicit, agonizing detail—the terror, hallucinations, physical collapse, and the fear that his mind wouldn’t find its way back. This event becomes a metaphor for the shift in Morgan’s writing focus from novels and fiction to poetry: he converts a short story to a poem, finding his way back, as his mind found its way back from the LSD trip, to the practice of poetry.
Morgan’s letters and journal entries chronicle his journey from his childhood in a Jewish family in New York City to teacher of creative writing graduate students at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Much of his writing focuses on his strong sense of place and his relationship with Alaska, demonstrated in the two book reviews—one on a book about the catastrophic Exxon-Valdez oil spill and the other on a collection of Koyukon Indian tales. Morgan ends the book with a passage about the importance of place, “the most profound use of which is as a metaphor for the self in its deepest, meditative self-knowing. All places used in this way are mythological and reach between people, across decades, across continents.”
This unique book appeals to a diverse audience. Writers of all genres will find the book informative and instructive as well as entertaining.
Nonfiction by John Morgan
Salmon Poetry, June 2012
ISBN-13: 978-1-907056-91-8
Paperback: 166pp; $21.95
Review by Cheryl Wright-Watkins in New Pages, September, 2012
This book is ostensibly an essay collection, but poet and creative writing teacher John Morgan has also filled the pages with poems, biographical information, journal entries, book reviews, interviews, and reading and writing instruction. These various elements within the same volume combine to create an intimate portrait of the poet and his spirituality, teaching methods, family life, writing practice, and interactions with nature and place.
Morgan’s credentials include a BA from Harvard, where he studied with Robert Lowell, an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop, and several prestigious literary awards and fellowships; however, despite his impressive accomplishments, Morgan frequently reveals his humility, exalting the book’s veracity and the writer’s authority. For instance, in the essay “Why I Am Not a Novelist,” in which he explains his arrival at poetry after two failed attempts to write novels: “You see before you no superhero—just an ordinary, striving, fatherly, husbandly figure, trying somewhat bumblingly to make his way.”
In this expansive portrayal of a poet, his life, and his work, the reader understands that for Morgan, poetry is a way of life. He reveals how writing poetry has helped him emotionally deal with several difficult events, including his wife’s miscarriage. He includes three of the twenty-four sonnets he wrote in response to his son’s sudden, serious, chronic illness to demonstrate the “true sonnet feel of powerful emotions being controlled by form.” He explains his affinity for poetry: “Poems are like messages in bottles hurled into the sea from a cliff and we may never know when one reaches some distant shore and is taken into a reader’s heart.”
Morgan shows a number of his poems in various stages of revision, explaining in detail how and why he made particular changes. He generously shares his philosophy about poetry and includes detailed accounts of his writing process, quoting classic and modern poets as well as his own original work. As a bonus, he suggests several writing exercises.
One of the most instructive essays is a close reading exercise. The essay opens with William Stafford’s poem “Traveling Through the Dark,” which Morgan recommends reading several times before beginning the exercise—a reading guide composed of twelve questions, followed by Morgan’s expansive answers to these questions. These questions encourage the reader to examine word choices, tone, mood, sensory details. I’ve never studied poetry, but I found this exercise helpful to my creative nonfiction writing.
Morgan confesses that during the four years he spent writing his failed novels, he took LSD on two occasions, the second time two weeks after the first. He describes the experiences in explicit, agonizing detail—the terror, hallucinations, physical collapse, and the fear that his mind wouldn’t find its way back. This event becomes a metaphor for the shift in Morgan’s writing focus from novels and fiction to poetry: he converts a short story to a poem, finding his way back, as his mind found its way back from the LSD trip, to the practice of poetry.
Morgan’s letters and journal entries chronicle his journey from his childhood in a Jewish family in New York City to teacher of creative writing graduate students at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Much of his writing focuses on his strong sense of place and his relationship with Alaska, demonstrated in the two book reviews—one on a book about the catastrophic Exxon-Valdez oil spill and the other on a collection of Koyukon Indian tales. Morgan ends the book with a passage about the importance of place, “the most profound use of which is as a metaphor for the self in its deepest, meditative self-knowing. All places used in this way are mythological and reach between people, across decades, across continents.”
This unique book appeals to a diverse audience. Writers of all genres will find the book informative and instructive as well as entertaining.
***
Morgan's new book delves deep into
the heart of the poet
by Libbie Martin / Book Review
Fairbanks Daily News Miner, Dec. 23, 2012
FAIRBANKS — Often, when I meet non-writers,
they have the same question: Where do you get your ideas? I have to admit, I
kinda hate that question, partly because it’s so cliché, but mostly because I
never have a pithy or snarky answer on the tip of my tongue. Maybe it’s because
I spend so much time trying to get the words out of my head and onto paper
before they’re lost forever — there are always so many words in there I fear
I’ll never catch them all — that I don’t have time to stare into my navel
wondering from whence they come.
Thank the universe for John Morgan. One of Alaska’s premier poets, Morgan’s
new book, “Forms of Feeling: Poetry in Our Lives, Essays and Interviews,”
explores the whole notion of where the words come from, how they get into
our heads and how we use them to maneuver through life.
From the back cover blurb: “Poetry gives form to our feelings and helps us
come to terms with them. Facing a personal crisis, a poem can be the
beginning of healing. But if poems are good in a crisis, they are also a way of
reaching out for new experiences and renewing our lives.”
A combination of narrative, personal essays, letters, and poetry, Forms of Feeling
is an illuminating look into the way a poet’s mind works. Divided into four sections:
“Poetry in our Lives,” “Becoming A Poet,” “Feeling Into Forms,” and “A Poet in
His Place,” the book explores Morgan’s growth as a poet, from his days at the
Robert Lowell Writing Seminar to his life in Alaska, his experiments with
mind-altering drugs (not a good trip) to his son’s devastating illness. Morgan
takes us through the wild ride that turned him from a novelist to a poet with an
incredible eye for detail and imagery.
In the chapter titled “Firstlings,” Section 2, Morgan details how he went from
wanna-be fossil hunter (“once I’d retired from playing first-base for the Brooklyn
Dodgers") to poet. It all began in junior high, he recalls, ninth grade, to be
specific. His voice had changed, girls seemed more interested in showing off their
clothes than actually wanting to spend time with him on dates, and hormonal
mood swings and identity issues ruled the day. “My main extra-curricular activity
was the science club.”
An English assignment led him to Dylan Thomas’ “Fern Hill,” and he spent
hours listening to the recording, trying to “imitate Dylan Thomas’ stirring
delivery.” After that, he picked up a “fat Louis Untermeyer anthology” of
British and American poetry, working his way from Chaucer to Eliot, learning
about style, alliteration, rhythm, and other poetical flair.
Morgan writes: “The first poem I ever wrote spilled over from the reading
and from my muddled emotional life. It described a wild team of galloping
horses — not a subject I knew much about firsthand, but of course
the point was symbolic. The apocalyptic horses were compared to a racing heart
and stood in my mind for death and for sexual passion, and the rhythm tried to
imitate their thunderous headlong rush. Putting it through several revisions
allowed me to relive the experience of creating the poem in the first place and
the whole process gave me something to do with my turbulent feelings, which
otherwise threatened to run away with me like those galloping horses.”
Morgan shows, in this one paragraph, what makes him such a good
poet — he doesn’t just write a poem and call it good. He works on his poems for
long periods of time, re-writing and revising, striking whole parts and
substituting other images — pulling from the landscape, his life, his past, his
copious reading of the classics and other poets, until it becomes a piece that
only he could have written. And he revels in the revising, unlike many poets —
myself included — who see revising and rewriting as a necessary chore to get
through. Morgan enjoys every single piece of the puzzle – gathering images,
finding words, putting them together, rearranging to enhance and augment the
picture — his pieces read smoothly, flowing logically and unerringly in the
direction you know they were meant to go.
At times, Morgan’s poetry and essays are searingly personal — his moments
of doubt, poems written to his wife, his son — and they’re hard to read, because
they evoke the same emotions in the reader, and these are usually the emotions
we run from, hide from, ignore, pretend don’t exist.
This is an excellent book for those who want to know where writers get their
ideas, or for writers who want to know how a good one does what he does.
It’s a glimpse into a soul, delving into the creative bent. And it can serve as
an impetus for stalled poets or those who think they could write a poem, if
they had the right inspiration:
“You catch a whiff of something on the border of consciousness. A phrase floats
into your head and you recognize the voice. A fly buzzes at the windowsill; you
wonder what it thinks it’s doing. Usually we dismiss such occurrences. They
seem to have no practical use. But the suspicion lingers that these events may
be trying to tell us something, to point out a meaning that, in the course of
our busy lives, we’ve been too distracted to face. Everyone has such moments,
but what do you do with them? What do you make from them? What purpose can they
serve?”
The answer, Morgan finds, is in poetry.
the heart of the poet
by Libbie Martin / Book Review
Fairbanks Daily News Miner, Dec. 23, 2012
FAIRBANKS — Often, when I meet non-writers,
they have the same question: Where do you get your ideas? I have to admit, I
kinda hate that question, partly because it’s so cliché, but mostly because I
never have a pithy or snarky answer on the tip of my tongue. Maybe it’s because
I spend so much time trying to get the words out of my head and onto paper
before they’re lost forever — there are always so many words in there I fear
I’ll never catch them all — that I don’t have time to stare into my navel
wondering from whence they come.
Thank the universe for John Morgan. One of Alaska’s premier poets, Morgan’s
new book, “Forms of Feeling: Poetry in Our Lives, Essays and Interviews,”
explores the whole notion of where the words come from, how they get into
our heads and how we use them to maneuver through life.
From the back cover blurb: “Poetry gives form to our feelings and helps us
come to terms with them. Facing a personal crisis, a poem can be the
beginning of healing. But if poems are good in a crisis, they are also a way of
reaching out for new experiences and renewing our lives.”
A combination of narrative, personal essays, letters, and poetry, Forms of Feeling
is an illuminating look into the way a poet’s mind works. Divided into four sections:
“Poetry in our Lives,” “Becoming A Poet,” “Feeling Into Forms,” and “A Poet in
His Place,” the book explores Morgan’s growth as a poet, from his days at the
Robert Lowell Writing Seminar to his life in Alaska, his experiments with
mind-altering drugs (not a good trip) to his son’s devastating illness. Morgan
takes us through the wild ride that turned him from a novelist to a poet with an
incredible eye for detail and imagery.
In the chapter titled “Firstlings,” Section 2, Morgan details how he went from
wanna-be fossil hunter (“once I’d retired from playing first-base for the Brooklyn
Dodgers") to poet. It all began in junior high, he recalls, ninth grade, to be
specific. His voice had changed, girls seemed more interested in showing off their
clothes than actually wanting to spend time with him on dates, and hormonal
mood swings and identity issues ruled the day. “My main extra-curricular activity
was the science club.”
An English assignment led him to Dylan Thomas’ “Fern Hill,” and he spent
hours listening to the recording, trying to “imitate Dylan Thomas’ stirring
delivery.” After that, he picked up a “fat Louis Untermeyer anthology” of
British and American poetry, working his way from Chaucer to Eliot, learning
about style, alliteration, rhythm, and other poetical flair.
Morgan writes: “The first poem I ever wrote spilled over from the reading
and from my muddled emotional life. It described a wild team of galloping
horses — not a subject I knew much about firsthand, but of course
the point was symbolic. The apocalyptic horses were compared to a racing heart
and stood in my mind for death and for sexual passion, and the rhythm tried to
imitate their thunderous headlong rush. Putting it through several revisions
allowed me to relive the experience of creating the poem in the first place and
the whole process gave me something to do with my turbulent feelings, which
otherwise threatened to run away with me like those galloping horses.”
Morgan shows, in this one paragraph, what makes him such a good
poet — he doesn’t just write a poem and call it good. He works on his poems for
long periods of time, re-writing and revising, striking whole parts and
substituting other images — pulling from the landscape, his life, his past, his
copious reading of the classics and other poets, until it becomes a piece that
only he could have written. And he revels in the revising, unlike many poets —
myself included — who see revising and rewriting as a necessary chore to get
through. Morgan enjoys every single piece of the puzzle – gathering images,
finding words, putting them together, rearranging to enhance and augment the
picture — his pieces read smoothly, flowing logically and unerringly in the
direction you know they were meant to go.
At times, Morgan’s poetry and essays are searingly personal — his moments
of doubt, poems written to his wife, his son — and they’re hard to read, because
they evoke the same emotions in the reader, and these are usually the emotions
we run from, hide from, ignore, pretend don’t exist.
This is an excellent book for those who want to know where writers get their
ideas, or for writers who want to know how a good one does what he does.
It’s a glimpse into a soul, delving into the creative bent. And it can serve as
an impetus for stalled poets or those who think they could write a poem, if
they had the right inspiration:
“You catch a whiff of something on the border of consciousness. A phrase floats
into your head and you recognize the voice. A fly buzzes at the windowsill; you
wonder what it thinks it’s doing. Usually we dismiss such occurrences. They
seem to have no practical use. But the suspicion lingers that these events may
be trying to tell us something, to point out a meaning that, in the course of
our busy lives, we’ve been too distracted to face. Everyone has such moments,
but what do you do with them? What do you make from them? What purpose can they
serve?”
The answer, Morgan finds, is in poetry.