Poetry discussion by contemporary poets

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

POETRY NEWS
‘Every Era is Replete with Bad Poetry': Donald Hall at New Hampshire Union Leader
BY HARRIET STAFF

Although he quit writing poetry two years ago, citing a connection between poetry’s sensuality and his octogenarian age, Donald Hall did manage to speak rather candidly with the New Hampshire Union Leader about his observations after decades writing poetry. (Although we know little about aging, we agree that poetry is a truly sexy craft.) From New Hampshire Union Leader:
WILMOT – This century appears to be a promising one so far for poetry.
Cities from Manchester to Pasadena host poetry slams. Hip-hop has entrenched its rhythmical brand of poetry into popular culture. And even small-town bookstores feature readings from poets.
Despite the groundswell, New Hampshire’s most famous living poet announced two years ago that he was done with the craft.
“I’m too old,” said Donald Hall, 86, this country’s 14th poet laureate. “I think that poetry’s very sexual, and I think it’s a lack of testosterone or low testosterone. In the early 50s, I said that poetry was ‘rich with sensuality.'”
Hall spoke recently in the book-lined living room of the Wilmot farmhouse that has been in his family for four generations. His right knee is shot, making the front couple of porch steps as daunting a challenge as a granite cliff on his beloved Mount Kearsarge.
He sits in an upholstered chair that is on a 6-inch riser; easier for him to get up and down. He looks out antique glass windows, the kind that warp outside objects like a funhouse mirror. Closest to his view are the peonies and other perennials that his deceased wife – acclaimed poet Jane Kenyon – planted decades ago.
Hall’s best poetry, he said, was written in his 40s and 50s. Over time, his poetic abilities waned. So he just put an end to it (although he does revise previously written poems).
Hall still writes. Like a baseball player who trades his mitt for a golf club, he’s turned to less vibrant endeavors. He answers nearly all letters that come his way. And in 2014, he published “Essays after Eighty,” a wry look at being old. The book landed on the New York Times Bestseller list (for a week, he notes).
“Certainly, he has been a big name of his generation, partly because he so dedicated his life to writing,” said Acworth resident Alice Fogel, the current New Hampshire poet laureate.
In the mid-70s, many writers found his career move inspirational, Fogel said. Encouraged by Kenyon, Hall gave up a tenured job at University of Michigan and moved to the Wilmot farm to make a living writing.
From there, Hall earned his place among New Hampshire’s literary greats. Robert Frost, Maxine Kumin, Charles Simic. All are national poets laureate; each lived in the Granite State. Frost, Hall and Kumin wrote vividly about New England.[…]
Continue at New Hampshire Union Leader.
Tags: Donald Hall, New Hampshire Leader
Posted in Poetry News on Monday, June 22nd, 2015 by Harriet Staff

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harr...-union-leader/

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harr...e-from-within/

[Editor’s Note: Garrett Caples delivered a version this talk at the Poetry Foundation on November 6, 2014 as part of the Harriet Reading Series. Other “Open Door” features can be found here.]


I begin with the penultimate sentence of “Theory of Retrieval,” the capstone to my recent book of essays, Retrievals:
“I admire from a distance other, perhaps grander aspects of [André] Breton—the movement leader, the concept synthesizer—but what I’ve sought to emulate as a poet-critic is his spirit of generosity to the living and the dead.” This is as much to say that I’ve never aspired to be a leader of others or an inaugurator of discourse. Indeed, “Theory of Retrieval” is something of an inside joke, for it’s simply a description of, and an account of various experiences that went into the making of, the book in which it appears. I mean, I don’t have theories. I just do things. Whatever I can get away with, according to the vagaries of my ethical compass. And whatever the drawbacks of such an approach, I’m pleased to report that, by this age, as a writer, editor, even poet, I’ve done a lot of things, things I thought needed to be done.
Notwithstanding all that, I was incautious enough to dub my latest chapbook of poems What Surrealism Means to Me, which led directly to the invitation to deliver this lecture on surrealism and contemporary poetry. The “-critic” is thus called to account for the effusions of the “poet-,” for I have hitherto never self-identified as a surrealist; rather, in the late ’90s, along with my friends Jeff Clark and Brian Lucas, I was accused by a largely forgotten academic of being a surrealist. (I think we were called, derisively, the San Francisco Surrealists.) I can’t speak for my confreres, but for my part, I wouldn’t have presumed to call myself a surrealist, because I took surrealism seriously. While I never held it against those who identified as surrealists, nor did I ever disavow surrealism, at the same time, I felt that calling yourself a surrealist had little bearing on whether or not you could achieve surrealism. Such discretion aside, however, the accusation has more or less stuck and my poetry, insofar as it’s thought about at all, tends to be considered surrealist.
Nonetheless, publishing my latest chapbook under the rubric of surrealism wasn’t a question of “giving in” to the label, but was rather a deliberate decision, as indicated by “Selfie at Delphi,” the poem-manifesto that opens What Surrealism Means to Me:
when i was a young poet, there was all this postmodern distance & irony i couldn’t abide. everyone was great at deriding what they disliked & everyone sucked at deciding what they liked. now that i’m a middle-aged poet, everyone’s vampiric, parasitic, cannibal, in the name of a look-at-me-ism that mistakes the clever for the conceptual: poetry as selfie.
what surrealism has done for me is provide dissident perspective on what otherwise nice, even reasonable employees of museums & universities tell me is cutting-edge, avant-garde, true. a spine to speak get the fuck outta here & an intelligence to back it up. surrealism’s been the light leading me through continuous yet temporary labyrinths & if you think i lit this rush from Lamantia who lit his from Breton, you’re fucking right.
On the one hand, I suppose, this looks for all the world like a midlife crisis; certainly I would never have carried on in this fashion in my youth. Fifteen years ago, I wouldn’t have permitted myself in a poetic text to write so prosaically, nor would I have spoken of my own poetry so directly or invoked surrealism so explicitly. And I definitely wouldn’t have had the grandiosity to propose this lineage from Breton to Lamantia to myself. Yet here is where I find myself. What’s shifted is the context of the discussion in the poetic avant-garde. When I came of age as a poet, the avant-garde in the Bay Area was dominated by language poetry; there was a stifling orthodoxy to the conversation and it was theory-driven at the expense of poetic results. The way to change this conversation was not by writing manifestoes, for language poetry was only too ready to argue, but rather by writing more compelling poetry. If my friends and I had any impact on poetry in terms of younger writers, it was through example, by suggesting other avenues in experimental poetry than those sanctioned by language poetry.
The situation today could be no more different, to the point where I feel a mild nostalgia for language poetry; however wrongheaded I found them, the language poets were worthy opponents, and they were nothing if not sincere. Rightly or, as I maintain, wrongly, they were committed to their ideas and the poetry that flowed therefrom. With the contemporary poetry of conceptualism, however, we are confronted with a whole new animal, one that doesn’t even pretend to believe what it says. As near as I can tell, it began as a cynical land-grab by failed visual artists, using a warmed over version of turn of ’70s minimalism as a way to take out their frustrations about their creative impotence, hence the valorization of “uncreative writing.” It is, on the one hand, all about product, ways of generating product with minimal effort, and in this we can see its academic origins, for this is surely the cut-and-paste solution to the professor’s publish-or-perish problem. On the other hand, it disavows its product, insofar as the texts of conceptualism are self-declaredly meant to be discussed, not read. Conceptualism will do anything for attention, because attention is its only goal. It will not hesitate to engage in the worst forms of ambulance chasing and grave robbing, whether attaching its projects to the suicide of open access activist Aaron Swartz or publishing a remix of the manifesto of mass murderer Elliot Rodger a mere two days after his killing spree. In this, it’s the ultimate symptom of the social media age, and social media has had a pernicious effect on the poetry world. A bubbling cauldron of clickbait and petty resentments, social media has created a permanent MFA class of poet, one concerned chiefly with parsing the activities of his or her peers as opposed to pursuing the ancient art we profess to practice. Poetry is elsewhere.
But why invoke something as unfashionable as surrealism to oppose conceptualism? As a poet, I always feel the need to........................................

Read more at the link provided above. Tooooooooo long to post all here. -Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.newpages.com/writers-reso...-writers-blogs

Interview with Robert Fanning
Published May 11, 2015

Robert Fanning, professor of creative writing at Central Michigan University, shares his manuscripts in process as well as the methods and sources of inspiration he used to draft them. His advice for burgeoning writers, poets in particular, is not the standard cookie-cutter words of wisdom you've heard elsewhere, and his refreshing approach to publishing will help you rethink Submission Sundays. And if you need a new playlist for writing, we have it.



I've heard a couple of indie publishers say that they can always spot an MFA manuscript that's been submitted without reading the bio of the author—and they weren't being complimentary. "The style is always the same." I'd love to hear you address how teachers can create an environment where individual styles can flourish.

I’ve heard that many times. Some of that has to do with editors having to read, yourself included, hundreds and hundreds of manuscripts. That’s a danger, I think, in teaching, that if your students might admire your work they might try to emulate it. I do not see that emulation happening in my classroom. I see a lot of diversity formally and thematically. I think it takes a lot of investment on the teacher’s part. You have to listen to your students and get a feel for what they are doing, their quirks, or where they are doing something different, and then try to feed that. I try to send them to the shelf that has the books that they need. I had a student a few years ago who was writing work that was wildly different from anything I’ve ever written, and I knew that, so I had to do my own research to find for him who his poets needed to be. I think that’s very important: learning to listen to students in order to see what they are trying to do that’s individual or unique, and trying to help foster that.

You have your own forms and structures that you use in your own writing. And you might start with one structure on the page and then realize that’s not what the poem needs. It needs a different structure: same words, different structure. You’ve discovered those structures, discovered what works for you. You’re working with such profound triggers. I’m thinking about Hugo’s Triggering Town here. Do you think that some of what we are doing as teachers is not only helping them find what to read, and helping them to find forms that fit their own work, but also to help them discover and work with and not fear their own triggers?

Absolutely. And to listen to themselves, and to go into their own lives. I would have been a very different teacher had I started teaching right when I came out of my MFA program. Which I didn’t. I went out away from the academy for many years. Returning later was liberating to me as an instructor, because I'm further down the road as a writer. I’m a much different poet; I’m trying new things all the time. So I’m in a particularly good place for working with young poets, I think, because once I’ve done something, I don’t trust it anymore, and I want to do something new. I don’t want to do the same thing again and again. I want each book to be a little different.

Congratulations. That seems to be working. (laughter)

Seems to be. To me, that’s a very good thing. I’m in a very edgy place, where I’m very open to what my students are doing. I don’t create any barriers between myself and my students. I prefer to have them call me by my first name. I write along with them. I think that’s important—for them to see me write and to read some stuff that really sucks, just to let them know we are really peers in this endeavor. Maybe poets who’ve published ten books and won loads of prizes, perhaps in some cases they set themselves above their students, maybe not even consciously. Then the students unconsciously place themselves in a position where they feel they must revere this iconic poet. And maybe that's where a cycle of aesthetic mimicking enters the scene. None of that is my style. We're all on a different journey as poets; I want to foster many styles by honoring what my students are drawn toward, if possible.

Do you think that maybe some of the workshop “feel”—or maybe the sense that we can tell where someone studied based on their writing—is worshipful emulation? Because there’s not the peer feeling?

Perhaps. I do tell my students when they are applying to MFA programs to look at who teaches there, to read their work, to see if they admire the work, to see if they feel they can learn from that person.

But it’s important for teaching poets to give students as many models as they can, and be willing to give students a wide variety of models. Recently, I conducted an independent study with a student on avant-garde writing since 1970, and I researched right along with him, because it’s an area I’d neglected and I’d not read enough of. So I’m always learning with my students. That increases the excitement of it all for me. I arrange my syllabus so I’m going to learn from it. I read right along with my students. In my graduate classes, I’ll read some journals and find poets who have written some compelling new books, maybe a recent prize winner, and I won’t even read the books before the semester. I read them right along with the students so we can have a meaningful, edgy, unrehearsed conversation about what’s going on in each poet's work.

So we are professional writers. We got our jobs in large part because we’re writers, and we’ve published, and we’ve done writerly things. But once we have those jobs, we are urged to become professional teachers. So some of what you just said strikes home with me because there might be this line between the two. We might become such good teachers that we are not authentic in our writing practice anymore, and we can’t bring that authentic writing practice to our students. Instead, we teach them things that anyone could teach them, if we are practicing our pedagogy and doing what all the teaching workshops would have us do. So there’s that line. And the magic moments we have with students are when the sides merge: when we are helping them from our authentic writing practice, but we just also happen to be teaching them something.

That’s what most of us hope for.

How do you manage that line?

It depends on the level. I teach undergraduate through graduate classes. In my intro and intermediate courses, I have a body of things I feel I want them to learn and know. There are things that I did not learn at their age. I want their tool kit to be completely full. I want them to have a really strong sense of form, and rhyme, and meter, as many craft elements as possible to build upon. I try to be a professional teacher, whatever that means, but I don't think I'm any good at that, frankly. To me teaching is a deep and mutual engagement; it's a conversation, and it’s very human. I don’t think students are as willing to open up and trust this wild process of writing and self-examination, if you’re up there being Mister Professor-Man, spewing facts. They’ll start looking out the window, just as I would have. Being able to teach poetry is an absolute privilege, and yes, I prepare to teach; I spend hours and hours and hours preparing, but I don’t lecture, per se. One, I’m not very good at it. And two, then it takes the learning away from me, too. I think that we, as teachers, also learn in those moments that are off the cuff. When that magic is happening in the room, it’s because it’s human, and it’s in the moment.

I love that idea of co-learning. It's not what you said, but it's what you meant.

So when we talk about the models that you use, the texts that you use, in your teaching, what is something you continually return to? I know you want to stay fresh and always bring in new things, but what are some things you constantly reach back to use?

I have certain texts I constantly come back to in my undergraduate classes. I like the Wadsworth Anthology of Poetry. I like the way it’s designed, as a bunch of mini-anthologies designed chronologically and by form. I like The Poet's Companion by Dorianne Laux and Kim Addonizio. Also, Steve Kowit's In the Palm of Your Hand, and other such How-To Manuals that have good, solid advice and poems in them.

My intermediate class is really built around forms and modes. I arrange it so I can "drop poems in" from class to class, that are really good examples of whatever I’m teaching. So if we’re talking about internal rhyme, I have my go-to poets I’ve used for a long time, but then there will be a poet I read yesterday in a journal or a new book, and I realize I can drop that in right here. I build these little modules, but I’m constantly looking for new models as well. Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” is always a great poem for teaching scansion, because its meter is both simple and surprising. It’s a particularly amazing poem to scan. Yeats is good to scan, and Kim Addonizio is great to scan. I look at Plath for image and metaphor, Yusef Komunyakaa, Phillip Levine, Dorianne Laux, Matthew Olzmann, Vievee Francis, francine j. harris, John Rybicki, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Peter Markus, whatever I'm into that day, week, or month. It’s changing all the time, but I keep a keen awareness of diversity too.

I want a myriad of voices in the room. Poetry is so eclectic and diverse now that it’s quite easy. There are so many good models now, such a wide array of voices, styles and modes. But that’s the hardest thing for me as a teacher—I want to cram the class with so many poems, and it’s really hard. I will have reached a really zen moment in teaching when I can take one poem to class. Instead, I drag my Santa sack of parcels and poems to throw around the room, and that’s too much. It’s overwhelming. I tell students constantly that you can learn so much just from slow, focused reading of just one poem. Just reading it over and over and over. But I love too many poems to bring in just one!

It’s another one of those lines. So many of our students have never really been exposed to poetry. And so when you’re trying to teach a craft class, you want to expose students to forms and drop in examples of all the forms, but then you also think this might be the only opportunity to expose them to all the poetry that turns us on to what we do. Where do you see that line, and how do you manage that?

That’s my hardest line. Teaching is a great sharing process to me. I'm like a tour guide in this incredible country of poetry, but we have limited time. It remains my biggest challenge as a teacher: to try to slow down and really focus on one or two poems. And I think I’ve gotten better at it, but I’ll still have on the syllabus: read these 20 poems, instead of focusing on one poem. It is absolutely the hardest thing for me, because there are so many amazing poets and poems I want my students to experience.

Do you think any forms are dead? Or do you think all forms still have some life in them?

fanning-sleep-poetryNo, and we're reminded of that all the time, as contemporary poets find new approaches to age-old forms, as well as creating new ones. I try to approach it as, first of all, why do this? Why write a sonnet? Are we doing this just to mimic? To try to shove a poem into a box, follow a lot of rules? So we have a conversation about that, organically. Why write a sonnet? What particular advantages does it have for the content you’re bringing forth? A sestina? A pantoum? These forms exist for a reason. They are built to enhance a poem's content. So we examine that.

In studying visual art, a common pedagogical model is to begin with still lives. And I think that’s a great model. When my wife taught sculpture, she spent the first part of the semester just teaching her students how to look, how to see. As poets, that's a good place to begin to, even before we get deep into form. We need to see what we’re looking at before we start to make; we need to have a solid foundation of knowing how to render an image, and to see. Later, when it comes to form: the more organic conversation, then, is about what form even is and how it benefits us as poets. I always work really hard to help my students understand that form is extremely liberating. That’s a hard thing to grasp when you’re 19 years old and resistant to structure, as I was. You don’t want somebody putting a frame around all this passion you have, all this angst. You don’t want somebody to box it all in. So I’ll tell my students: you hate sestinas? Then write a sestina about how much you hate sestinas.

Some students stick with free verse, but not without first writing in various forms, and realizing that free verse is its own challenging form, too, really. Regardless, form is then a tool they possess, and they can use it later, if they choose to—and I believe one's free verse benefits a great deal from wrestling with the armatures of form.

What’s the most important thing students get out of a CW program? And what was the most important thing you got from your own MFA program, and how is that different from what you want our own students to get?

Beyond the mentorship, the reading, the study, I want my students to feel that poetry is deeply meaningful and a sacred way of engaging with the self and the world, and it can sustain you through life’s trials and give meaning to your life. That's the most important thing, frankly, and I want them to take that with them. At this stage of my life, I realize poetry is something that has been there all the time for me. It’s gotten me through a lot of life challenges. It has helped me make sense of things that didn't make sense, and opened worlds up to me. I want my students to leave with that golden key. Whether they publish anything, whether they write a great book, all of that’s great, and certainly I want them to learn a lot about the craft. But the core thing I want them to remember is that poetry is a sacred act. It is a conversation with the world within the self and the self within the world. Yes: I want my students to have a deep knowledge of the craft, the forms, and history, to have a good sense of the movements and trends that inform what’s being done currently; that's important. I want them to have a sense of where they might be at the moment and where they might fit in to all of it. At that age, you’re just really starting to shape your aesthetic, as I was. I noticed that my aesthetic started to shift over time, so I let them know that, too. Find your aesthetic but be open to it changing.

Part of what we bring to our students is the best of what we got as students, and/or what we felt we were missing. I gained so much from my experience at Sarah Lawrence College's MFA program. That’s a brilliant, amazing program. It’s so focused on relationships. They have an individual conference system where you meet with your mentor often. There’s a lot of one-on-one mentorship. So I built that system into my teaching, too. Sarah Lawrence's program felt fairly open, which was a good thing, for me, but can be dangerous because it requires self-discipline, which is good practice for the writing life. I quickly realized I’d have to do a lot of work on my own to make the program what I wanted. So I went into the library; I started at A and wanted to work my way through to Z and read as many poetry books as I could in those two years. So that is something I bring to my teaching, too. I tell my students, don’t wait for me to tell you what to read. You go find the poets you love, too. Then, read everything they’ve written. I bring a big focus on reading and personal exploration in the art.



Try on as many voices as you can, as many modes as you can. Don’t think of yourself as a certain kind of poet, too early on, if ever.


Earlier, we discussed triggers, and not fearing them. Some students, when they are new to it, think every poem has to be original, and new and different from any they’ve already written. Some students fear repeating themselves. We have to guide them and say, well obviously this is what you need to talk about. This is your thing; don’t be afraid of it. So we talk to them about triggers, but also about influence and how we bring our influences into our writing. That can be part of our shift in aesthetic. Do you have those conversations with them?

To speak to the repetitive issue: I think that’s an important thing. It’s tough because, yes, they could be writing the same poem over and over again. On the one hand, I’ll tell them: follow these obsessions as far as you can. If for whatever reason you’re writing these really sad poems about a partner or your father, they need to come out, and you need to work them through. But you get to the point at which you realize you’re sitting down to write another sad father poem, reflexively. And when you know that, maybe you really have to start to make a shift. It’s hard, because it's also important to follow those obsessions to a seeming conclusion. Even in my work, themes keep emerging and emerging over years. That is going to happen organically. On one hand, I’m telling students to follow it through, but on the other hand, also practice writing poems th
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We have a couple teachers here that may find this article/interview interesting aside from its primary poetic evaluations.
Far too little individuality is allow or nurtured in the one size has to fit all public schools today. -Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...article/249062

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
The Medium of the English Language
BY JAMES LONGENBACH

The Medium of the English Language
BY JAMES LONGENBACH
The medium of Giorgione’s Tempest is “oil on canvas”; the medium of Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed is “oil and pencil on pillow, quilt, and sheet.” Descriptions of a work of art’s medium seem to tell us everything and nothing, for our entire experience of art is dependent upon the artist’s intimacy with the medium, and yet the medium itself may seem weirdly mundane, especially when the artist harnesses everyday materials like a sheet. In the nineteenth century, the stuff from which art is made came to be called the medium because for hundreds of years the word had referred to something that acts as an intermediary, a piece of money or a messenger. The artistic medium enables a transaction between the artist and the world, and, over time, the history of those transactions has become inextricable from the medium as such, an inherited set of conventions. It’s not coincidental that it was also in the nineteenth century that the word medium was first used to describe a person who conducts a séance, a person who exists simultaneously in the worlds of the living and the dead.

Lots of people sleep on sheets. Very few people handle oil paint as provocatively as Rauschenberg, and even fewer deploy sheets as a way of forging a transaction between the interior space of the mind and the exterior space of the world, a transaction that gives other people, the audience, an enticing and sometimes puzzling way of rethinking their own relationship to those spaces. Members of the audience may draw a little, they may have a fine sense of color, but they respect the transaction that the artistic medium does not simply record but presents as a unique and enduring act in time. Sometimes, however, when the sheer otherness of the medium is foregrounded at the expense of a conventional signal of the artist’s mind at work, they don’t respect the transaction, in part because the artist doesn’t covet such respect: how can art be something made of a bed sheet?

How can art be something made of words, the same words used for newspapers and parking tickets? Unlike the media most commonly associated with visual and sonic artistry, words are harnessed by most people during almost every waking moment of their lives; they’re more like bed sheets than like oil paint or the notes of the diatonic scale. Even small children are skilled manipulators of language, 
capable of detecting and repeating the most subtle nuances of intonation and tone: how swiftly we learn that by shifting the accent from one syllable to the other, the two-syllable word “contract” can be either a noun referring to a kind of agreement (“contract”) or a verb meaning either to acquire or constrict (“contract”). But while children rarely confuse such words when they’re speaking, children don’t write the poems of Shakespeare or the novels of Henry James, and neither do most adults. We may sustain an easy mastery of language in our daily lives, but once we engage language as an artistic medium, that mastery is never secure: our relationship to language is constantly changing as we discover aspects of the medium that our prior failures and, more potently, our prior successes had occluded.

My medium is not language at large but the English language. When I was young I took this for granted, but over the years I’ve become increasingly conscious of the qualities shared by poems because they’re written in English, rather than Italian or French. I’m not fluent in those languages; while I’ve lived for a time in Italy, where my children attended Italian school, I spent much of that time sitting at a desk, trying to write poems in English. But my lack of fluency heightened my awareness of my medium. Living in Florence, I was incapable of taking my mastery of  language for granted, and this incapacity not only reared its head when I was speaking broken Italian to our landlord; it infected my relationship to English, demanding that I hear the medium of the English language in particular ways, ways in which it has also been heard before. In Italian, the word for what we call a landlord is proprietario, just as in French it is propriétaire. And while those languages contain no version of the word landlord, a typically Germanic compound noun, the English language does contain the Latinate word proprietor: when we savor these possibilities, we are (as the meanings of the word medium suggest) undertaking a complex negotiation with the dead.

Every language has different registers of diction, but the English language comes by those registers in a particular way, one that reflects 
the entire history of the language. Unlike the romance languages, which were derived from the Latin spread throughout Italy, France, and Spain during the Roman Empire, English descended independently from German. Old English, the language of the eighth- or ninth-century poem we call “The Seafarer,” now looks and sounds to us like a foreign language, close to the German from which it was derived: with some study, one can see that the Old English line “bitre breostcaere gebiden hæbbe” means “bitter breast-cares abided have” or “I have abided bitter breast-cares.” The language of Chaucer’s fifteenth-century Canterbury Tales, or what we call Middle English, feels less strange, in part because its sense now relies largely on word order rather than on word endings: “Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages” or “then people long to go on pilgrimages.” And the Modern English of the Renaissance we can read easily, because it is the language we speak today, even though the language has continued to evolve: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments.”

Many complicated factors determined this evolution, but one of the most important was the Norman invasion of England in 1066. Once Norman French became the language of the English court, a new vocabulary of words derived from Latin began to migrate into Germanic English. The Old English poet could abide breast-cares, but he could not go on a pilgrimage or suffer impediments; those Latinate words were not available to him. Even today, we raise pigs and cows (from German, via Old English) but eat pork and beef (from Latin, via French), because after the Norman conquest the peasants who raised animals generally spoke English while the noblemen who ate them spoke French. We similarly inhabit a body but bury a corpse because the English language contains Germanic and Latinate words for the same thing, and, over time, we have made discriminations in their meanings. The traditional language of English law is studded with pairs of Germanic and Latinate words (will and testament, breaking and entering, goods and chattels) in which the meaning is not discriminated but reiterated, made available to the widest variety of people who spoke the rapidly developing English language.

Speakers of English may or may not be aware that their language is by its nature different from itself, but any interaction with English as an artistic medium depends on the deployment of words with etymologically distant roots — words that sound almost as different from each other as do words from German and Italian. Notoriously, T.S. Eliot incorporated quotations from foreign languages into his poems, but in The Waste Land, when he jumps from German words (“das Meer”) to words borrowed from the French (“famous clairvoyante”), he is exaggerating what English-language poems do inevitably all the time. The line “Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages” mixes Germanic and Latinate diction strategically (the plain folk playing off the fancy pilgrimages), and the sentence “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments” does so more intricately, the Germanic monosyllables let, true, and minds consorting with the Latinate marriage, admit, and impediments to create the richly 
polyglot texture that, over time, speakers of English have come to recognize as the very sound of eloquence itself. One hears it again in Keats (“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”), in Browning (“the quiet-colored end of evening smiles”), or in most any poet writing today. Coleridge famously called Shakespeare “myriad minded,” a phrase that itself wedges together Latinate and Germanic words, and the very medium of English-language poetry is in this sense myriad minded.

It’s possible to write Modern English as if it were an almost exclusively Germanic language, as James Joyce does in this passage of Ulysses, evoking the alliterative rhythms of Old English poetry by giving priority to Germanic monosyllables and treating English as if it were still a highly inflected language, in which sense need not depend on word order:

Before born babe bliss had. Within womb won he worship.
It’s also possible to write English as if it were an almost exclusively Latinate language, as Joyce does in this passage of Ulysses, frontloading Latinate vocabulary and weeding out as many Germanic words as possible:

Universally that person’s acumen is esteemed very little perceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitably by mortals with sapience endowed.
But these bravura efforts of parody and pastiche sound more like the resuscitation of a dead language than the active deployment of a living one; it’s difficult to speak English so single-mindedly. In contrast, Shakespeare’s language feels fully alive in Sonnet 116, and yet its drama nonetheless depends on the strategic juxtaposition of a Germanic phrase (“true minds”) with a highly Latinate phrase that a speaker of English might never say (“admit impediments”), just as that speaker probably wouldn’t say “babe bliss had” or “with sapience endowed.” We don’t speak of the cow who jumps over the moon as “translunar,” though we could.

We do speak of the “Grand Canal” when we come to Venice, deploying two Latinate words; but to a native speaker of Italian, the word grande simply means big. As an Italian friend of mine once said, all we’re thinking about is size: the canal is big in the same way that your hat might be too big, “troppo grande.” The difference between our deployment of the Latinate phrases “Grand Canal” and “admit impediments” is that in the former case we are scripted by the language we deploy, our typically awe-struck response to the history of Venice produced by the language we speak. In the latter case Shakespeare has made a choice, as in other circumstances any speaker of English might also make a choice: saying “look how big the canal is” 
is different from saying “look how grand the canal is.” It is at such junctures that our language begins to function as a medium, something that acts as an intermediary, a transitional object. Nothing is automatically an artistic medium, though anything could be.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...article/177754

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
John Masefield
1878–1967

BY CONOR O'CALLAGHAN
He was born the year British Imperial forces were squaring up to the Zulus and Tennyson’s death was still fourteen years in the offing. He once met someone who had met Napoleon. He held a door for Lenin at the British Museum. He was deemed by Ramsay McDonald to be the natural successor to Robert Bridges, a voice-of-the-voiceless laureate for Britain’s first labour prime minister. He lost his son in WWII. He died the year the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper and Norman Mailer was jailed after Vietnam protests in Washington. More than any poet I can think of, his life and work straddle two irreconcilable worlds.

Nowadays it is difficult to credit his fame. The Everlasting Mercy was declared “nine-tenths sheer filth” by that paragon of piety Lord Alfred Douglas. The 1923 edition of Collected Poems sold eighty thousand copies. It is equally difficult to make any serious critical defense. Even Yeats, who was among his closest literary allies, advised him to sing in music halls. He wrote far too much. He did not, as John Betjeman tactfully pointed out, “specialize in brevity.” Nowadays, whenever his name comes to us, it comes to us with a faintly ludicrous patina. He is the seaman poet who suffered chronic seasickness; whose bestseller Gallipoli hailed that squalid massacre as a glorious victory; who died of gangrene brought on by a split toe.

I have liked John Masefield’s poetry for over twenty years. My maternal grandfather, a self-taught detective sergeant from a landlocked county of South Ulster, loved to recite the swaying opening stanza of “Sea-Fever.” I learned “Tewkesbury Road” by heart at secondary school. What class of genius, I wondered, could compose “the grey light drift of the dust”? Until recently, admitting to liking Masefield’s poetry was like confessing sympathy with some far right-wing militia or saying you listen to the Carpenters. Then Manchester’s Carcanet Press brought out a Selected earlier this year. The unexpectedly enthusiastic reviews that have greeted its publication suggest a dormant following.

Masefield’s first book, Salt-Water Ballads, appeared in 1903. By 1913, with fifty-four years still on the clock, his significant poetry had been published. To this day he gets itemized as the original of the Georgian species, even though his first three books were, technically speaking, Edwardian. Those early lyrics possess nothing of the tweedy hothouse pastoral of their age. They are breezy, visceral, caught placelessly between two yearnings like “anchors hungry for English ground.” They impose the see-saw of shanties onto drier literary meters. They have stories, direct speech. They are littered with words—fo’c’s’le, goneys, skysail, spunyarn—that you suspect had not appeared in poetry up until then and have not since.

Masefield’s best poems escape the autopilot optimism of those of his contemporaries. His vision is so clear and realistic that his palette risks appearing monochrome: “the grey dawn breaking,” “the cool grey rush of the dusk.” His lines can be so accentual as to sound vaguely jazzy. Even the anthology anthems, “Sea-Fever” and “Cargoes,” hit willful bum notes. They harbor tongue twisters, at once cherished and unsayable, like “the flung spume and the blown spray and the seagulls crying” or the “Quinquereme of Nineveh from distant Ophir” that Muldoon ventriloquizes via MacNeice in “7 Middagh Street.” “Cargoes,” among popular favorites in English poetry, has to be one of the most pessimistic:

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke-stack
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rail, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.


Muriel Spark, in her book-length study, argues that Masefield’s gift was for narrative. However untenable that claim seems now, “The Everlasting Mercy” and “Dauber” deserve at least partial survival on the grounds of importance if not sustained quality. The former’s realism broke real ground and influenced a generation. Sassoon happened upon the style of his war poetry by lampooning it. Graves described how its “fresh wind ... exhilarated us youngsters.” While its narrative is off-puttingly moral, the early fight sequence remains vivid and gritty. The latter, a semi-autobiographical tale of the eponymous painter-cum-cabin boy, contains some of the truest, most beautiful images of the sea and seafaring:

the swift ship
Tore on out of the tropics, straining her sheets,
Whitening her trackway into a milky strip,
Dim with green bubbles and twisted water-meets,
Her clacking tackle tugged at pins and cleats,
Her great sails bellied stiff, her great masts leaned:
They watched how the sea struck and burst and greened.


Masefield matured into mediocrity. He became an authority on Chaucerian meter, and his own work drifted slowly into the canon’s Bermuda Triangle. Not a solitary line appears in Paul Keegan’s otherwise magisterial New Penguin Book of English Verse. “I am like the dodo,” the man mused, “no longer known as a bird at all.” Only a twit would argue the case of Masefield’s greatness. Better, I suggest, to see him occupying a position within British poetry similar to that of Edward Arlington Robinson here: a minor poet whose career became an important stepping stone between the Victorian and the modern (both Auden and Larkin acknowledged a debt), and who wrote a few gems of his own that remain unworthy of neglect.
Originally Published: March 2, 2006

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178645

ESSAY
Is It Poetry or Is It Verse?
The president of the Poetry Foundation weighs in on 2Pac Shakur, “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” and “Jabberwocky.”

BY JOHN BARR
1.

Question: What do the following poems have in common?

* * *

It seemed to me a simple thing since my socks was showin’ through:
Turn my old boots out to pasture, and buy a pair—brand new.
Well, they built this cowboy K-mart outa town there in the Mall,
Where I parked my Studdybaker after shippin’ drys this fall.


* * *

There R no words 2 express
how much I truly care
So many times I fantasize of
feelings we can share
My heart has never known
the Joy u bring 2 me
As if GOD knew what I wanted
and made u a reality


* * *

My brother built a robot
that does not exactly work,
as soon as it was finished,
it began to go berserk,
its eyes grew incandescent
and its nose appeared to gleam,
it bellowed unbenignly
and its ears emitted steam.
Answer: They are the opening lines of poems by leading writers in their respective fields. And they all, most likely, set on edge the teeth of the readers of Poetry magazine.

It’s not just snobbery. People who care about their poetry often experience genuine feelings of embarrassment, even revulsion, when confronted with cowboy poetry, rap and hip-hop, and children’s poetry not written by “adult” poets. Their readerly sensibilities are offended. (If the writing gives them any pleasure, it is a guilty pleasure.) The fact that Wallace McRae, Tupac Shakur, and Jack Prelutsky wrote these works for large, devoted audiences simply adds insult to the injury. Somewhat defensively, the serious poetry crowd dismisses such work as verse, not poetry, and generally acts so as to avoid it, if at all possible, in the future. The fact that these different kinds of poetry don’t communicate, don’t do business with one another, is not just a matter of lost e-mail addresses. The advocates of each know what they like, and it’s definitely not what the others are doing. The result is a poetry world of broad divides, a balkanized system of poetries with their own sovereign audiences, prizes, and heroes. The only thing they share is the word poetry, and that not willingly.

There’s nothing wrong with this, a generally peaceful coexistence of live-and-let-live poetry communities, except to those who require, for intellectual comfort, a universal theory of poetry that ties it all together. It also matters to the Poetry Foundation and organizations like it, which must make choices and use their finite resources to support some kinds of poetry while not others.

2.

Efforts to define the difference between poetry and verse (like efforts to define the difference between poetry and prose) have been with us for a long time. Verse is often a term of disparagement in the poetry world, used to dismiss the work of people who want to write poetry but don’t know how. Verse, in this usage, means unsophisticated or poorly written poetry. But quality of writing is not the real difference between the two. Yes, there is plenty of poorly written verse out there, but there is also plenty of poorly written poetry—and sometimes the verse is the better crafted.
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.
Robert Service’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” with no help from the critical establishment, is still going strong after a century, while most early Yeats is read today only because it was written by Yeats. To use verse as a pejorative term, then, is to lose the use of it as a true distinction.

George Orwell gives us another way to think about this when he describes Kipling as “a good bad poet.”
A good bad poem is a graceful monument to the obvious. It records in memorable form—for verse is a mnemonic device, among other things—some emotion which very nearly every human being can share.
Into this same pot Orwell puts “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” the work of Bret Harte—and presumably that of Robert Service. “There is a great deal of good bad poetry in English,” says Orwell; by implication, there is even more bad bad poetry. My own nominations for the latter include the work of Edgar Guest, whose Collected Poems, in a signed limp leather edition, was one of two books of poetry in the house where I grew up (a wedding present to my parents).
Ma has a dandy little book that’s full of narrow slips,
An’ when she wants to pay a bill a page from it she rips;
She just writes in the dollars and the cents and signs her name
An’ that’s as good as money, though it doesn’t look the same.
Orwell’s distinction, between good bad poetry and just plain bad poetry, is one based on quality of execution, of craftsmanship. Good bad poetry is verse competently—even memorably—written. But his distinction leaves unaddressed the nature of the poetry itself.

3.

Verse, I have come to think, is poetry written in pursuit of limited objectives: to entertain us with a joke or tall tale, to give us the inherent pleasures of meter and rhyme. It is not great art, nor is it trying to be. Verse, as Orwell says, tells us something we already know—as often as not something we know we already know. Verse is not an instrument of exploration, but rather a tool of affirmation. Its rewards lie not in the excitements of discovery, but in the pleasures of encountering the familiar. Writers of verse have done their job when they make lines that conform to the chosen meter—and do not go beyond it. Frost’s notion, “The possibilities for tune from dramatic tones of meaning struck across the rigidity of a limited meter are endless,” is unvisited territory. Verse does not seek to know the unknown or to express the unexpected, nor does it undertake the risk of failure that both entail.

“Serious” poetry, on the other hand, is written in pursuit of an open-ended goal. It seeks to use language, in its full potential, to encompass reality, both external and internal, in the fullness of its complexity. Unlike verse, poetry does not bring our experience of the world down to the level of the homily or the bromide, and sum it all up in a soothing platitude. It does not pursue simple conclusions or familiar returns. Rather, it is a voyage of discovery into the unknown. Of the figure a poem makes, Frost says,
Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. . . . Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. . . . It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.
A poem begins in delight, he says, and ends in wisdom. Verse begins in delight and ends in . . . more delight. The difference between poetry and verse, then, is the difference between an explorer and a tour guide. Verse tells us, finally, that all is well. Poetry, on the contrary, tells us that things are not as we thought they were. Verse does not ask us to change our lives. Poetry does.

At its best, verse can cross over into the realm of serious poetry. Children’s poetry, in particular, can speak at the same time to its intended audience of the young or very young, while holding the attention of an experienced reader.
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
In the recent finals of Poetry Out Loud, the national recitation contest cosponsored by the Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, if any one poem drove the judges to thoughts of suicide if they had to hear it one more time, it was probably Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.” Yet the poem probably stands as high today in the critical community as it does with young readers. Constructed wholly out of neologisms, the poem tells its tale from a parallel universe. Many of the new schools of poetry that followed it in the 20th century could claim “Jabberwocky” as a progenitor. With a little effort, you can even get Mother Goose and Dr. Seuss to resonate with contemporary poetry’s fascination for the nonrational. The nonsense of children’s verse converges with the non-sense of the fanciest experimental poetry.

Most verse has no following in the critical world because it needs none to be understood and appreciated. Most verse also receives no support from the programs of the Poetry Foundation (with the exception of children’s poetry). This is not so much because the Foundation takes a position on the value of verse as poetry, although the legacy of Poetry magazine strongly inclines us to the “serious.” It is rather because the mission of the Foundation is to discover and address poetry’s greatest unmet needs. (The estate of Tupac Shakur is presumably doing just fine without the Poetry Foundation, thank you very much.) The exception is children’s poetry, which the Foundation supports because of its importance to the future of the entire art form. Findings from our major study—Poetry in America—show that a lifelong interest in reading poetry is most likely if developed early and reinforced thereafter.

Whether it’s “Jack and Jill ran up the hill” or “There once was a man from Nantucket,” there is a kind of poem that won’t get out of our ears, even as it refuses our serious attention in the matter of its sense. There is a place in the poetry world for verse—if it is memorably written—and we wish it well in all of its variety.
Originally Published: September 18, 2006
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Far too much verse is currently being heralded as magnificent poetry IMHO.
TRUE GREAT VERSE IS OFTEN BETTER THAN AVERAGE POETRY (ESPECIALLY IF IT IS WRITTEN WITH NO SPIRIT AND NO HEART), BUT GREAT VERSE NEVER IS BETTER THAN GREAT POETRY IMHO. -TYR

George Orwell gives us another way to think about this when he describes Kipling as “a good bad poet.”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ I HAVE ALWAYS FOUND Orwell's criticism of Kipling to be laced with the vilest venom of pure jealousy!
Enough that I have very little respect for Orwell. As I respect no man that deliberately knocks another strictly due to jealousy... --Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/246790

ESSAY
A Little Society
From the Brontës to Dorothy and William Wordsworth, literary siblings challenge assumptions of lonely genius.

BY CASEY N. CEP

For years, a tiny pub on the road between the English villages of Haworth and Keighley has been home to a peculiar rumor. The Cross Roads Inn was one of Branwell Brontë’s favorite haunts. It was at the Cross Roads that two of Branwell’s friends claim he read from a manuscript that featured the characters who would later appear in the novel Wuthering Heights.

Despite Charlotte Brontë’s insistence that her sister Emily wrote Wuthering Heights, the rumor that their brother Branwell penned the novel has persisted. In their various biographies, Juliet Barker, Daphne du Maurier, Lucasta Miller, and Fannie Elizabeth Ratchford all considered the possibility that Branwell was the true author of Wuthering Heights. Barker claimed to have identified a story of Branwell’s that influenced the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff; du Maurier pointed to poems written by Emily and Branwell as evidence of an early collaboration between the two that could have blossomed into Wuthering Heights.

The persistence of the rumor reflects the curious, cloistered upbringing of the Brontës, but also the more universal experience of siblings. Collaboration and competition between brothers and sisters exists no matter their vocations, but literary siblings challenge our assumptions of lonely genius, isolated writers alone at their desks. Patrick Brontë, father to the four artists, who raised them himself after their mother died, wrote: “As they had few opportunities of being in learned and polished society, in their retired country situation, they formed a little society amongst themselves—with which they seem’d content and happy.”

“A little society” is the perfect description of siblings. Brothers and sisters have long encouraged one another’s literary careers: letters and drafts change hands; carefully chosen words of praise and criticism pass between lips; scraps of paper, coveted notebooks, and particular pens move between writing desks.

The Brontës—Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne—were all prolific writers as children. When Charlotte was ten and Branwell was nine, they began to write plays set in the fictional world of Glass Town. When Emily and Anne were old enough to contribute, Glass Town grew into the separate kingdoms of Gondal and Angria. Together, the four children filled miniature books and tiny magazines with poetry and stories.

Their juvenilia reveal young artists finding their voices, but also their audience. Writing first for one another, they learned how to write for others. When the sisters finally published a book in 1846, it was a collection of poems. Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell sold poorly, and the sisters redirected their efforts to fiction. Emily and Anne continued writing poetry privately, but Charlotte would write poems again only to mark the deaths of her siblings.

“On the Death of Anne Brontë” is one of Charlotte’s most sorrowful poems. “There’s little joy in life for me,” it begins. From the first stanza (“I’ve lived the parting hour to see / Of one I would have died to save”) to the last (“And now, benighted, tempest-tossed, / Must bear alone the weary strife”), she laments her sister’s death and her fresh solitude. She outlived all of her siblings: Branwell and Emily died in 1848; Anne followed them to the grave less than a year later. Charlotte would be their literary executor after their deaths just as she had been their literary champion in life.

That same closeness characterized the relationship between Dorothy and William Wordsworth. Although they lived apart during much of their childhood, the siblings were reunited as adults and eventually cohabited for many years in the Lake District. In an essay on Dorothy, Virginia Woolf wrote: “It was a strange love, profound, almost dumb, as if brother and sister had grown together and shared not the speech but the mood, so that they hardly knew which felt, which spoke, which saw the daffodils or the sleeping city; only Dorothy stored the mood in prose, and later William came and bathed in it and made it into poetry.”

Dorothy would copy verses for her brother and assist him with correspondence, but she was also a talented writer. While she wrote little for publication, her journals, travelogues, and poetry are all now in print. It is clear that her writing influenced her brother’s or, as Woolf noted, that “one could not act without the other.”

It was Dorothy who made notes in her journal about a fateful walk the siblings took on April 15, 1802, when they “saw a few daffodils close to the water side … a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road.” Dorothy recorded that she “never saw daffodils so beautiful [—] they grew among the mossy stones and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced.”

Only a few years later, William would return to that entry and craft from it one of the most iconic poems in the English language. Written in iambic tetrameter, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” captures “a crowd, / A host, of golden daffodils.” While the poem celebrates “the bliss of solitude,” the poet himself rambled through the Lake District with his sister. In one of her own poems, “Floating Island,” Dorothy wrote that “the lost fragments shall remain, / To fertilize some other ground.” She might very well have been thinking of the way her own writing nurtured her brothers.

The collaboration between siblings is not always so indirect. Charles and Mary Lamb co-authored several collections of poetry and prose for children. Long before he had established his reputation as an essayist and a critic, Charles collaborated with Mary on Tales from Shakespeare (1807), Mrs. Leicester’s School (1809), and Poetry for Children (1809).

Mary, who suffered from mental illness, wrote poetry and stories almost constantly when fueled by her mania; Charles, not without his own struggles, suffered from depression and alcoholism, both of which led to severe writer’s block. Brother and sister were linked not only in illness but in tragedy. Mary came to live with Charles after murdering their mother in a psychotic episode. Although Mary was 31 and Charles was only 21, he became her legal guardian and refused to have her committed. They lived together for 40 years, until Charles died.

Well known in literary circles, Charles and Mary were forever linked to one another. It was Thomas Carlyle who called the siblings “a very sorry pair of phenomena,” but everyone from Keats to Coleridge to Wordsworth enjoyed their company. While they hosted many of London’s literati, their deepest friendship, their strongest relationship, was with one another. It was brother and sister who saw one another through madness and depression, frustration and addiction. “You would laugh, or you would cry, perhaps both,” Mary wrote in 1805, “to see us sit together looking at each other with long and rueful faces, & saying how do you do? & how do you do? & then we fall a crying & say we will be better on the morrow.”

Unlike the Lambs and the Wordsworths, pairs of siblings in which the brother’s reputation far exceeded the sister’s, one Victorian family produced a daughter whose fame has outlasted that of her brother. Christina Rossetti is considered one of the greatest Victorian poets, while her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti is remembered more for his status as sibling than painter or poet.

Born to an accomplished poet and Dante scholar, Christina and her brother were the “two storms” in a family of four children whose other dyad was known as the “two calms.” All four of the Rossetti children had accomplished careers as writers and critics, encouraged by a childhood filled with arts and letters. As teenagers, they played rounds of bouts-rimés, racing against one another to write sonnets with specified forms and rhymes; Christina was the youngest, but is said to have excelled most at the game.

While Dante Gabriel founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to surround himself with other artists, Christina found support from the Portfolio Society, a group of female poets. Despite their esteemed position in literary society, they remained each other’s best critics. Exchanging letters almost daily for years, they critiqued one another’s work, suggested new topics and themes, and helped to organize poems into volumes for publication.

Private disagreements, including Dante Gabriel’s suggestion that certain topics are unsuitable for female writers and Christina’s increasing unwillingness to accept her brother’s revisions, did not keep them from championing one another’s work in public. And while Christina’s most remarkable poem, Goblin Market, testifies to the love between sisters (“For there is no friend like a sister / In calm or stormy weather”), it was her brother Dante Gabriel whose illustrations accompanied its publication. And like Branwell Brontë, who painted a famous portrait of his sisters, Dante Gabriel produced iconic images of Christina.

Tellingly, Branwell’s painting of his sisters, the only surviving group portrait, originally included his likeness: the blurred pillar between Emily and Charlotte was once Branwell. As the oil paint fades, the canvas is slowly revealing Branwell’s figure. Brothers and sisters are not always at peace, and posterity plays favorites. Branwell is as spectral a figure in the portrait as he is in the pages of literary history. The competition for prizes, publication, and readers in life often continues posthumously, and not all siblings are peaceable partners in literary creation.

Where there is ink, there is envy. Literary siblings are certainly not exempt from the rivalries that animate other families. One sibling’s success fuels another sibling’s writing with jealousy and ambition or thwarts the other sibling’s efforts entirely; the connections of one sibling to the literary establishment facilitate another sibling’s career or, less ceremoniously, earn the lesser sibling a footnote in literary history as simply that, a biological relation.

Literary siblings are not only a thing of the past. Contemporary poetry is home to at least two of these little societies: Matthew and Michael Dickman are twin brothers who edit one another’s poetry and share a publisher; Fanny and Susan Howe are sisters whose poetic careers span decades. While many artists long to be orphans, free of family and obligation, some poets find strength in their siblings. The complicated dynamics of these little societies are fascinating and fraught. Collaborating on juvenilia, editing one another’s drafts, supporting one another through depression and doubt, championing each other’s work: these little societies sustain one another in ways only siblings could.
Originally Published: October 22, 2013
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If students find the story pulling away from the truth, that’s OK. You might remind them that they’re serving the poem, not the story, which is simply the impetus, the fuel for the piece of art they find themselves making. You might remind them here of the old adage: “Trust the poem, not the poet.”

The poem, the message(!) must be the truth from your heart. Otherwise its fiction and not poetry IMHO.
WHEN ONE CAN TRUST THE POET, THAT POET AND HIS/HER POETRY RISES TO THE TOP AND BECOMES GREAT.
As in great, even if not recognized as GREAT by the literary powers that be.
And quite often, as history has shown, future generations see , marvel at and thus pronounce its greatness!
Emily Dickinson's legendary greatness - CAME DECADES AFTER HER DEATH AND FROM A DIFFERENT GENERATION THAN THE ONE SHE ACTUALLY WROTE TO.

Example, in my writings, I have had several teachers ask may they copy, and use one of my poems in class to illustrate certain forms, poetic devises and/or styles of writing. Strange that none of them have been American teachers, all were foreign teachers, several were at universities.
I've never turned down such a teaching request and always sent additional information as to the meaning, inspiration and my concluding thoughts on the finished poem.
THE POEM CITED BELOW HAS BEEN REQUESTED TO BE COPIED AND USED BY 4 TEACHERS AND 3 OTHER PEOPLE JUST ASKING FOR PERSONAL REASONS. One asked permission to copy it , to frame and hang in her living room.
IT ALSO PLACED FIRST IN TWO DIFFERENT POETRY CONTESTS.--Tyr

River Laps Softly

The ripples of water lap river's edge
quietly I sit, a man seeking love
The orange twilight stirs my lonely soul
nearby, lonely call of a single dove

Sweetest place roaring river moans and churns
fish splashing about in a soft replay
Continuance as the world slowly turns
colors splash endings to wonderful day

The smell is that of fish , water and mud
cool air spreading its greatest soft relief
Comfort gives to stop anger in my blood
as Nature gifts a most calming belief

Soon its quiet , knowledge enters my soul
Victory came because I made it so

Robert J. Lindley, 08-08-2014

Poem Syllable Counter Results
Syllables Per Line: 10 10 10 10 0 10 10 10 10 0 10 10 10 10 0 10 10
Total # Syllables: 140
Total # Lines: 17 (Including empty lines)
Total # Words: 101