Poetry discussion by contemporary poets

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Found this in one of my meandering searches of new poetry sites, blogs and misrepresentations!
Ending verse struck me as being funny as hell, so I share it here.
O', how many times have I felt the same way about certain people! -Tyr

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http://ecstaticdoggerel.blogspot.com

And one day the boy came back, and the tree was so happy she could barely speak.

"Come, boy, come climb my trunk and have fun again!" she whispered.

"I am too old and sad to have fun," said the boy. "The world is not fun. I need a boat, to sail far away from here. Can you give me a boat?"

"A boat?" said the tree. She didn't know what to say. Only that morning there had been news of wildfires, and drought, and starvation, and beheadings, and mass extinctions, and a bunch of walruses with no ice left in the ocean for resting had come ashore in one giant tusky bawling mass.

"Were you saying something?" asked the boy, checking his stock listings on his smartphone. "Yeah, a boat. My life isn't all sunshine and butterflies and bears scratching their backs on me, like yours."

And the tree looked at him a long time. Then she sighed. "I wish I had not given you all my branches," she said. "Because now I cannot beat you violently with them like you deserve, you whiny little dickhead."

POSTED BY M. C. ALLAN (CARRIE, TO MOST) AT 9:02 AM NO COMMENTS:

[Balu]

... so I share it here. ...

This is Fantastic. Having read this I felt as if I returned back for a moment to the days of my childhood.
Thank you, Robert, for giving me such a feeling.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

This is Fantastic. Having read this I felt as if I returned back for a moment to the days of my childhood.
Thank you, Robert, for giving me such a feeling.

Thank you for reading and understanding poetry my friend.
Poetry is meant to be a gift to all that read it. Always the poet's hope is it helps the reader in some way.
Life must be about giving back and helping others. For if not then it fails to be divinely inspired.
We that can and do write with that in mind are rewarded when we may find it has help inspire somebody in some positive way.
As to memories of youth, we all seem to have the happy ones stored for use in our daily lives and anything that brings them out to be remembered yet again is a treasure IMHO. -Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/arti...ndation.org%29


ESSAY
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Turns 100
The famous poem was nearly not published.

BY THE EDITORS
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Turns 100
This month marks the 100th anniversary of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” published when Eliot was just 26 years old. Had it not been for the intervention of Ezra Pound and Harriet Monroe, the seminal poem that helped usher in American Modernism might not have been published at all.

Eliot originally wrote parts of the monologue of a troubled, middle-aged man in 1910 and soon combined these pieces to form the long, complicated poem readers know now. Then he put it in a drawer for four years and focused on his graduate study in philosophy.

In the spring of 1914, Conrad Aiken, Eliot’s college friend, passed “Prufrock” along to Harold Monro, editor of Poetry and Drama. He reportedly remarked that the poem is “absolutely insane” and turned it down.

In September 1914, Eliot first met Pound in London, who was then the acting foreign correspondent of Poetry. Eliot showed him “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and Pound was elated. “Prufrock,” wrote Pound to Poetry editor Harriet Monroe, is “the best poem I have yet had or seen from an American,” adding exuberantly in all caps, “PRAY GOD IT BE NOT BE A SINGLE AND UNIQUE SUCCESS.”

The following slideshow features three of Pound’s letters to Monroe, proclaiming Eliot’s talent and urging her to publish “Prufrock.” (“I hope you’ll get it in soon,” he wrote.) She found room in the June 1915 issue. Though Monroe’s responses to Pound are not available, his letters hint at her apprehension. “In being the first American magazine to print Eliot you have scored again, though you may not yet think so,” Pound wrote shortly after “Prufrock” appeared in print, still compelled to convince her of its value.


View slideshow of letters from Pound to Monroe

For more background, watch Eliot scholar and editor Christopher Ricks the Prufrock centenary at Harvard University.

Letters by Ezra Pound, from New Directions Publishing Company acting as agent, copyright 2015 by Mary de Rachewiltz and the Estate of Omar S. Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Company. Photos courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.


Originally Published: June 8, 2015

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/251110

ESSAY
Prufrock, Lewinsky, and the Poetry of History
How T. S. Eliot’s lovelorn classic still sways us.

BY AUSTIN ALLEN

One of the more striking literary essays in recent memory appeared this summer to zero fanfare. That in itself is no surprise: most literary critics could reveal the nuclear codes without even the NSA noticing. Still, you might have expected some buzz around a splashy Vanity Fair tribute to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” penned by a longtime fan named Monica Lewinsky.

The occasion of the essay was the “Prufrock” centenary; the author’s guiding impulse was sheer enthusiasm. Lewinsky writes that she was “smitten” by T. S. Eliot’s lovelorn classic as a teenager and that after “more than 20 years, these feelings have not waned.” She’s a connoisseur of “Prufrock” allusions, from the pop to the highbrow; one “personal favorite” comes from Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris: “Prufrock is my mantra!” Even her e-mail address contains a “Prufrock” reference—a fruitful conversation starter, she says, with fellow lovers of the poem.

As it turns out, this isn’t the first revelation of her fandom. The 1999 biography Monica’s Story, which Andrew Morton wrote in collaboration with his subject, mentions her “life-changing” love of poetry and of “Prufrock” in particular. Covering the Morton bio for Time in 1999, John Cloud peppered his article with excerpts from the poem. He introduced a section on Lewinsky’s publicity tour with “Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”; he suggested that, like Prufrock pinned to the wall, she’d “begun to feel fixed and formulated by the eyes of the public, the prosecutors and the media.”

In 2004 Lewinsky withdrew from public life, fed up with all those prying eyes. When she re-emerged a decade later as part of an anti-bullying campaign, she invoked her old hero:

I believe my story can help. Help to do something to change the culture of humiliation we inhabit and that inhabits us. I had been publicly silent for a decade—but now I must, as T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock said, disturb the universe.
All in all, you sense that “Prufrock” is her mantra and that her devotion to it verges on spiritual zeal. Although she argues that the poem transports us “beyond meaning,” it seems to have had a sizable and definite meaning in her own life. Reflecting obliquely on his early reading in a 1934 essay, Eliot wrote, “Everyone, I believe, who is at all sensible to the seductions of poetry, can remember some moment in youth when he or she was completely carried away by the work of one poet.” By her own account, Lewinsky was such a reader, and her consuming passion was for the starchy, High-Church Anglican who wrote modern poetry’s great song of shyness.

•

If she’d had the choice, Lewinsky couldn’t have picked a more fitting inspiration. Eliot learned early in his own life that diffidence and daring, intense inwardness and intense exposure, can be twin edges of a single sword. Few 20th-century poets were as painfully reticent or achieved greater fame. None brooded more on the convergence of literature, sex, and history—the ways in which the private mental and physical lives of individuals intersect with the public life of the masses.

That obsession, which burns through the early poems, first flickers to life in the figure of Prufrock. Poor J. Alfred is the archetypal bit player on the world’s stage, anonymous and foppish right down to his abbreviated name. Mockingly comparing himself to biblical and Shakespearean heroes, he mourns his romantic failures and thwarted “greatness”:

Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in
upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
In the end, he accepts the role of “attendant lord” in life’s drama, “cautious” and “deferential,” aiding the major players but staying in the background. (He could be describing a model White House intern.)

In his own recent “Prufrock” tribute for the New Republic, Damian Lanigan called the poem “the battle cry for legions of bookish virgins, the supreme validation of the neurotic soul.” At first glance, this seems too triumphalist: surely it’s no battle cry but a cry of disgust and pain. After all, we never feel that Prufrock’s self-mockery is mistaken—that he is destined for greatness or that the beautiful girls will sing to him. However, he is poignantly wrong about one thing: “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” As Lanigan affirms, legions of readers have disagreed. Prufrock may lose out on love and glory, but his neurotic soul is validated in private eloquence.

By Eliot’s own admission, he was himself a frustrated virgin during the poem’s composition. Five years after its publication, his anxieties had curdled further. “Sweeney Erect” (1920) depicts the brutish title figure shaving in a brothel:

(The lengthened shadow of a man
Is history, said Emerson
Who had not seen the silhouette
Of Sweeney straddled in the sun).
Tests the razor on his leg
Waiting until the shriek subsides.
The epileptic on the bed
Curves backward, clutching at her sides.
The diminishment of sex in this sleazy little scene is the failure of history itself. Sweeney’s callous indifference both perverts and grimly affirms the Emersonian metaphor; he’s repellent, but he’s a Representative Man of his time. The prostitute’s seizure is a sort of shadow orgasm, an image of uncontrollable suffering.

This sexual desolation becomes downright apocalyptic in The Waste Land (1922), with its arid plains and rotten marriages, its arrogant youths “assault[ing]” jaded women, its sweeping indictment of cultural sterility. Near the close of that poem, a memory of “daring” breaks the spell of barrenness, heralding regenerative rain:

Then spoke the thunder
DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries …
The erotic crackle of the language leaves no doubt: this is the daring that eluded Prufrock. (“Do I dare / Disturb the universe?” … “Do I dare to eat a peach?”) It’s the transgressive daring of Romeo: “For stony limits cannot hold love out, / And what love can do that dares love attempt.” (Lewinsky reportedly once quoted these same lines in a valentine to President Clinton.) The “surrender” is exhilarating but impossible to “retract” and necessary to conceal. The “age of prudence” could be personal or historical, a period of caution, repression, waste.

It’s well known that Eliot wrote The Waste Land after the collapse of his first marriage. Though the poem was received as a judgment on a culture, it was also agonizingly personal—in a sense, the projection of a private breakdown onto the wider world. As both spouses’ letters attest, its vision of exhaustion and impotence drew on the poet’s bleak experience. Eliot hinted as much publicly in a comment on Tennyson’s In Memoriam: “It happens now and then that a poet by some strange accident expresses the mood of his generation, at the same time that he is expressing a mood of his own which is quite remote from that of his generation.”

“Strange accident,” maybe, but in the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), Eliot argued that the poet’s goal is precisely the depersonalizing (or universalizing) of mere “personality and emotions.” No wonder he has always appealed to readers who conceive of their lives in broad symbolic terms. In the mid-1980s, one young scholar, reflecting on The Waste Land and the “Tradition” essay, wrote to his girlfriend:

Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, [Eliot] accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. … This fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times.

The astute, brooding commentator was a 20-year-old college kid named Barack Obama.

Of course, few readers see their self-projections onto the “tradition” justified so spectacularly. Yet Eliot entices all of us, even the most Prufrockian schlub, to view history as personal—and to personify it as the source of our daily temptations and frustrations. The heart of this vision is a passage in “Gerontion” (1920):

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with wh

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

ESSAY
How Words Fail
Does language reflect the world? Or is it a distorting mirror that never gets reality straight?

BY CATHY PARK HONG
I always felt an anxiety about language, an anxiety that grew more pronounced when I began writing poetry. I rationalized this anxiety by rolling out the immigrant truisms. Growing up, I had to negotiate the yawning gap between speaking Korean at home and battling it out in the schoolyard with my faltering English (for a while, my flimsy arsenal was “You shut up!” for every imaginative invective hurled at me). I thought the English language was a tricky, trap-filled activity I had to somehow master like squash or table tennis. Nabokov once called English “an artificial, stiffish thing” and wrote, “If Russian was his music, English was his murder”; yet he wrote some of the most exquisite prose in the English language. I am no persecuted exile, however, but a pampered second-generation American whose childhood difficulties with English nonetheless left their indelible mark.

When professors first introduced the craft of poetry to me, I felt like Leonard Zelig, Woody Allen’s chameleon-man, who appropriated the behavior of whomever was around him. “Write about your family experience! Write about what is true to you,” one dramatic poetry professor told me in his office, and then gave me poems by Asian American poets who sounded exactly like Sharon Olds. I tried to compose clear, confessional gems but thought of them as interesting exercises in imitation. When the professor looked at them, he told me I was beginning to find a voice. “Whose voice?” I asked. “Yours!” he announced, and the meeting was over.

“Finding your voice” is a familiar workshop trope, one that assumes poetry is an expression of an authentic self. I was asked to write in natural, plainspoken speech (none of which felt natural or plain to me), and this teacher mistook the result as me. He embraced the principle that a poem represents a person who is a unified whole, and that the syntax of the poem is a window to the person’s, or writer’s, mind. The professor’s assumptions proved only that I was a damn good mimic.

My teacher’s concept of “the voice” is shared by many poets, including Adrian Blevins, who wrote an essay about the music of sentences for PoetryFoundation.org. She opines that the sentence structure of a poem gives us a clear diagnosis of the poet’s mind. In her reading of John Berryman’s “Dream Song 29,” she writes, “The ungrammatical . . . excerpt produces the emotional effects of an anxious or scattered psyche.” She sees a direct correlation between Berryman’s progressively unraveling mind and his unraveling syntax, concluding, “It’s interesting to note that Berryman began playing with syntax as a young man, when he was still, as far as anyone can determine, happy enough. As his life becomes more and more pressured . . . he becomes more and more serious and seems to lose, as a result, the sense of daring syntactical play. . . . It is therefore possible to speculate that Berryman’s suicide was at least partly the result of a loss of his syntactical distinctiveness.”

Blevins believes in a causal relationship between the author’s psychological state and the author’s syntactical choices, asserting that Berryman’s “loss of syntactical distinctiveness” helped lead to his own suicide. If we are to follow this logic, how to explain Hart Crane, who offed himself yet wrote poetry that is syntactically distinct? Or Sylvia Plath, who was at the top of her syntactic game when she shoved her head in the oven? Or that many poets today are happy on antidepressants yet write syntactically dull poetry? Blevins also observes that the sentences of Gertrude Stein and certain “post-post-post-postmodernists” are “stark raving mad,” implying that the poets must obviously be bonkers.

Blevins says that the poetic “sentence” is a unit for “talk” and that “talk” is the essence of the poet’s authentic being. I, however, cannot shake the belief that English is “an artificial, stiffish thing” and was grateful to discover Stein and a whole lineage of poets, in particular the Language poets, such as Lyn Hejinian and Ron Silliman, who pretty much thought the same. Their poetry emphasizes the materiality of language rather than language as transparent conduit for soulmaking. They asserted that the “I” in the poem is really a fabrication of the self rather than a direct mirror of the author’s psyche. As Hejinian once wrote, “One is not oneself, one is several, incomplete, and subject to dispersal.” From these ideas, the Language poets stylistically formed their own versions of what poet Ron Silliman dubbed the “new sentence”: poetic lines that are syntactically fractured, purposefully atonal, averse to the first person.

Ultimately, though, I was more drawn to poets who severed syntax out of a sense of cultural or political displacement rather than for the sake of experimentation. History and circumstance alienated these poets from their own language, placed them in the margins of their cultures, where they were witness to language’s limits in articulating a cohesive voice. Through deliberate inarticulation, they managed to strain out a charged music from syntactic chaff, a music borne out of negation. The poet I have most in mind is Paul Celan.

Celan’s relationship with the German language was tortured and ambivalent. Son of Jewish parents, he lived in Romania and grew up speaking German and Yiddish, Hebrew, Romanian, and Russian. When the German forces conquered Romania, they deported Celan’s parents to the concentration camps. Because his German mother tongue was also the language of his parents’ murderers, Celan wrestled with it in his poetry, a tension evident in the fissures, elisions, and neologisms of his poems. From these ruptures, Celan sutured a composition that radiates a haunting and terrifying music. To wit:

No one kneads us again out of earth and clay,
no one incants our dust.
No one.

Blessed art thou, No one.
In thy sight would
we bloom.
In thy
spite.

A Nothing
We were, are now, and ever
shall be, blooming:
the Nothing-, the
No-One’s-Rose.

With
Our pistil soul-bright
Our stamen heaven-waste,
Our corolla red
From the purpleword we sang
Over, O over
The thorn.
The repetition in “Psalm” creates a propulsive cadence. The poem begins with a negation of Genesis. The recurrence of “No one,” a reference to God (or his absence), creates a tonally hammering antiprayer as it denies Creation. “Blessed art thou” is negated by the thudding absence of “No one.” “No one” becomes “Nothing” and then returns as “No-One’s Rose.” The song, driven by absence, ends somewhat redemptively, as the flowering song or the word sings “over” the imagery of suffering, Christ’s thorn. Yet the singing is also fractured—the invocatory “O” in the line “Over, O over” is a hesitant break in cadence. Driven by spiritual necessity, the music of Celan’s poetry is both brutal and brutalized.

Like Celan, the poet John Taggart entwines the music of his linguistic experiments with a deep spiritual sensibility. Son of a Methodist clergyman, Taggart was born in Guthrie Center, Iowa, in 1942 and spent most of his childhood within the church culture. He equates “poem as gospel service,” positing that poetry should have a spiritual power that can be wrought from its own music. But Taggart is no traditional lyricist. His “voice” is not a stand-in for the self. His ultimate goal is to turn the poem into what he calls a “sound object,” where words cease to be metaphor and become part and parcel a compositional score.

Deeply influenced by the experimental music composer and writer John Cage and Objectivist poets such as George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky, Taggart incants through the “silence of the gaps” that surround the unadorned word. His words are mortarless, often unbound by clauses or punctuation. Rather than isolated poems, Taggart composes poetic variations that are circular, repetitive, and serial. In fact, his largest collection of poems, Loop,is aptly titled since his poetry obsessively returns to a set of nouns in different arrangements, as if each poem is a remix of the previous one. “Nativity,” for instance, scrolls down as if it were enacting a feverish sermon:

If you kneel
sender will teach
will teach you
here’s a sender
no bright harness
still a sender
if you kneel
will teach you
teach the shout.
But Taggart does not completely abandon content. Like Celan’s work, Taggart’s poetry can be read within a cultural-political context. Here is an excerpt from “Twenty-one Times,” Taggart’s most explicit poem about Vietnam and his own version of Wallace Stevens’s“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”:

4
Napalm: soap will not wash the word out
The word breaks through partitions and outer-walls
Breakthrough of cells of the word in the mouth.

5
Napalm: the heart rubbed and smeared with soap
The young heart is soiled with fire
Soap cannot cleanse the soiling of the fire.

6
Napalm: why the child caught on fire
The itching as of creatures for possession of words
Glitter for self and nation.
The repeated incantation “napalm” is an attempt at exorcism, as if to cleanse the horrors associated with napalm. But despite the attempt to “wash” it out, the word grows cancerously: “Breakthrough of cells of the word in the mouth.” As in many of Taggart’s other poems, the nouns in “Twenty-one Times” are reshuffled, and each time a noun is reintroduced, its associations become progressively menacing: “the young heart is soiled with fire” leads to “why the child caught on fire.” As the poem’s inexorable momentum builds to a frightening pitch, “napalm” as a word metastasizes inside the mouth, until poem’s end: “Napalm: speak and the word glows and plays / speak and suffer torment for love / because of you no one will have to write the word down.”

Celan and Taggart have created a distinctly haunting and astonishing music through solecisms and hesitations, through the broken sentence. For them, the disassociation of voice from language is not just a philosophical choice. It is also political. The voice is not always a freeing form of self-expression. It can prove to be a difficult transaction, a construction of fragments, as much conflicted demurral as actual communication, as much about what is unspeakable as about what is speakable.

Originally Published: July 31, 2006
Visit Harriet—the Poetry Foundation blog.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...article/178842

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
In Praise of Rareness
“The more respect you have for poetry, the less of it you will find adequate to your taste and needs.”

BY CHRISTIAN WIMAN
Every time we print an issue of Poetry that has more prose than poetry in it, we get at least one letter of complaint. These complaints vary in tone and temperateness, but inevitably there are sentences which run something like this: "Given the nature of your journal, and given its very name, what's with all the prose? Couldn't you use those pages for more poems? Shouldn't poetry be your emphasis?"

Well, yes and no. Yes, poetry should be (and most definitely is) our emphasis; but no, that does not necessarily translate into publishing more of it. In fact, I think a strong case can be made that the more respect you have for poetry, the less of it you will find adequate to your taste and needs. There is a limit to this logic, of course, or else Plato would be the patron saint of the art. But still, an overdeveloped appetite for poetry is no guarantee of taste or even of love, and institutionalized efforts at actually encouraging the over-consumption of poetry always seem a bit freakish, ill-conceived, and peculiarly American, like those mythic truck stops where anyone who can eat his own weight in rump roast doesn't have to pay for it.

Reading through old literary journals is not an activity I would ordinarily recommend, but it can be instructive in this context. People who know the history of Poetry usually point to a couple of indisputably high moments, the first under Harriet Monroe, who published the early work of just about all of the major Modernists; and the second under Henry Rago, who was on the whole more eclectic and adventurous than Monroe. It's interesting, then, to look at a couple of memorable issues from those times.

In June 1915 Monroe, in a now-famous story, took the advice of Poetry's foreign correspondent, Ezra Pound, and printed the first published poem of T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." The other contributors of verse in that issue include Skipwith Cannéll, William Griffith, Georgia Wood Pangborn, Dorothy Dudley, Bliss Carman, Arthur Davison Ficke, and Ajan Syrian, all of whose work sounds pretty much like this:


O leaves, O leaves that find no voice
In the white silence of the snows,
To bid the crimson woods rejoice,
Or wake the wonder of the rose!

Just over forty years later, when Rago was editor, Sylvia Plath made her first appearance in the magazine with six poems that, though not representative of Plath at her best, nevertheless practically blaze with radiance beside the poems of Lysander Kemp, Louis Johnson, Edith Tiempo, William Belvin, August Kadow, etc., etc.

My point here is not to illustrate how badly most poetry ages, nor to present some sort of "long perspective" by which to judge a contemporary journal. Because one generation's treasures are the next generation's jokes does not invalidate the earlier meanings people may have found. It's quite possible that for many people those now-indistinguishable poems alongside "Prufrock" provided just the provocation or consolation they needed on a bad day, or caused them to look at their immediate world not, Lord knows, with new eyes, but at least with old eyes, at least to look. (And in fact the general reaction to "Prufrock" was decidedly negative.) Time is the ultimate test of art, but it is not the only test of art. It is possible for a work that will not survive its own time to nevertheless speak truly to that time. For us, coming across passages like those I've just quoted is like discovering some foul, furred thing at the back of the refrigerator: one's whole spirit winces. But for someone somewhere they were once fresh. What happened then is happening now, I guarantee you. It is the bliss and curse of being alive.

But that's a digression. The point I want to make here has to do with the prose in these issues, which in both cases remains surprisingly fresh, readable, even relevant. In the 1913 issue there is a memorable, sharply-worded piece by Ezra Pound, which, ironically, fulsomely praises the utterly forgotten poetry of T. Sturge Moore. In the issue edited by Rago, there are excellent reviews by Thom Gunn and Charles Tomlinson, as well as an astute piece on verse drama by William Meredith. This tendency is borne out by other back issues of Poetry (issues old enough to allow for some perspective, I mean). The poetry is pretty much a steady backdrop of competence for the occasional and (now) unmistakable masterpieces. The prose is surprisingly consistent in its quality and appeal.

Does it follow from this that prose is the more durable art? Of course not. No one is reading that prose I just mentioned, nor is there any particular reason why they should be. Critical prose exists solely for the sake of the moment in which it is written. Its function is either to bring to light some work from the past that has been neglected or misunderstood for the sake of enlarging and refining contemporary consciousness, or to help readers know what contemporary works to read, and how to read them. The bulk of the critical prose that survives is written by famous poets, and it survives only because the poetry of these people has survived. There are a few exceptions to this, but in general aiming at eternity with critical prose is like praying to a potato. You may very well get God's attention, but probably only because He likes a good laugh.

Is prose simply easier to write than poetry? Again, not necessarily. Prose can be damnably difficult to write, but it's been my experience that one can always will oneself to write it. Right now, for instance, because I am busy and lazy in equal measure, I am bashing these sentences out hurriedly before the issue goes to the printer. I think we can all agree that what I am writing here is not, let us say, for the ages. But perhaps at least a majority of us can also agree that it is written in perfectly adequate prose. All sorts of useful things may be written in perfectly adequate prose: editorials, history, philosophy, theology, even lasting novels. But there is no such thing as a perfectly adequate poem, because a poem into which some strange and surprising excellence has not entered, a poem that is not in some inexplicable way beyond the will of the poet, is not a poem.

The truth is, sometimes poetry is almost embarrassingly easy to write. There are the famous stories: Keats writing "Ode to a Nightingale" in a single morning, Coleridge channeling "Kubla Kahn," Milton essentially taking dictation from God (or perhaps from the Devil, because that's who came out looking better) while writing Paradise Lost. But besides these instances, just about every poet admits to some simultaneous feeling of helplessness and unaccustomed power in the writing of his best poems, some element of mystery. "If you do not believe in poetry," Wallace Stevens once wrote, "you cannot write it," and indeed this is the chief "difficulty" in poetry, that it comes so infrequently, that it remains beyond our will.

Anyone involved with the institutions of poetry would do well to remember this. With all the clamor in this country about the audience for poetry, a veritable barnyard of noise into which I myself have been known to bray, we shouldn't lose sight of one of poetry's chief strengths: how little of it there is. I don't mean how little there is in the culture, but how little there is at any one time that is truly excellent. Poetry's invisibility is deplorable and worth fighting. Its rareness is admirable and the chief source of its strength. Indeed, I sometimes think that if we honored its rarity more, poetry's invisibility would be less of a problem, or at least we might define the notion of visibility differently. Seamus Heaney has noted that if a person has a single poem in his head, one that he returns to and through which, even in small ways, he understands his life better, this constitutes a devotion to the art. It is enough. And in fact I find that this is almost always how non-specialists read poetry—rarely, sparingly, but intensely, with a handful of high moments that they cling to. The emphasis is on the memorable individual poem, and poetry in bulk is rarely memorable.

All of this ought to have implications for the writer of poems as well. If poetry is so rare in the world, if so much of it is dross, just think how much rarer it must surely be in your (our!) own work. There is nothing wrong with thinking of poetry as a process, with developing a way of writing that allows you to churn out verse. Nothing wrong with it, that is, unless you give up all attempt at discrimination and insist on publishing all of these efforts. It may not be the case that anyone who is writing a book of poems every two or three years is writing too much, but he or she is certainly publishing too much. The great thing about writers like Hopkins, Larkin, Bishop, Bunting, Eliot, Herbert, Justice, and Bogan is that they demanded more from their work than anyone else did, and their discipline and dissatisfaction are now our pleasure.

What might all this mean for a literary magazine? Sixty years ago George Dillon and Hayden Carruth, who were then editors of this magazine, created a firestorm when they published an issue that had a mere eleven pages of verse in it. They explained their actions by saying that there simply weren't enough poems on hand that merited publication, and that to have lowered the bar of admittance would have been to lower the prestige of the magazine. It's impossible to know whether or not they were justified, because it's impossible to recover the material from which they were choosing. My suspicion, though, being familiar with Carruth's work as an anthologist and critic, and having edited this magazine myself for several years, is that they were. I also suspect that it was not at all a denigration of poetry, but an exaltation of it.
C.W.

Originally Published: January 8, 2007

Very interesting take on poetry. His truth but not necessarily my truth.
A poet should never or else rarely ever write Prose .
And by writing that I just broke that rule. ---Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Counter-Clockwise: Editorial Manifesto

Clockwise Cat exists as a triumph over tyranny: The tyranny of time, the tyranny of linguistic convention, the tyranny of hierarchy and political oppression.

Time in this context is construed as that which constrains and constricts us – the elements that inhibit our imaginations and attempt to confine us in conformist cages. Indeed, these conformist cages are layered like Russian dolls – we break out of one cage only to find we are confined by a still-bigger one. Time is a human construct that was subliminally conceived to delude us into thinking that work, not leisure and creativity, was the “aim” of life. Thus, the tyranny of time is the tyranny of work. We must work because that is the system that power has built. Clockwise Cat, however, hisses at and pisses on the idea that life is about work.

Cats, of course, defy time, and fully apprehend leisure and pleasure. Their purrs are vibrations of the universe reminding us to pace ourselves and enjoy existence. Their fur is like cosmic velvet to the touch, its plush texture calming our agitations. Cats sleep the majority of their day because, well, why not? Sleep is the mystical space between life and death, a delirious oblivion where angels and demons tangle in holy visions, which provides refuge and refreshment.

Cats prove that time doesn’t really exist.

(Granted, the universe operates on a sort of “time” paradigm, but humans have seized upon this elusive idea and ruthlessly pounded out the cosmic core of it. We must aim to re-capture the mystical nexus of time, and not attempt to “tame” it. Time is undomesticated, not doomed for imprisonment in clock-cages.)



Linguistic convention is anything language-wise that complacently perpetuates the status quo. Language is a living entity, and should be employed vigorously and imaginatively, in order to keep it flowing forward rather than stagnating like mosquito-ridden puddles. Indeed, linguistic convention acts as a mosquito to language, sucking it dry of life, bleeding it of its very essence. Language must be free and feral, allowing for radical reinvention, or it crumbles under its own dead weight. Those poets and writers such as the Symbolists, Surrealists, Dadaists, Magic Realists, Beats, the post-modern experimentalists, the Avant Garde-ists, the Gonzo Journalists – hell, even Dickinson and Shakespeare, – hell, even Eliot – were and are intuitively cognizant of the urgency of injecting outlandish innovation into language to keep it fresh and real.

You could say that ALL poets defy linguistic convention in some way, and that may be true to a point. But I say, it’s the ones who instinctively and deliberately subvert convention and create a wild, authentic, individualistic, iconoclastic idiom who are the true language-guerillas. e.e. cummings, anyone?

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...article/248812

Four Englands
Four Debut British Poets Being Variously English

BY TODD SWIFT


This omnibus review is very much about English poetry, and Englishness in contemporary poetry from England, and, perhaps even better, young English poets. By something like a happy coincidence, these four collections are each by a poet who has won an Eric Gregory Award (more on this in a moment) — and, even more pleasingly, they won their awards more or less consecutively, in 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009 (Martinez de las Rivas, Mort, Berry, Brookes). So, here are four poets who have been noticed, and even encouraged, as some of the main rising stars of new poetry in “these isles.” Well, these isles are crowded with poets, many Welsh, Irish, or Scottish, but any list of the most appreciated of the YBPs (Young British Poets) would include these poets — along with, say, Ahren Warner, Sam Riviere, Luke Kennard, Heather Phillipson, Sandeep Parmar, Caleb Klaces, Jen Hadfield, Jack Underwood, Liz Berry, James Byrne, Jon Stone, and Clare Pollard.

There is something like a broad consensus that has been forming, based on appearances in the larger British magazines, acquisition of prizes and university degrees, and publication in pamphlet form with publishers like Faber and Faber, or, in a smaller way, tall-lighthouse, when Roddy Lumsden was its editor. The Eric Gregory goes every year to a handful of the best poets thirty years or under, for an unpublished manuscript. To win one is to get a nice chunk of money, and 
a very good shot at a publishing deal within the next few years.

In the case of the poets here whose books from late 2012 to 2014 are under review, this wait has been between three and nine years. One of the collections is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, which is the sort of stamp of approval most poets would gnaw a finger off for; Berry has won a Forward Prize, and Mort been asked to judge the Forwards already (a great honor for a debut poet); Brookes was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize; Martinez de las Rivas is being spoken of as a major new Christian poet. Each is from a recognized publisher — Faber and Chatto & Windus, relatively major players; and Salt, the feisty newer kid on the block (despite having published hundreds of poetry books). In short, here are four poets American poets and poetry readers would do well to acquaint themselves with — and yet, none of these debuts are likely to be widely sold, reviewed, or read beyond Britain’s borders, at least for the time being.

These poets come out of a certain tradition, or at an angle from The Tradition, as one might expect of poets in their twenties or early thirties. Each has a few notable precursors, so-called presiding spirits, who have very much shaped their work’s temperament, goals, and style. Helen Mort, a poet from Sheffield in the relatively impoverished North of England (home to the major indie band Arctic Monkeys), writes under the influence of Tony Harrison and Simon Armitage, yet her major themes and music come even more from Sean O’Brien and Don Paterson — each, in their way, very male poets. 
In a sense, Mort is the strong female Northern Poet, come at last (she does not very much resemble the current poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, who nevertheless has publicly praised her work).

Emily Berry is only one of the “Berrywomen” now active in London poetry circles — the other is Liz Berry, whose own debut was published this year. Ms. Emily’s is a berry-red book from Faber, with the very pop title of Dear Boy. Berry is from London, where she has lived her whole life and it is something of a rude shock to actually read a Faber collection by a British poet from the publishing capital itself, who is, for instance, not Irish or Scottish. She is resolutely English in tone and manner, in much the same way as her hero, Morrissey of The Smiths is; indeed, Berry’s key precursors may be said to be the great pop and indie lyricists since the eighties, during which time she grew up. But this is half the story. In other ways, her ironic, edgy, and peculiarly strangled emotionalism seems to reach out and grab Plath from the grave and demand she return, this time as a pastiche ghoul. Berry, then, has a skewed relationship to how contemporary British poetry has heretofore tended to sound — unless one had been reading Luke Kennard, the strongest poet of this new generation, who seems to have invented several of the key tropes, forms, and concepts that Berry herself assays.

James Brookes is even more English than Berry, if such is possible. That is because, in a daring or foolhardy swerve back to confront the major living poet of his place and time, Brookes seeks to take on Geoffrey Hill at his own game. Surely Hill, like Milton or Yeats, has mastered a baroque and learned rhetoric so steeped in history and language as to be inescapably his own? Well, yes, and no. The general way of putting it is that Brookes “reminds” us of Hill. I would say he out-Hills Hill, in being, in this debut, even more concerned with the history of kings and parliament, the violence and graphic details of world wars, and the demands of place, in this instance, Sussex, where he was fortunately born a stone’s throw from Shelley’s “boyhood home.” It is perhaps unimaginable for an American poet born in 1986 (even if it was a few yards from Hailey, Idaho) to unironically compose and publish poems with titles like “Amen to Artillery,” “Silent Enim Leges Inter Arma,” “Surveying the Queen’s Pictures,” or “Lucifer at Camlann.” This is high poetry, full stop.

However, in terms of an attempt to turn lyric modernism’s highest Hill into a mountain, or unaging intellectual monuments, we must end with the Somerset-raised Martinez de las Rivas, whose Christian poetry seems almost impossibly erudite (by contemporary standards), with blatant echoes of Joyce, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, David Jones, and Lowell, and several poems that (seemingly without irony) break off into Anglo-Saxon, Greek, or Latin. It is apparently the most learned debut by a twenty-first-century British poet; we in England last saw work with this Poundian high modernist ethos in Bunting. Depending on your relationship to words like “elitism” and “accessibility,” Terror either appalls or thrills, or both — as it is no doubt (given its title) meant to.

What we have here are excellent emerging poets, each to a certain degree acclaimed, each imbued with a seriousness of purpose that varies between the almost-sentimental to the almost-portentous, with way-stops any fellow traveler will recognize as arch irony, wit, reserve, and tonally restrained elegance. These are the stations of the English poetic cross, and yet these pilgrims make something new of them while revisiting the old blood-dimmed haunts.


•


Helen Mort’s Division Street opens with a quote from Stevenson about Jekyll and Hyde, followed by a poem playing on the fact that her name means “death” in French; and various poems across the book relate to divided loyalties, identities, and the dangers (and promise) of names. Anyone who has followed British poetry since 1990 will know this is territory that deceased British-American poet Michael Donaghy staked out as his own in the poem “Smith,” often cited as a modern British classic. However, this idea of doubles, and doubling, and double identities, central to Scottish literature from James Hogg to Robert Louis Stevenson, indeed, J.K. Rowling, is perhaps most famously explored, even obsessively so, in most of Don Paterson’s collections; Paterson is the best-known advocate of Donaghy’s work (as well as his publisher at Picador). Mort’s collection is almost a direct reply to these influences — and is especially Patersonian in its sensorial enjoyment of alcohol, pubs, and drink in general — few other poetry collections have such a fug of lock-ins as this one. In her most Patersonian moment, in the poem “The Complete Works of Anonymous,” she even says, “I’ll raise a glass to dear Anonymous: the old / familiar anti-signature, the simple courage / of that mark.” In Mort’s Northern English world, raising a glass is no bad thing. Indeed, as she tells us in “Oldham’s Burning Sands,” “people sing the sweetest when they’re drunk.” As a credo for a poet it promises lots of hangovers after the carped diem. “Stainless Stephen,” a local, provincial comedian down on his luck, even when shut out of most establishments, “knows a pub across the river / where the doors will never shut.” Even the elements want to possess the local pub — snow, in the poem “Fur,” wants “to claim The Blacksmith’s Arms.” In the poem “Fagan’s” there is a pub quiz host “part-drunkard, part-Messiah.” The Division seems to be between those sober, and less so. In fact, it is more than that. Mort’s poems can sometimes be a bit sentimental, or force a bonhomie or epiphany past the point of no return, but her music is almost never wrong — indeed, in terms of her skill at expertly deploying fairly conservative rhythm and rhyme, she seems the equal of Paterson or Duffy.

More vitally, her origins appear authentic — her Northern “voice” underwritten by a sense of generational blight and hardscrabble self-empowerment that few poets from the South of England could ever reference. Not since Tony Harrison, it seems, has a poet wanted to make so much of what divides “uz” from them. The two most noteworthy poems in the collection, which as a whole is as openly 
readable as any mainstream British poetry is likely to ever be this decade, and hence, as likely to be prized for such, both emphasize the rather striking (pun intended) contrast between Mort’s non-elite past (growing up Northern, and less privileged) and her elite present, or more recent past (Cambridge student/graduate). This becomes the tension of her own life and work, but, more broadly, the perceived tension of the English current today.

The great poem in the book, a sequence in five parts, is called “Scab.” A scab, which we know is a wound’s barely healed covering often picked at, to no good effect, is also the ugly name for someone who crosses a picket line during a strike to find work — often, poignantly, betraying family and friends in the process of making ends meet. This resonates with the violent history of the suppression of the miners’ strikes under Thatcherism. Mort considers how her own crossing, from Sheffield to Cambridge, is an equivalent selling out of more tribal loyalties. In the bravura last few lines, she achieves a tonal force simple yet worthy of her concerns, likely to make the poem essential reading for anyone concerned with such issues:

One day, it crashes through
your windowpane; the stone,
the word, the fallen star. You’re left
to guess which picket line
you crossed — a gilded College gate,
a better supermarket, the entrance
to your flat where, even now, someone
has scrawled the worst insult they can — 
a name. Look close. It’s yours.
That is the big poem in the book, but to this reader, the more elegantly affecting is “Miss Heath,” a poem in nine more-or-less tercets, whose narrative is easily summarized. Mort writes the kind of popular English poem whose subject and theme can be summed up easily, and is thus ideal for exams; this is what the experimental poets 
loathe about so-called mainstream British poetry, that it d

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178034

INTERVIEW
Former Freight Hopper Makes Good
Richard Wilbur on meeting Frost, writing in foxholes, and falling in and out of fashion.

BY D. H. TRACY

Former army cryptographer, freight hopper, and Broadway lyricist Richard Wilbur (1921—) published his first book of poems in 1947. He quickly developed a reputation, cemented by subsequent collections, for felicitous, elaborate, even-tempered verse, and his recent Collected Poems 1943-2004 is a remarkable record of sustained optimism and commitment to craft. No poet of his generation has been more committed to careful, organized expression or has more thoroughly mastered the forms and devices of traditional poetry; this conservative aesthetic and his deep love for “country things” link Wilbur to the Roman poet Horace and to his fellow American Robert Frost. Wilbur had an academic career at Wesleyan University, and remains an active translator, particularly of classic French drama. [Read D.H. Tracy’s extended Wilbur biography.]

Wilbur lives in Cummington, Massachusetts. This conversation took place on April 7, 2006.

D.H. Tracy: You’ve had a very long career—your first book came out 60 years ago next year. Some of the questions I’d like to ask have to do with your perceptions of things over time.

I’m surprised by the strenuousness of the criticism your poetry has sometimes generated, and by the contrast between this strenuousness and the timbre of the poems themselves. When you were starting out, did you have an idea of how controversial it would be to write optimistic formal verse?

Richard Wilbur: Actually, in my background, at that time, most of the poets I admired—and many of them were alive—were capable of writing metrically. Many of them chose to rhyme. My favorite poet, then and always, was Robert Frost, and I didn’t hesitate to follow in his footsteps. There were people at the time I was commencing to write who didn’t regard Frost as a Modernist, but now I believe he’s considered to be one form that Modernism could take.

So I never felt I was electing to be “old hat” from the start. It seemed a kind of poetry that anybody at the moment might like to write, and indeed many people were doing so. It wasn’t really until the ’60s that there was a general turning away from so-called formal verse.

DHT: You knew Frost personally, isn’t that so?

RW: Yes, I did. I had the luck to meet him almost immediately after World War II, when my wife and I and my daughter went up to Cambridge to be at the Harvard graduate school. He was spending his winters in Cambridge.

I had a certain advantage with him right away because my wife’s grandfather, William Hayes Ward, had been the editor of The Independent, in which Frost’s first publication occurred. It was his poem “My Butterfly.” My wife’s great-aunt, Susan Hayes Ward, was an expert on hymnody and a great lover of poetry, and the person whom Frost described all his life as “the first friend of my poetry.” That meant that Frost smiled on us from the beginning.

DHT: Some of the poems from your first book were composed while you were still in the army. And you’ve talked about how you first deeply read Poe out of a paperback in a foxhole at Monte Cassino. Do you remember the circumstances behind the composition of any of the poems?

RW: I’m not sure that I can call up the moment. Even if you’re in a divisional signal company—which means that you are very busy, and imperiled some of the time—you find that, as Evelyn Waugh once said, war is mostly waiting around. You sit in a hole in the ground somewhere, or in a truck somewhere, or behind a couple sandbags, and you pass the time by forgetting, if possible, where you are for the moment.

And I forgot myself in all sorts of places during World War II. I had a young man’s ability to sit down in the corridor of a troop ship going overseas, with people’s feet all around me, and read books and even scribble on a poem. I did that sort of thing at every opportunity.

DHT: Can you give us a basic sketch of a day in the life of an army cryptographer? Were you usually outdoors? In a field office? By a radio? What did your duties consist of?

RW: Most of what I did was, as you say, cryptographic work: I was breaking enciphered messages and sending out messages in cipher. Our greatest weapons, on the cryptographic side, were big machines. Those had to be toted around in large trucks. We worked in a truck, very often. Under unpleasant circumstances, like the Anzio beachhead, we would dig the truck into a bank and make it as secure as possible. At other times, we would just sit there in the damn truck and work. We also established ourselves in buildings, here and there—wherever we could find a little bit of shelter so that we could do complex work with full attention. We sought that shelter.

DHT: You were initially thrown out of cryptanalysis school because of suspected disloyalty and leftist sympathies, after they discovered a copy of Marx in your possession.

RW: Quite ridiculous, really. When I reported to my basic training camp, I took along a large Modern Library volume of Marx’s Capital, which I had never read. I thought that (as I’ve just said) war was going to involve a lot of waiting around, and I might as well read that big fat book. I’ve still never read it.

But the fact is that, during inspection, when we had to have our footlockers open for the eye of the inspecting officer, it looked pretty bad. So the counterintelligence corps people decided they better look into me.

I really wasn’t very radical. You might say I was a strong New Dealer—an admirer of Franklin Roosevelt and an adherent of the union movement. I had no really dangerous leftist convictions. I do think that during World War II—and it’s probably indeed the same right now in Washington—what is preferred is that people who handle secret material should not have strenuous political attitudes of any kind. I can recall that when I was going through basic training, we were shown, as a matter of what they called indoctrination, a couple of rather good films by Frank Capra, one of which essentially traced the development of Fascism in Europe, and the clear moral of which was that we should have stopped them in Spain. You were supposed to sit in front of that movie and absorb it, yet if you went out in the company street thereafter and started talking about how we should have stopped them in Spain, people who were security-minded would feel a certain alarm. They did not want the passionately political in secret work.

DHT: How common an occurrence were these demotions? Did anything similar happen to any of your friends?

RW: Yes. One of my friends, who had I think been in the Communist Party (I’m not sure), was thrown out of some secret work, and comically enough he ended up rather in charge of teletype communications for the southern ETO [European Theater of Operations].

If you had a specialist number of some kind, identifying you as having some sort of ability, you were likely, regardless of people’s doubts about your security, to end up practicing that talent and that training. So I, even though my service record—which was forwarded along with me wherever I went—contained some sort of an indication that I was suspected of disloyalty, I found myself, through a series of accidents, doing exactly the secret work for which I had been trained, because the 36th Infantry Division needed a cryptographer.

DHT: Did this treatment rattle you, or did it seem entirely in keeping with what you knew about the army and the way it operated?

RW: I find it hard to report on my frame of mind about that; I was not dashed by it. It seems to me that I had a considerable feeling of knockabout enjoyment of things in those days, a feeling of adventure. So I just waited to see what would happen to me, and to absorb the shocks that might come.

DHT: Speaking of Edgar Allan Poe in the foxhole, it’s striking that the early American figures you seem to be in conversation with are Poe and Longfellow, and the monumental European figure who most interests you seems to be Milton. More commonly poets seem to fall in with Whitman and Dickinson, and then Dante. Have these figures and affiliations taken you in unusual directions relative to your peers?

RW: I don’t suppose that when I started writing poetry I was trying to place myself in the likely pattern of American poetry as a whole. I really responded to Walt Whitman rather favorably when I was young, and got to like him much more when I was older and teaching a course in American poetry. In spite of the fact that Whitman is thought of as the great American bard, like many people I read very little of him in my youth. He is a great unread poet for most people.

At present, to hear people talk in the academies, you would think that the things that happened in American poetry were Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. But when I was starting to read and know American poetry, I read many other people, and enjoyed, for example, Emerson. I liked the best of Longfellow very much. But my great attachments were to the Modernists. Really I responded to the whole lot of them. The list, if I gave it to you, would simply be the contents of a Modernist poetry anthology.

DHT: In the early ’60s you traveled to the Soviet Union and had contact with a number of writers there, translating, among others, Andrei Voznesensky, whose books were selling hundreds of thousands of copies. Some of the remarks you’ve made about Soviet poets during this period, who were writing “high demotic” poetry for an eager, newly literate public, have been fascinating—you’ve compared their situation with Longfellow’s in the mid-19th century.

RW: That’s right. It was a very comparable situation that I found when I went to the Soviet Union. In the first place, the Soviet reader was someone in many cases proud of a new literacy and seriously aspiring to higher things, and the Soviet poets, even those who had a certain freedom of mind and attitude, felt that they were the servants of those people, and that it was their business to energize and enlighten them. Therefore, people like Andrei Voznesensky sold out very large editions whenever they published. It did seem very enviable to me.

DHT: Have you kept up with any of those writers, either personally or with their work?

RW: For quite a while I did keep up with Voznesensky, but I haven’t really seen him for about ten years now or had any correspondence with him. I suppose that some of our cordiality did have to do with the need to bridge the gap between our countries, and now that doesn’t seem to be the chief aspect of the international situation.

I think actually that Yevgeny Yevtushenko is living and teaching here in the United States, somewhere in the Southwest [editor’s note: at the University of Tulsa]. He’s almost migrated to us.

DHT: What do you think about high demotic poetry in the United States right now? Is there any? If so, is there is a use for it? If not, is there a need for it?

RW: When I think of the 19th-century fireside, it’s rather easy to imagine a volume of Longfellow on the table by the easy chair. There are a lot of other distractions in our contemporary American life—with some of them I’m quite unacquainted. I don’t have a computer, for example. I know nothing of the Internet. But I know that the Internet is a large part of life for people now. And of course there’s television and videos and all the rest. I think that some of the entertainment aspect of poetry is less important to the majority of people now. They find their entertainment more readily in other media.

But just two days ago I was reading poems over at Tufts College in Medford, and a young woman in the audience asked me pretty much the question you’ve asked. I thought, well, instead of talking about how Modernism estranged the common reader and so on, let’s see if I can’t think of what’s positive about the present situation. One thing I thought of was simply the way poetry books sell at present. My first volume came out in an edition of 750 copies. I think that no New York publisher would come out with so small a first printing nowadays. I can’t estimate the likely sales of a good book of poetry now, but they’re much higher than they used to be.

Then there’s the matter of the poetry reading—I don’t mean the slam, but the reading. When I was a kid, the only people who went around on the lecture circuit very notably were pros like Robert Frost and Edna Millay and Carl Sandburg and, a little earlier, Vachel Lindsay. It was a limited number of people who had great power not only as poets but as entertainers. Starting I should say just after World War II, the poetry reading began to be a form of concert that was very frequent and well attended, and didn’t require that the reader be a pro as an entertainer. A kind of savvy audience developed—an audience of people who know that there’s a difference between a poetry concert and a concert of music. I walk out of any concert of music feeling that I’ve heard all the music. Of course I didn’t, but I tell myself that I have, and feel that I have. At poetry readings, you have to be willing to let a few things go by you, to be puzzled and frustrated from time to time, and to tolerate that as part of the poetry-reading experience.

Well, I seem to be running on, but I think there are positive aspects. Of course I could mention also radio broadcasters who read poems of some real quality, apparently to large audiences. That, too, is a good sign.

DHT: Speaking of writing for wide audiences, I wonder if you could speak a bit about your experiences writing Broadway lyrics. What habits did you have to get rid of or rein in to write for musical accompaniment, and to collaborate with others?

RW: You do have to change your way of working, in order to write Broadway lyrics. I know that, except for the occasional happy birthday poem, which is directed to somebody, I don’t write for people “out there”—I write to see if I can’t understand what it is I want to say. I assume myself to be an average human being, and I figure if I make things clear and interesting to myself, others might find them so.

But Broadway lyrics are an entirely different matter. There you have to think as knowledgably as you can about what is going to please a particular kind of New York theatergoer. When I was working on Candide, [Leonard] Bernstein and [Lillian] Hellman and I referred to him as “the man from Scarsdale.” He’s out there in the third or fourth row, he’s been dragged to the show by his wife, and you hope to say things that will keep him awake, will amuse him, and will be fully understandable to him. I remember when I was, as it were, “trying out” for the job of lyricist on Candide, I wrote for Hellman and Bernstein a sample lyric based on a passage in Voltaire’s Candide. It was one in which some shipwrecked kings in the middle of the Atlantic were resolving to lead improved lives if rescued. One of them was saying, “I’ll find myself a humble cot and cultivate the chicken.” The man from Scarsdale would not know that “cot” could mean a cottage or little farmstead of some kind—he would associate it with the army-and-navy store, and with the bunks at summer camp. So you can’t get away with too many clever rhymes of that kind. You really do need to think all the time about the people for whom you’re writing. I always preferred to write for an imaginary, quite bright and amusable person. When you start writing for people, you’d better not be condescending or you’ll lose.

DHT: You’ve talked about the difficulty of writing verse drama, and you spent a year in New Mexico trying to write your own plays. How would you put your finger on the difficulty?

RW: I turned out to be perfectly horrible at the conception and animation of characters. I could think of all sorts of amusing lines, but I could not get any kind of human action going on the stage. I, like many poets, do not have a narrative imagination. I tend to be able to pursue an argument for a certain distance, but I’m not really a storyteller.

I was once given a test by Harry Murray at Harvard. It was called a thematic apperception test. He was asking a number of writers to take it. He put a picture in front of me and said, “Tell me what you see there.” Well, the picture I remember was several frogs sitting around a pond; behind them, a hill; over the hill, a view of a house and a chimney with some smoke coming out of it. What I said was that it interested me the way the clouds in the sky repeated the forms of the frogs. And Mr. Murray said, “Yes, but who lives in that house?” And I said, “I’m damned if I know.” The last thing I was going to do was to tell a story about that picture. But any novelist would instantly have done so.

DHT: Are there poets you admire who do demonstrate this kind of dramatic gift? Yeats, perhaps, or Eliot?

RW: It seems to me that Eliot proved in the best of his poetic plays that he had a capacity for narrative. I think Brad Leithauser does too. I can think of a number of people who have written sustained story poems which I’ve found it pleasant to read. But the most I can do in that line is to write a poem such as my “Mind-Reader,” which is a Browningesque monologue in which the speaker does go from one point to another within his life, but is much more conveying his consciousness than his story.

DHT: A major project of yours has been the translation of the verse plays of Molière and Racine. Did you conceive of the project as “corrective” or “nutritious,” either to yourself or to poetry generally?

RW: I thought it was going to do all sorts of good to translate Molière’s The Misanthrope. It’s such a wonderful play that I wanted to do it properly and make it available to our stage. Happily, it turned out that I did have a talent for that. I don’t think I was trying to improve myself in any way, but actually translating that wonderful play did have an effect on my imagination when it came to my own poems. If you work through a Molière play trying to write lines which an actor will wish to speak with conviction, and the right flavor, it’s going to make it a little more possible to write within your own range. I began to have more of a dramatic voice, and to have more of what amount to characters in my poems.

DHT: You’ve written some children’s poetry of pretty sophisticated riddling and verbal play, requiring some attention to the formation and spelling of words (to find the “pig” in “spigot,” and so on). Were these poems tested on your own children? Or did they come about only after having seen your kids go through their language acquisition?

RW: When I was a kid, I was very amused by amusable poetry. I was fond, for example, of Edward Lear from the beginning, and of all sorts of nonsense verse, and of Lewis Carroll. I loved the Alice books, and read them annually at Christmastime. So I was prepared, I guess, to write some kids’ stuff as I got older. But of course the great catalyst was my children. My children loved to have me tell them stories, and they loved to hear and recite funny poems intended for children—things like the cautionary verses of Hilaire Belloc amused them all a great deal.

Another thing I did with all my children was to play dinner-table games, and that too fed into my initial project as a children’s author. But actually, the first thing I ever did was a book called Loudmouse, which I wrote at the invitation of Louis Untermeyer for a series of books he was editing called Modern Masters Books for Children. Louis had looked around for a lot of writers who had never written for children but might be expected to do it well. My first book, a narrative about a loud-voiced mouse, was written for that series, and it included some little jingles. I got to serious writing of poetry for children with my series of poems called “Opposites.”

I said just now that when I was writing Broadway lyrics, I tried to write for an imagined person of some taste and intelligence. I found myself doing the same thing with children’s verse. I did not write down to an imagined creepy little child; I wrote up to my own children at their best, and to intelligent, lively children generally. This meant when my first Opposites book was published and reviewed in the Times, a reader wrote in and said, “I’m an adult, and I enjoyed that book. Is that all right?” I was always delighted to find there were as many adult readers as there were child readers. A woman I respected very much always kept a copy of Opposites on her bathroom cabinet—I was proud of that.

DHT: It seems there is a pastoral element in your work that has true seductive value, but on the other hand you’re scrupulous about holding the city in equal esteem. Is this a balancing act for you, or does it come naturally?

RW: I think it does come naturally. I have spent more of my life in the country than in the city. But I was born in New York City and have lived there, in Greenwich Village or elsewhere, from time to time. I’ve lived in Cambridge, a delightful town. I don’t see any reason to feel superior to city life when it comes to writing poems. I was always very happy to discover that a nature poet like William Cullen Bryant could also write quite well about the town.

I’m happiest in the country. I was brought up on a farm in New Jersey about 20 miles out of the big city, and I was about a hundred feet from a barn full of cows, and experienced every aspect of farming as I grew up. I’ve also always been a tramper in the woods. Living as I do now in one of the hill towns of northwestern Massachusetts, I find there’s lots of good material all around.

DHT: Does the farm where you grew up still exist?

RW: No. As a matter of fact, the town of North Caldwell is not in any way recognizable now. It’s been absolutely engulfed by the spreading metropolis. So I haven’t seen it for about ten years. One friend of mine still lives there. I ought to go and see him. But none of the trees I climbed are there anymore.

DHT: As a poet who works in received forms, how do you think about originality? Do you feel a responsibility to use form in original ways? Or do you think of originality as overvalued? Is it even a virtue? What does originality consist of, for you?

RW: I don’t have any interest in the repetition of the past. I regard what you just called “received forms” as so much equipment, really—that’s all that they are. I find that the use of meters, rhymes, and stanzas is a way of saying what I want to say with greater power and pleasure. I would be very troubled if people thought my book of poems had too fearfully traditional an air. I try to make every poem different from the last, and I simply use the meters and the other received, inherited formal elements to enforce what it is that I’m saying.

DHT: As fashions have come and gone, have the terms your work has been received in changed much? Do you think the criticism has gotten coarser or finer, closer to the point or farther away?

RW: Anybody who uses forms as I do is going to go in or out of fashion. When I started writing, there was a very warm reception to my poems generally, and they were cheerfully accepted on the formal side. Come the 1960s, I was suddenly very much out of fashion. So I spent a decade or more simply being defiant, and going on doing things the only way I knew how.

Now I should say there’s a revival of tolerance for so-called formal poetry, and also, many people who have gotten a bit sick of the prosaic creative-writing poem of the past few years have learned to read formal poetry with relish and understanding.

DHT: Do you feel any sense of vindication about this? Do you think it’s a temporary development?

RW: I don’t regard form as a cause, so I’m not really militant about it. One of my favorite poets of all time, who never gets tiring for me, is William Carlos Williams. I can’t imagine lining myself up against him, or against any school of writers presumably descended from him. Free verse is awfully hard to write, but I much admire it when somebody can do it well, as most people cannot.

DHT: Elsewhere, talking about William Carlos Williams, you’ve indicated the affinity both of you have for things and objects, and how both of you avoid approaching the spiritual through the immaterial or the abstract. How do you approach airier poets who do approach the spiritual in this fashion? Do they hold any interest for you?

RW: I daresay I could think a bit and come up with a list of poets who seem to me not very much in touch with the concrete world but [who] nevertheless have power. Yeats is rather that way, really. If you look around in Yeats hoping for a good description of something, you’ll look all day. It’s mostly something else—a form of poetry rather close to the incantatory and oratorical, which I find quite wonderful sometimes.

I shall make Yeats my champion of the abstract.

DHT: In 1974 someone asked you where you thought poetry would be in the year 2000, and you replied that you saw “no one powerful style prevailing or developing,” and you spoke somewhat ruefully of the development of a marketplace where work is accorded space according to how easy or difficult it is to classify. Would you say time has borne out this prediction?

RW: I do think that development is tiresome. No really good poet is describable in terms of his school affiliations. I do think that when people begin to put together anthologies in that spirit, they include a lot of inferior work by association, and neglect much that is more original.

I’m not aware, really, of our present poetic scene consisting of a lot of schools. Do you see it that way?

DHT: It seems more fragmented than it was several decades ago, but maybe I’m mistaken.

Are there developments over the past 30, 40, 50 years that have surprised you, ones you would not have been able to predict?

RW: That’s a tough one. I guess that when surprises happen, it’s the emergence of some unpredictably good talent that excites me. I can’t think very well in terms of what people call “the condition of poetry in America.” There are doubtless distinguishable trends, but I don’t see them. I tend to see the individual book as it comes, and rejoice or not.

DHT: Another phenomenon you’ve been able to observe for a long period of time is the entry of poets into the universities. As a social experiment, would you call it a success? Where do you think this experiment stands now, relative to where it did when you were starting your career?

RW: Certainly when I was starting, it was relatively rare for there to be poets working in the English departments of this country. Ridgeley Torrence had done it, Robert Frost had done it, David Morton was doing it at Amherst when I was an undergraduate. But of course there’s been a runaway development of this, together with the establishment of creative writing courses, MFAs, and so on. Anything of this kind is going to be both good and bad. Don Justice spent a very good part of his life running creative writing classes, and if so marvelous a poet as that found it a lively thing to do—I know that he conveyed his liveliness to a certain number of his students—it must have been good.

I have my negative thoughts about the phenomenon too. It seems to me that it has made for a lax, undemanding kind of poem: prosaic, personal, unambitious, and formless. That has been the period style for a bit too long, though that seems to be changing. There are other negative things one could say about poetry camping in the university, but if what poets need is an encounter with life in general, I think it’s still to be had.

DHT: Your most recent teaching appointment was when?

RW: I retired from Smith College in 1986, I think. Because I enjoyed teaching subject-matter courses as well as doing the creative writing sort of thing, I find that I’m sometimes frustrated by the unavailability of persons to whom I can tell the truth about Milton’s “Lycidas,” for example. Every now and then I want to corner people and give them the cold dope on the authors whom I most enjoy teaching.

But on the whole, I find that I’m quite busy enough. At the moment I’m translating Corneille’s extraordinary play L’Illusion Comique. I’m on line 902 of it and forging forward every day. I do that when a poem doesn’t come and insist on being written. And all of that pretty well fills my days.

DHT: Discussions of poets’ work tend to fall into ruts, where the same three or four poems are discussed again and again. Is there a poem of yours that you would like to draw attention to, a poem that you feel has not received adequate notice?

RW: There’s a poem of mine called “Lying” that has had some good attention, but I like it better all the time, and so I hope that people who are at all interested in me will have a look at that one. When I read that poem to an audience, I always tell them that when I showed it first to my wife, she said, “Well, you’ve done it. At last you’ve done it. You’ve written a poem that’s unintelligible from beginning to end.” And it is a tough one in the sense that it’s full of riffing similes and metaphors, and indeed that’s what the poem is about: it’s about resemblances between things, and the idea that all things are ultimately of one nature.

But when I persuaded my wife to reread that poem, she said, “Well, yes. It’s clear now. Busy, but clear.” And I think a number of people have found it so.

DHT: One last question I’ve been dying to ask. In your poem “Walking to Sleep,” there is the passage “What you must manage is to bring to mind / A landscape not worth looking at, some bleak / Champaign at dead November’s end.” I just moved to Champaign, Illinois, last year—is this the Champaign you’re talking about?

RW: [laughs] It’s the same word, but it has a different flavor in the poem—I take a positive view of Champaign, Illinois.

This particular Champaign, in “Walking to Sleep,” is intended to be a part, I suppose, of a strategy of emotional avoidance. The poem begins by trying to bore oneself to sleep, and then, halfway through, it takes a more contagious and courageous view of things. But I’m getting incoherent.

DHT: What was the genesis of that poem? Was there insomnia involved?

RW: Ever since my childhood I’ve been interested in my dreams, and sometimes kept a book in which I wrote them down. So finally, out of many, many years of dreaming, and some years of having insomnia, I decided to make dreaming the whole subject of the poem.

Of course, one of the theses of the poem is that the way you dream will be an indication of the way you take the world as a whole, the way you take this world and the next. And so it is, rather at some length, an account of two strategies for going to sleep. It ends by proposing [that] you go to sleep courageous.


Originally Published: April 18, 2006

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Stephen Burt's logic is airtight. Yet his claim that "poetry cannot be defined in terms of a social function at all" except that it "concerns communication among just two persons" seems cramped and unmoored. A long line of poets and thinkers have made great claims about poetry's social use. Burt seems to be stacking and storing different types of poetry in a container ship, removed and protected from the world as it journeys across the sea. The stacks of poetry can be referenced by poet-engineers, not of the sacred or the social, but of the aesthetic.

In contrast, Emerson claims that "Poets are...liberating gods." Emerson thought poems could change reality because they uncover its hardwiring, then jimmy with it. Poetic insight, he wrote, "does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucent to others." Emerson named the current flowing through things divine—a fire our bodies and poems externalize. "For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing."

Poets, he's saying, weld new relations and add new forms to the world. (Think, for instance, of D.A. Powell's poems about living and loving with HIV, or A.R. Ammons's poems about inlets, woods, and garbage.) In making our circuitry—our social and biological nerves—translucent, it becomes perceivable and so changeable. Our social reality is thus enlarged to include relations and facts that have been obscured (not yet discovered) or repressed. "Poems are born dark," Celan wrote, because language is "loaded with world."

Do other forms of art and work carry out this same task? Yes, of course, but poetry is especially adept at helping us experience, and so understand, celebrate, mourn, curse, or philosophize about our relations. The fact that most often this poetic "exchange of energy" (Rukeyser) is between two people does not mean it ends there. Poets do not know how their poems will be used in the future. Whitman did not know his work would inform a gay liberation movement. Housman did not know A Shropshire Lad would speak to people suffering the horrors of WWI.

Poetry can leap across and charge the synapse between us and the world, altering both. If we abandon this use, then poets become one more group of wage-laboring specialists, gathered into "ghettos," speaking our own language, and designing complicated objects which serve as prophylactics to protect us from people still naïvely seeking this life-making force.

Five very important paragraphs(and right on cue methinks) from the previous very lengthy article. -Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...ne/poem/245710

Reading Primo Levi Off Columbus Circle

BY J. T. BARBARESE


Re-reading him in Bouchon
past noon, it is mobbed midtown,
like an ant farm seen through painkillers.
God, what a bust it’s all been,

capitalism, communism, feminism,
this lust to liberate.
Che should have stayed in medicine.
The girls here admit they can’t wait

to marry and get to the alimony,
before they hit thirty. The men,
heads skinned like Lager inmates,
know only the revolutions

in diets and spinning classes.
Still, one table away,
these two, with gnarled empretzled hands,
seem unhappy in the old way.

Source: Poetry (April 2013).

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/article/250740

Sweeping Hearts
Writing poems inspired by Native American music and poetry.

BY ELIZABETH RABY
Sweeping Hearts
Having students write poems while listening to a cassette tape of "Earth Spirit" by R. Carlos Nakai, a Navajo-Ute who plays the Native American flute, has been a remarkably successful exercise with young people from grades two through twelve. Inspired in part by the Native American poets at the 1988 and 1992 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festivals at Hopewell, New Jersey, and in part by Margot Fortunato Gait's article, "The Story in History," in the September-October 1992 issue of Teachers & Writers, I use the tape as a way to bring a Native American presence to the classrooms I visit as a poet-in-die-schools in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Following Gait's example, I draw both a pyramid and a circle on the chalkboard. Gait says that the European conception of the universe is structured like a pyramid, by which things are ranked "according to their smartness or complexity or similarity to us." On this pyramid, humans are outranked only by the angels and then by God. Students have little difficulty assigning things to a place in this hierarchy. I suggest that dirt may rank near the bottom, hence our tendency to feel justified in treating dirt "like dirt." Students find it easy to think of examples of what we have done to dirt.

We next consider the Native American paradigm of being: a circle that includes, in no hierarchical order, humans and dirt, thunder and bears. I read aloud Joy Harjo's "Eagle Poem," a fine example of the circularity and the respect for the things of this world that such a vision engenders:

Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.
With this poem still echoing in our minds, I tell the class that we will write while listening to a tape of Native American flute music. After making sure that everyone has paper and a sharpened pencil, I explain that while the tape plays I will read three poems aloud, and that afterward there should be no talking for a few minutes. The only sound will be the sound of the flute. I invite the students to go wherever the flute takes them, to hear whatever message it brings them, to follow whatever story it tells—to write down whatever comes to them.

The first poem I read is "Spring Night in Lo-Yang—Hearing a Flute" by Li Po, which I tell the students was written more than a thousand years ago:

In what house, the jade flute that sends these dark notes drifting, scattering on (he spring wind that fills Lo-Yang? Tonight if we should hear the willow-breaking song, who could help but long for the gardens of home?
—Translated by Burton Watson

Then I read Joy Harjo's "Song for the Deer and Myself to Return On":

This morning when I looked out the roof window
before dawn and a few stars were still caught
in the fragile weft of ebony night
I was overwhelmed. I sang the song Louis taught me:
a song to call the deer in Creek, when hunting,
and I am certainly hunting something as magic as deer
in this city far from the hammock of my mother's belly.
It works, of course, and deer came into this room
and wondered at finding themselves
in a house near downtown Denver.
Now the deer and I are trying to figure out a song
to get them back, to get us all back,
because it's too early to call Louis
and nearly too late to go home.

Finally, I read "An Evening at Windy Point for Christopher Jay" by the Hopi poet, Ramson Lomatewama. It begins with the sound of a Japanese bamboo flute (suizen):

The sound of suizen
lingers over a valley of sand.
Desert shadows grow in silence.
The man, sitting at the edge,
brings music to Windy Point.
Below,
juniper and pinon trees listen.
Smooth bamboo songs
touch the face of summer.
There are no monastery walls here,
Only the music,
the man,
the spirit.

The haunting sound of the flute and the softly spoken poems have never failed to achieve a strange combination of attention and peace-fulness in the classroom. Very young children may miss an occasional word or reference, they never miss the beauty of the language or the spirit of the poems. Usually there is so much noise in our lives—perhaps without realizing it we all hunger for the calm this music inspires. Students often ask that it be played as the background to other writing exercises. The music establishes a mood they like to extend, which makes it especially good for the first day of a writing workshop.

The music evokes strong emotions in the students, makes them wish for a more perfect world, and gives many of them a chance to express their anguish and anger about the state of the environment. They take bits and pieces from the poems I read aloud and combine them with their own personal histories and the mood the music creates. Here are some examples:

Watching Wondering
I wake and hear the sweet music of the flute
I follow it
Watching
Wondering
Beauty fills the air
Each step I take
Watching
Wondering
Suddenly the music gets louder
I spot a giant fall of water
Watching
Wondering
The lion was next to the lamb
There meadows and lakes are plenty
Watching
Wondering
I sit under a tree thinking
Has God called me home?
Watching
Wondering.
I close my eyes and fall asleep
Watching and
Wondering no more.
—Carolyn Bahnck, Fifth grade



Mother Earth

As the woman fell to the hot sand,
She started to think about the child she once had,
About the husband she once had not so long ago,
And about the tribe she once had that she would roam the land, sea,
and sky with.
As she sat there too dried out to drop a single tear for her tribe and
her family,
She looked around at her only friends, the sun, the sky, the land, the
plants.
And pleaded for forgiveness, and a child to look after.
Then something strange happened,
She felt a sharp pain, then the cry of a newborn baby
And she no more felt lonely but happy.
Then she looked around and silently said
Thank you to her friends,
She noticed that everything started to bloom and come to life,
And then a second baby was born,
But it was not a real person, it was an animal.
Then a bright light came down to her and told her, "You have been
given the greatest
gift of all time, the gift to create life for all
kinds of living creatures."
Then she closed her eyes and started to think
of all her friends, opened her eyes and saw her
friends and family looking at her,
And from that day on she knew the earth
would have life on the land that she, once, roamed by herself.
—Melissa Janis, fifth grade


Before, Before

I am the blue-green grass,
I bend into the water,
the quickly moving water is
angry,
angry with the vengeance of the
water-god,
He rushes by angrily,
He is mad at the people,
the people in the village,
they are hurting him with their
chemicals,
I have seen better days,
when the water-god was happy
gurgling and laughing,
before the people,
when animals came to drink,
before the hunters,
Before, Before.
—Tania Philkill, sixth grade



The flute calls to me.
Its sounds rush through my body
As an eagle's feather
Falls at my feet.
A wolf calls
From the hills
Joining the sweet sound
Of the music.

The fresh, warm air
From the desert
Fills my lungs, as the flute
Seems to cease, but starts again.

This is a song of pureness and love.

The flute calls to me
Its sounds rush through my body
As I awake
From this dream of time.
—Elisa Keller, seventh grade



The flute sounds like a boy lying on his bed.
Looking at stars through his window.
Trying to express his feelings by playing.
He is sad, very hurt.
He is thinking, wondering where everyone is.
He is lonely, just him and his soul.
He is calling for help, trying to see,
He is thinking, wondering if anyone's out there.
Feeling the way he feels.
—Danielle Scheel, seventh grade



Gone, but Still Alive

The medicine man comes through
the opening in my teepee,
I lie under furs of animals
I trapped last winter.
I lie now shivering from the disease.
It is now part of me.
It grows with me, is me,
and I am it.
We are one.
The medicine man is becoming unclear,
as he kneels beside the fire
to make my healing potion.
The medicine man starts dancing.
I can feel his presence beside me.
By my head, my side, my feet,
yet I cannot see him.
He is becoming more and more unclear.
My shivering ceases.
All is black.
The medicine man is on earth,
but I am now in the sky.
My soul is alive,
soaring above the medicine man.
I am well, I am free!
—Katie Cleary, eighth grade




The
soft wind
wakes up the
sleeping trees.
The cool green forest
is awakening to the radiant
dawn. The sun's golden rays
shine through the well-nourished
trees. The healthy animals scatter around
the forest bottom. The huge mountains stand
high above the never-ending sapphire sky. The forest
creatures scatter back to their homes. The sun goes down
like a ball of fire. The darkness of the sky blankets the
sleeping forest.
—Brooke Holland, eighth grade


As the culminating activity for a unit on history, social studies, or environmental science, writing poems while listening to "Earth Spirit" can help students organize new facts, reflect on their meaning, and make them their own. I have often asked students to think of one single thing, a fact or an idea that they remember from a recently completed unit, and to write a poem about what that fact or idea means to them. In this case, a judicious selection of poems read aloud at the beginning of the session, combined with the music, is all that is needed to get the poems started.




Elizabeth Raby, "Sweeping Hearts: Writing Poems Inspired by Native American Music and Poetry" from Old Faithful: 18 Writers Present Their Favorite Writing Assignments. Copyright © 1995 by Elizabeth Raby. Reprinted by permission of Teachers & Writers Collaborative.
Originally Published: August 11, 2015

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harr...i-didn’t-know/

A SHORT, HIGHLY PERSONAL OBSERVATION COMPLETELY LACKING IN EXAMPLES WHICH I COULD HAVE NEVER HAVE MADE THIRTY YEARS AGO WHEN I WAS A YOUNG POET STILL LIVING IN NEW YORK, BECAUSE I DIDN’T KNOW ENOUGH TO KNOW IT WAS TRUE. BUT I DO NOW.
BY MARTIN EARL


W.H. Auden once said that he always felt that he was the youngest person in the room, even at an older age, when this was certainly not the case. I’ve felt similarly while blogging, especially when being reprimanded by commentators half my age. This could have all sorts of explanations. But for the moment let’s file them under “Monkey Glands”, aka W.B. Yeats. Today, I have a more pressing issue at hand, a comment on the younger generations of scriveners; or to reverse Auden’s impression, all of those younger than myself and involved, in one way or another, in the palimpsestic quest of poetry. I mean poets in their twenties, thirties and forties – fifty being the cut-off date.

Of course, there are exceptions but for the moment I am intent on generalizing. In the field of poetry, women make better bloggers than do their male counterparts, also better commentators, better critics and, increasingly, better poets. Of the younger generation of poets I am discovering through my involvement with Harriet, the women are clearly superior. Not only is their poetry more ambitious and achieved but their criticism is more daring, their originality of thought deeper and their wit more honed.
Why should this be? One reason perhaps (and this is undoubtedly one of those clichés for which I will be run out of town) is that women have an ontological connection that men don’t have to making and creating, to nurturing form out of raw materials: out of themselves, out of language and out of the ground, in the sense of both lettuce patches and the Heidegerrean notion of fundamentum absolutum, or der grund. Heidegger posits a reversal of the Cartesian first principle and says “I am therefore I think.” This stands in well for the difference between male and female sensibilities.
Traditionally discouraged or prevented from taking part in social paradigms of creative expression (with the exception, of course, of motherhood) women have learned patience, the art of autonomy and a capacity for restraint. Related to these qualities is the fact that they are more open to difference, generally more tolerant, and less threatened by the mechanisms of authority: those mechanisms that are found in traditional knowledge structures, traditional language structures and traditional institutional structures. Since historically women have had to defend themselves against the power emanating from these structures, their mastery and insight into the workings of power is deeper. Likewise, women’s competitive instincts are more subtly attuned to the task at hand, the medium they are dealing with, the objectives of a given project than they are with the impression they would like to make upon the world. This comes from ease with self-effacement, which in artistic endeavors results in a more thoroughgoing capacity for immersion in the project at hand. They are more apt to experiment in ways that produce organic forms for expressive purposes rather than try, as men so often do, to trick language into duplicating the will. Because women are generally more sensitive to others, they are more sensitive to the needs of the poem. Because they are more coherent, grounded and possess a higher degree of self-knowledge at a younger age, they are better prepared to resist the influences of their teachers, their education and even the expectations of the medium they are working in. Hence they are more original.
Decades of work by women to open new formats, create equalities, to encourage creative and intellectual work, to valorize the special experiences of women (both material and intellectual), and to formulate a critical framework for understanding the various forms of oppression woman have born, and continue to bear, is, in my opinion, and in my special field of concern (poetry and literary criticism) also responsible for the health, innovation and continuing wonder of the medium. But it is not the whole story, and it is time to move on, away from theory and back to practice. On a practical level, that of making and reading poems, male poets now have more to learn from how women work, and from what they are saying and creating than vice versa.
And yet in spite of what I say above (characterizing women’s experience, perhaps inaccurately, and seeing their poetry as having benefited from that experience) I have never been comfortable with the designation “women’s poetry”, or with any of the other normative appellations that marked 20th century discussions on the subject and that led to misleading typologies and atomizations. In fact, I follow Berryman’s cue in not distinguishing between British and American poetry – and I carry that further to all poets writing in English: Irish, South African, Indian and West Indian, Australian etc. (two of my favorite poets, John Kinsella and Less Murray, are from down under).
I’m even uncomfortable (since I live and work in a polyglot setting) with classifying poets or their poems by language. To pit French poets against German poets seems hardly useful when we finally arrive at the poem itself. My Portuguese colleagues, some of whom I’ve translated, are essentially doing the same thing that I do when I write a poem. The fact that they are writing in Portuguese doesn’t matter in the end. Of course different situations produce dif

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/lear...e/251266#guide

Anne Sexton: “The Truth the Dead Know”
The impersonal power of a confessional classic

BY AUSTIN ALLEN

Anne Gray Harvey took the married name Sexton in 1948, thereby joining Swift, Wordsworth, and Frost as one of English literature’s most perfectly named poets. The word sexton, meaning a church officer who serves as bell ringer and gravedigger, is rich in both symbolism and literary history. The figure of the sexton appears in such mainstays of the canon as Hamlet (with its two gravedigger-clowns), Emily Dickinson’s thwarted-love poem “I cannot live with You,” and Hart Crane’s haunting ode “The Broken Tower.” In her brief career, Sexton lived up to virtually all the associations—tragedy and comedy, music and melancholy, death and the embedded word sex—that her name prepared for her.

A member of the mercurial, mid-20th-century group called the confessional poets, Sexton worked in an impressive range of forms and modes, from witty ballads to raw free verse. She broke poetic taboos with flair, writing frankly about menstruation, female masturbation, bipolar disorder, and other topics considered all but untouchable at the time. “A Sexton audience might hiss its displeasure or deliver a standing ovation,” Maxine Kumin recalls in the introduction to Sexton’s Complete Poems. “It did not doze off during a reading.” Like her friend and rival Sylvia Plath, Sexton committed suicide, suffocating herself in her garage at age 45.

Sexton’s titles alone often sound like dispatches from the graveyard. The Pulitzer Prize–winning 1966 collection Live or Die prepared the way for The Death Notebooks (1974) and The Awful Rowing Toward God (posthumous, 1975). Her poems include “The Hangman,” “Imitations of Drowning,” “Suicide Note,” “Godfather Death,” “For Mr. Death Who Stands With His Door Open,” and “Wanting to Die.” Then there’s “The Truth the Dead Know,” the opening poem of All My Pretty Ones (1962) and one of the 20th century’s outstanding poems of loss.

As revealed in its dedication, “The Truth the Dead Know” is an elegy with a double subject:

For my mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my father, born February 1900, died June 1959

These are the actual birth and death dates of Mary Gray Staples and Ralph Harvey; their daughter’s poem emerged three years after they died in quick succession. Such autobiographical details, now common in poetry, were then a cutting-edge gesture. In the 1962–1963 Hudson Review, Cecil Hemley reacted with mixed feelings:

There is no doubt that the poet wants us to associate herself with the “I” of the poem. … This identification with the writer has the advantage of intensifying our feelings, but the disadvantage of embarrassing us slightly. There were good reasons why past eras were reticent on such matters. However, the poem rises above the confession and achieves great beauty.

This far removed from confessionalism, Hemley’s embarrassment seems both quaint and beside the point. Distracted by the minor novelty of the framework, he downplays the extent to which the poem is deeply, deliberately traditional. Its imagery could belong to just about any century: church, grave, hearse, shoes, stones, boats, sea, gate, sun that “gutters” like a candle flame.

What was and is fresh about the poem is its bluntness:

Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.

From that stark “Gone” onward, the diction is so austerely Anglo-Saxon that the few Latinate words seem like extravagances. Amid stanzas rife with monosyllables, procession sounds highly formal, and cultivate, dangling at the end of a line, sounds almost luxuriant. But cultivate, too, is somehow stiff or hollow in light of the poem’s theme. Both words imply progress, a concept that death mocks. Both offer momentary changes of pace from the prevailing style, which is as plain as loss.

A change of pace is exactly what this speaker craves. Having lost both parents in the space of four months, she escapes to the beach with her unnamed “darling.” There the two lovers feel a sense of overwhelming connection, even communion:

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

Despite the bond the couple forges, “this” is no paradise. The “whitehearted water” could be an agitated cousin of Homer’s “wine-dark sea.” It swings “like an iron gate,” recalling the “iron gates of Life” through which Marvell, in “To His Coy Mistress,” insists that we must “tear our pleasures” if we’re to enjoy them at all. The lovers seem besieged, threatened: “the wind falls in like stones,” as in punishment by stoning, and the speaker reflects that “Men kill for this.” Both human and natural forces exact a price for such intense love.

Soon romance fades altogether as Sexton’s dirge marches to its close:

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in their stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

This final stanza contains just three polysyllabic words: without, refuse, knucklebone. All three reinforce the image of death as a kind of asceticism. The corpses lie shoeless and motionless. Their refusal echoes the speaker’s refusal of the funeral: just as she abandoned the dead en route to the grave, so the dead now dispense with the blessings of the living. That last exposed knucklebone seems pugnacious and, at the same time, naked.

Meanwhile Sexton’s stone sea recalls at least two of Emily Dickinson’s most chilling images: the corpse as stopped clock and the “Valves” of the soul closing “like Stone.” “Stone boats” (i.e., coffins) evokes the long mythological tradition of death-voyages, from Charon rowing souls across the Styx to the Lady of Shalott drifting glassy-eyed into Camelot. The water that pelted the lovers with spray now seems to have engulfed and petrified Sexton’s imagination. Sea, boats, and bodies become stone, stone, stone. Death is universal and irreversible.

But poems themselves soon die if they freeze into straightforward statements. To survive, they must preserve restless undercurrents of ambiguity. What, if anything, is still moving at the end of Sexton’s poem?

One answer lies in that double-edged word refuse. Paradoxically, Sexton grants the dead an action—an emphatic, line-ending verb that combines cold negation and warm defiance. Moreover, their refusal mirrors the speaker’s, so that living and dead, parents and child, each partake of the activity (and, figuratively, the condition) of the other. “In another country people die,” the speaker declares, echoing Hamlet’s image of death as “The undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveler returns.” Yet like the ghost-haunted Hamlet, Sexton finds that the separation isn’t so absolute. The two countries are joined by a murky psychological sea (Hamlet’s “sea of troubles,” Sexton’s stony waters) and by the indissoluble link between generations.

Sexton’s parents can’t visit her as literal ghosts, but the thought of them in their “stone boats” returns just as she’s trying to get away from it all. Perhaps, as Hemley imagines, they’re “sailing away from her in time,” or perhaps they’re emissaries, harbingers of her own death, floating toward her. Regardless, their “Truth” is what she has to learn and what she has to teach us.

•

“The Truth the Dead Know” employs a timeless diction, and its theme is as old as parents and children. With a slight change to the headnote, it could be a fictional construct about an anonymous speaker. Yet Sexton takes care to present it as a slice of her own life. As Hemley observes, this may have “the advantage of intensifying our feelings”; it also tempts us to read other biographical factors into the poem.

In 1959, the year Sexton’s parents died, Robert Lowell published Life Studies, widely acknowledged as the foundational text of confessional poetry. In that same year, Sexton took one of Lowell’s workshops at Boston University alongside an ambitious young poet named Sylvia Plath. The competitive friendship between the two women has become legendary. Over happy-hour martinis at the Boston Ritz-Carlton, they talked poetry, planned illustrious futures, and traded stories of suicide attempts. Through their mutual admiration ran a vein of envy: Plath brooded in her diary when Sexton landed her first book deal, and Sexton coveted “a scholarship to McLean,” the psychiatric hospital where Plath and Lowell had both been patients. (She taught a poetry seminar there in 1968–69 before finally being admitted herself in 1973.) Sexton even reacted with jealous resentment to Plath’s suicide, as she confessed in “Sylvia’s Death” (1964):

… and I know at the news of your death,
a terrible taste for it, like salt.

(And me,
me too.
And now, Sylvia,
you again
with death again,
that ride home
with our boy.)

Inescapably, they influenced each other. One revealing way to read “The Truth the Dead Know” is in comparison with “The Colossus,” the title poem of Plath’s first (1960) collection and another distinguished elegy by a grieving daughter.

In “The Colossus,” Plath’s speaker crawls over the massive wreck of a statue she calls “father,” fruitlessly trying to reassemble him. The landscape is eerie, primal, a mix of “the Oresteia” and Dalí. The diction is wildly varied (pig-grunt, acanthine, Lysol), the tone both melodramatic and comic, the speaker’s situation both noble and futile. Plath adopts, in critic Margaret Dickie’s words, “the ancient role of the female who mourns the dying god, or the heroine who tends the idol,” but she’s lost all hope of fulfilling her task. She’s doomed to endless filial duty, the same duty she would later renounce in the explosive “Daddy.”

“The Colossus” was Plath’s first masterpiece, and it can’t be a coincidence that Sexton’s poem, published two years later, tackles the same theme from a virtually opposite angle. No mythic conceit. No verbal razzle-dazzle. The speaker anything but noble. Sexton is not the loyal but the disloyal daughter, not a tragic heroine persisting in rites of mourning but a flawed human resisting grief. The dead father in Plath’s poem remains passive and mysterious; the dead parents in Sexton’s, as if punishing their daughter, flatly “refuse / to be blessed.”

“The Truth the Dead Know” is not superior to “The Colossus,” but it is more raw—and that rawness was the product of enormous effort. Kumin reports that the poem “went through innumerable revisions before arriving at its final form, an a b a b rhyme scheme that allows little room for pyrotechnics.” One unpublished version, available via recording, contains phrases such as “loose brows” and “a blushing hermit in the sun”; it ends on a conventional carpe diem note:“live now, live now.” This redemptive ending feels as alien to the final work as the stylized diction. In both respects, Sexton pared the poem down to the bone.

Plath’s “Daddy” may have been, in part, another entry in this contest of one-upmanship. (If Sexton could abandon her father at his funeral, Plath could call hers “you bastard.”) Similarly, the baroque morbidity of Sexton’s late poems may have been a bid to out-Plath Plath. Both poets took confessionalism to startling extremes, but “The Truth the Dead Know” achieves a starkness neither of them found (or perhaps sought) again. It’s both vulnerable and stoic, colloquial and classically restrained. Along with Dickinson’s “I heard a Fly buzz” and Philip Larkin’s “Aubade,” it’s one of the least comforting death poems in the language. Its power hinges not on the revelation of private details but on the recognition of an impersonal truth—one that we all learn sooner or later.