Tag Archives: On The Art of Poetry

yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought

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We sat together at one summer’s end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.’

from Yeats, “Adam’s Curse”

Poetry is not just a set of techniques

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from Robert Alter The Art of Biblical Poetry

“Poetry is not just a set of techniques for saying impressively what could be said otherwise. Rather, it is a particular way of imagining the world—particular in the double sense that poetry as such has its own logic, its own ways of making connections and engendering implications, and because each system of poetry has certain distinctive semantic thrusts that follow the momentum of its formal dispositions and habits of expressions.”

ummmmmm semantic thrusts, and distinctive ones at that…..

fresh images beget

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from Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry, chapter three

The fact is that poetry in general involves, necessarily, a linear development of meaning, which means that in one respect it is a linear form of thinking or imagining. “Those images that yet/fresh images beget,” Yeats wrote in one of his most famous poems about art and the imagination, and that approximately, is the way most poems would seem to work: one image suggest a related one, or a further manifestation of the same underlying image; one idea leads to a cognate or consequent one; one pattern of sound, interinvolved with a particular semantic direction, leads to a similar pattern that reinforces some underlying similarity of suggestive antithesis of meaning.

perceptual psychologist defining structural use of poetic discourse

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1. I used to talk like this all the time, back in my UCIrvine critical theory experiment

2. Here’s what Barbara Herrnstein Smith says, which is incredibly useful:

As soon as we perceive that a verbal sequence has a sustained rhythm, that it is formally structured according to a continuously operating principle of organization, we know that we are in the presence of poetry and we respond to it accordingly […] expecting certain effects from it and not others, granting certain conventions to it and not others. One of the most significant effects of meter (or, more broadly, of principles of formal structure) in poetry is simply to inform the reader that he [sic] is being confronted by poetry and not by anything else… Meter serves, in other words, as a frame for the poem, separating it from a ‘ground’ of less highly structured speech and sound.

3. So I’ve usually written a very free verse, where what marks it as “poetry” is short lines and more metaphorical language. Do these say “poetry” to readers? Do they say enough?

4. Who are these readers who read enough poetry to know it as different from the ground when they read it?

not the fundamental I but the deep you

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from “Proverbs and Songs”
Dedicated to Jose Ortega y Gasset
Antonio Machado

IV
But look in your mirror for the other one,
the other one who walks by your side.

V
Between living and dreaming
there is a third thing.
Guess it.

XV
Look for your other half
who walks always next to you
and tends to be what you aren’t.

XVII
In my solitude
I have seen things very clearly
that were not true.

XVIII
Water is good, so is thirst;
shadow is good, so is sun;
the honey from the rosemarys
and the honey of the bare fields.

XXI
Form your letters slowly and well:
making things well
is more important than making them.

XXIV
Wake up, you poets:
let echoes end,
and voices begin.

XXV
But don’t hunt for dissonance;
because, in the end, there is no dissonance.
When the sound is heard people dance.

XXVI
What the poet is searching for
is not the fundamental I
but the deep you.

XXVIII
Beyond living and dreaming
there is something more important:
waking up.

XXXIV
If a poem becomes common,
passed around, hand to hand, it’s OK:
gold is chosen for coins.

XL
But art?
It is pure and intense play,
so it is like pure and intense life,
so it is like pure and intense fire.
You’ll see the coal burning.

Poets and Silence

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I think that what poets do is decipher silence.
Ekiwah Adler Beléndez

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?
Audre Lorde

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