Tag Archives: ars poetica

Lessons in the Art of Poetry, Drew MFA First Residency Jan 2009

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I enjoy seeing naughtiness done in strict iambic pentameter. Alicia Ostriker

Earnest dictates want us to remove the heart and frontal lobe from lyric poetry [but] the need for a lone voice to sing out of the darkness will go on. Joan Larkin

Well, we certainly can’t have the word “love” in a poem. Martin Espada

Art is a series of answers to which there are no questions. C.K. Williams

The poem becomes a vehicle for pinning down moral dilemma. C.K. Williams

As a poet I’m always concerned about history, and about bearing witness to history. Natasha Terthewey, in an interview on NPR while drafting my residency essay

A poem should surprise truthfully. Martin Espada

Punctuation is your friend. Martin Espada

A phrase in parentheses is a poet’s cry for help, “I don’t know why I’m saying this!” Martin Espada

You can use anything you want – it’s liberty hall. Jean Valentine

Whenever you have a block, there’s something under the rock. Alicia Ostriker

Poetry does make something happen, for it changes sensibility. Robert Hayden

A poem is built on silences as well as on sounds. And it imposes a silence audible as a laugh, a sigh, a groan. Robert Hayden

Dickinson’s poems often have guillotine endings – the poem has its head chopped off. Anne Marie Macari

The last line of the poem should automatically make the eye bounce back to the beginning to start over. Martin Espada

I like the white hot moment of silence at the end of a poem. Patricia Smith

You must write better than you consciously know – the bulk of your work gets done by your unconscious mind. Alicia Ostriker

Using the language of speech is what distinguishes American poetry from other poetry or Don’t use book words without a reason. spoken in some variation by Alicia Ostriker, Gerald Stern, Anne Marie Macari, and C.K. Williams

C.K Williams on translating

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from a Thursday lecture on the triumphs and tribulations of translating

-poetry is itself a language
-poetry can only be translated into poetry
-poetry is the gap between what you know and what you do

We are, he said, mainly unconscious of how much translation has functioned in our history and culture. The Renaissance was heavily works translated from Greek and Rome, for example, and U.S. poetry was rescued from strangling formalism in the 1950s by translations that poured into the country from Latin and South America and Europe.

Bishop — “translating poetry is like trying to put your feet into gloves.”

Always an issue of form vs. content — do you translate the meaning, the poetic vision, the meter, the rhyme? Try for some kind of hybrid? Poetry is music and lyrics, and compromises must always be made.

There are levels of translations — literal, free, translation of the vision by choosing new words and images from the second language. Then there are “versions,” where the translator doesn’t even pretend to convey the work of the original poet, but to make new poems out of the old. “Grand theft auto translation” he called this latter, “past the edge of where translation can go.”

He is now considering “thick translations,” where the poem is translated but then followed by pages of commentary explaining how and why it worked in its original language and what choices the translator made.

Most translated poems are shared work, between someone fluent in the first language and a poet skilled in the second language.

Transfiguring is also a possibility, shifting art in to poetry, poetry to dance, etc — this is a kind of shape-shifting as opposed to translating between languages.

And lest anyone think we all sit around politely reciting verse, here’s C.K.’s comment on one translation, ” It had nothing whatsoever to do with the original and furthermore is just crap.”

Notes on Dickinson, Poetry and Language

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from our afternoon lecture by Anne Marie Macari

-language is hypothesis and experiment
-poetic language expands our boundaries
-metaphor is instinctual groping

Dickinson’s definition of “redemption” is those things that force us into immediate experience, to the embodied, physical realm

Dickinson would improvise for hours on the keyboard, and was a singer with perfect pitch — no surprise that her poems are strong musical compositions, with lines of harmony and dissonance, and cannot be understood aside from this. The rhythm, the pacing — you have to pay attention to these, for they can change and shape the “surface” meaning of the words.

In many of Dickinson’s poems, she casts herself as a rival to God as a creator (Surprised? That whole “lonely spinister of Amhearst” crap has so limited how most of us understand Emily)

The male critics who spend all their time searching for men in Dickinson’s life, limited by their assumption that some man somewhere has to be connected to such creative brilliance, have “Dickinson Envy,” Anne Marie says.

Dickinson has, in the words of one biographer exploring gender politics, “a power disembodied from its user.” Dickinson claims so much power in her poetic voice, challenging religion, god, men, but at the same time is distant from that power. No surprise, given when she lived. Rich’s essay on this in On Lies, Secrets and Silences comments that, in a masculine-assumptive world, “active willing and creation in women are forms of aggression.”

Anne Marie talked about the often astounding endings of Dickinson’s poems, lines that turn the poem, and often social order, inside out. She described these as “guillotine endings” — the poem has its head chopped off. Martin Espada, in a workshop, talked about creating poems where the last line automatically makes the eye bounce back to the beginning to start over. That made total sense to me, but the endings that crack open the world also appeal to me – such different ideas, such different poems.

A Dickinson poem I didn’t know:

#301
I reason, Earth is short-
and Anguish- absolute-
And many hurt,
But, what of that?

I reason, we could die-
The best Vitality
Cannot excel Decay,
But, what of that?

I reason, that in Heaven-
Somehow, it will be even-
Some new Equation, given-
But, what of that?

Anne Marie Macari

Anne Marie Macari

Tuesday night

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which would make it only 16 hours from my last post, right? Wow.

Today we got our mentor assignments. I’ll be working with Alicia Ostriker (Yeah!), who was my first choice, because I want to launch right into exploring poetry and liturgy. But everyone here is so great that I could be doing great work with anyone. Next semester I think I’ll ask for someone whose work is really different from mine, to help me push the ways I boundary my own writing and thinking.

But for now — Alicia, yeah!!! I’ve been reading and using her work in my own for so many years now.

Also got the full review of what will be due and when. All I can say is this — please invite me for meals from time to time, okay, so I remember to leave my desk and eat actual meals? Or ask me to walk in the park so I don’t fade to some kind of ghastly pallor. (ok, given that I’ll be spending time in Miami, the latter is not a given, but still….)

Today was a lecture about how sound and form influence the meaning of a poem. Like the books I’ve been reading about poetic form, the talk pushed me to know I have to deal with this stuff. In college, back in the olden days, I hated formal poetry, but of course it was all by straight white men and so irrelevant to my life. Now I have so many examples of how writers use formal structures to make radical new meaning, so I have no more excuses. Poet Dan Bellm, in his book Practice, has a crown of sonnets (a complicated interwoven pattern) that links Torah, his own Vietnam experiences, the Gulf War, and the situation in Israel/Palestine. In rhyme and meter that is totally background on first read, as the content and language sweep you along. But anything remotely similar I would try right now would be narrative and take four times as many words — the boundary of the form makes the language so tight and clear. I wanna do that. Not sure how, but I know what I’ll be doing for the next two years.

Great quote from William Stafford — as we write and rewrite, he says, “strange things with meaning begin to occur.”

Tonight’s faculty reading was Martin Espada and Ross Gay. I’ve heard Martin several times over the past year, so had heard all the pieces but one before, but he is a wonderful, engaging, bold, and funny reader, so one more time is never a problem. Everyone here was freaking out about the imminent arrival of an ice storm, but Martin just laughed, since he lives in Amherst, MA. “Western Mass,” he explained, “is like Canada but without the health care.”

Ross Gay was new to me when I applied to this program. He grew up in Levittown, and writes often about Philadelphia, and is just a damn fine writer. I knew the pieces from his book Against Which, but he also read new poems, which were just breathtaking. One great line: “praise the body/its miraculous stutter and thrum.”

One of his poems nearly made me cry, though, for it was about a boy and an old old dog named Max. Earlier today, Hannah called to say she had to put down her cat Max. He was 20, and had been having seizures for a while. Last night he just crashed. I’ve only known Max about a year and a half, but he had a huge personality, and I really cared about him, and I’ll miss his cranky old self. The picture is Max sleeping on Hannah’s temporary bed the first morning in Miami. happy-cat-on-bed

defining poetry

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from A.E. Housman, The Name and Nature of Poetry (1933):

A year or two ago, in common with others, I received from America a request that I would define poetry. I replied that I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat, but that I thought we both recognized the object by the symptoms which it provokes in us.