Tag Archives: ars poetica

on the dangers of writing in “I”

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from Carol Frost’s essay “Self-Pity” in After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography

There are two reasons I have avoided the first-person pronoun. First, readers encountering the “I” may substitute an interest in the affairs and concerns of a presumably real person for the experience of the poem. Second, I may be unable to finesse the language, the image, and the line to clarify the emotion and experience with sufficient variety and force to move the poem toward the universal and memorable.

The first-person pronoun seems the trickiest of all, because of the tendency, in present tense, for a persona to be created whose utterances and behaviors seem too tenderly self-regarding. [In poems with too much self-regard, when we are told the speaker feels deeply but shown no other implicit or explicit motivation] the uses of the first person—look at me, listen to what I want—provide one: this is the way I feel. And think. It’s as if the subject of the poem is the poet’s consciousness and sensitivity.

The verbal contraption Auden said a poem is can tell us as much about the writer as a chair; every turn of the lathe and every peg tells us about the woodworker, even if our main purpose is to rest there comfortably, considering our own affairs. We may ask: Is it made of burlwood or tiger maple? What rough or fine brushstrokes applied the patina of lacquer or oil? What economy, what sense of design is present? The handiwork reveals and teaches us what is essential to about the artist—the state of awareness or remembrance, feeling, intent, proclivity, reason, care, regard, trifle, judgment, and imagination; it doesn’t reveal what is non-essential—whether the trees grew in woodworker’s backyard.

And thinking about the poet as woodworker makes me think of this, from Antonio Machado’s “Portrait,” a plea to remember the vital spirit behind the craft of the poems:

Call me romantic or classic—I only hope
that the verse I leave behind, like the captain’s sword,
may be remembered, not for its maker’s art,
but for the virile hand that gripped it once.

Which I love, in spite of the overwhelming masculinity of that sword and virile hand (egads).

So two different poets, one arguing that poetry does and should reveal the maker’s art, both arguing that poetry does and should reveal the intention and character of the maker.

If you’re a writer too—no pressure or anything. Really.

Memory at its finest lacks corroboration

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Durum wheat
Lisa Martin-Demoor

Memory at its finest lacks corroboration
—no photographs, no diaries—
nothing to pin the past on the present with, to make it stick.
Just because you’ve got this idea
of red fields stretching along the tertiary roads
of Saskatchewan, like blazing, contained fires —
just because somewhere in your memory
there’s a rust-coloured pulse
taking its place among canola yellow
and flax fields the huddled blue of morning azures—
just because you want to
doesn’t mean you can
build a home for that old, peculiar ghost.

Someone tells you you’ve imagined it,
that gash across the ripe belly of summer,
and for a year, maybe two, you believe them.
Maybe you did invent it, maybe as you leaned,
to escape the heat, out the Pontiac’s backseat window
you just remembered it that way
because you preferred the better version.

Someone tells you this.
But what can they know of faith?
To ask you to leave behind this insignificance.
This innocence that can’t be proved: what the child saw
of the fields as she passed by, expecting nothing.

You have to go there while there’s still time.
Back to the red flag of that field, blazing in the wind.
While you’re still young enough to remember
a flame planted along a road. While you’re still
seeing more than there is to see.

“Durum wheat” by Lisa Martin-Demoor, from One Crow Sorrow. © Brindle & Glass, 2008.

walking around the event

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I don’t want to tell what is. I want to tell what is with all the radiations around it of what it could be. So it’s not simply a transcription of anything that actually happened but what actually happened, plus all the thoughts that one could think about it if one could walk around it, stop time and walk around the moment. And once you add in all that gradation of the moment it’s no longer the event. The event is just the raw material that goes into your observation of what you see when you walk around it.

Anne Carson, from Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play

What makes poetry personal?

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What makes poetry feel personal? What makes each poet’s voice different from another’s? I’m thinking about that a lot right now, as I’m studying first person poems and thinking hard about my own poetic voice.

Often, I think, we link a poet’s voice to their content or subject matter. I would have said that about myself as a feminist or lesbian or Jewish or working class or abuse survivor poet. But if I’m all of these, and more, then what is personal about my poetry? And if I write persona poems, in the voice of another, or use writing to explore lives and experiences not my own, then is my writing still “personal”?

Here’s one answer, not the one I expected, from William Matthews essay “Personal and Impersonal” in the anthology After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography

“… an apprentice not only learns the tools and materials of a craft, but commits to memory and to muscle memory the characteristic motions of an activity. […] an apprentice begins by confronting those parts of a craft that are easiest to describe with words like anonymous, collective, and traditional. But a skillful apprentice moves toward a condition of mastery by which quite opposite words are invoked: hallmark, signature, style.

So the personal and impersonal are intricately braided, and thus both difficult and perhaps not even useful to separate, in the way a craft—let’s say the craft of poetry—is practiced. But you’d hardly know this from reading and listening to discussions of poetry.

Probably what seems most personal to a poet is style, the study of which is, indeed, akin to ballistics.

But what many readers and critics often mean by personal is the relationship between poet and subject matter. Can the speaker of the poem be identified with the poet? Does the poem describe a biographically actual, as opposed to an imagined, experience? How much of the emotional temperature of the precipitating impulse of the poem has been retained or lost in the poem? And, to borrow an easy locution from workshop jargon, does the poem “take risks?”

Note that all of these questions are
1) ad hominem or ad feminam, as the case may be;
2)impossible for the reader to answer without information only the poet knows, and thus closer to gossip than to thought; and
3)the equivalent of asking not if an object is useful or beautiful but how much it cost.

The language we write in is anonymous, collective, and traditional, and likely it’s with the language itself that we should strike a personal relationship, a style without which content is simply imposed upon us by the massive power of conventional rhetoric and cliché. Too little attention is paid to style as a prophylaxis against cant.”

Rumi on writing poetry

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Listen to presences inside poems,
Let them take you where they will.

Follow those private hints,
and never leave the premises.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This is how it always is
when I finish a poem.

A great silence overcomes me,
and I wonder why I ever thought
to use language

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

from The Essential Rumi translated by Coleman Barks

Varieties of Ecstasy

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again, from Barnstone’s intro to his Sappho translations, all things for me to consider as I’m writing blessings.

“The fragments of Sappho’s poems contain the first Western examples of ecstasy, including the sublime, which the first-century Longinos recognized and preserved for us. They also include varieties of ekstasis briefly alluded to in these pages: the bliss of Edenic companionship, dancing under the moon, breakfasts in the grass; the whirlwind blast of love; the desolation and rage of betrayal; the seizure and paralysis before impossible love; and as all her ordinary senses fail, the movement near death–the ultimate negative ecstasy.

the war between grammarians and libertines

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from Willis Barnstone’s introduction to his translation of Sappho

While the ancient Alexandrian scholars preserved and fashioned Sappho, ordering and editing her poetry, since Horace and Quintilian there has been war between “grammarians” and “libertines” over the nature of translation itself, between fidus interpres, which the Latin writers mocked, and literary re-creation and imitation. In modern times the soft war goes on between translation as a literary art or a classroom language test, which is revealed in spelling. The combatants regularly have seats in the academy, and victory depends on which audience and publisher receives and acclaims them. […] As for the transcription of names, there is no single rule book for regulating transliteration. This free-for-all mode reflects language flux, which is always with us, no matter who is emperor.

The main lesson from all of this is that whatever one does will make a lot of people furious. One cannot be consistent, therefore one is incompetent and worse. Any linguistic change troubles like new currency and stamps.

one of the privileges of considering poetry

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from the Footnote to the Translations in Mary Barnard’s Sappho translation, in which she is reviewing critical writing about Sappho’s life:

“…However, when we come to consider the sense of the poetry and the human relationships, we should, I feel, have the privilege of tentatively rejecting any theory which outrages common sense.”

I would argue that we should, in general, reject theories that outrage common sense, and not just tentatively. But maybe that’s just me.