I've been thinking of the state of inspiration as one of suggestibility. One receives suggestions from what – memories, subconsciously perceived patterns, the ether, some spirit, one's own hubris – and follows one suggestion after another. But to stop there and say, "This is finished," strikes me as the height of gullibility. A poet must be open to suggestions, but exercise judgment in which ones to accept. As with any art, the piece under production should be examined from a step away, and that which does it injury replaced with something else – another suggestion perhaps – that accords rationally and aesthetically with its essence. Or, should the whole be found to be a set of injuries, let the poet be decent enough to scrap it entirely. Let us be suggestible, but of sound judgment.
I agree. That's Wilbur's assessment of his own process. One has to play two roles, the advocate and the critic. The critic is the role that evaluates and makes judgements about quality. But the word 'judgement' is a dirty one in poetry today. The idea of judging art, people don't like it. They respond reflexively with "That's just your opinion" or "If you don't like it just don't read it."
This is a great essay! The dichotomy you discuss between Ginsburg and Wordsworth really points out how modern poetry, imho, went astray by abandoning universal themes for individual, subjective ones. In terms of process, it got me thinking about my own verse (I can't bring myself to call what I write "poetry" in any literary context 😂) and whether I'm guilty of the same thing Ginsberg is.
It's funny because Ginsberg has never done anything for me. Even "Howl"; I consider it over-long. I have a book of Kerouac's poetry and I think he was better than Ginsberg and I think it's because it feels more universal. It's like the difference between a gritty Delta blues tune that captures universal suffering versus a British Invasion pop blues tune that uses the forms and has a great tune but can't get that emotional core (as an aside, I think Bukowski got it which is why I think he's the only decent poet from what you call the neoromantic era).
I really don't analyze my own process; I've written poems in twenty minutes that I've thought were quite good, and I've taken years to write a poem I thought was quite good. Length is not the primary factor; as you point out, it's capturing an emotion. Thinking about it I find my quicker poems tend to spring from intense emotion like love, anger or loss; my longer (in time to write) poems tend to come from more complex emotions such as nostalgia or a general sense of either peace (or disquiet) or some form of humor. And I agree with the Ginsberg quote that traditional forms are a way of bringing that emotion up into words, if you will, much like the form of the blues focuses the musician into making specific musical statements. That's why I love form! But I also love form because I can't write free verse to save my life; I write blank verse, yes, but my free verse sucks!😂
Anyway, I never took any poetry classes or anything but if they discuss stuff like this they would probably be a lot of fun. Thsnks for a thought-provoking essay.
I actually like Bukowski. I think he's a great storyteller. Love is a Dog from Hell is a solid book.
I've had writing sessions that went really well, but never so well that the thing came out perfect or fully formed. The times when I did think that, I've gone back, sometimes years later, and found that I can fix something.
I think you're right, the quicker ones spring from an intense emotion. For me, the traditional, received forms is something which provides the framework for the thinking itself. It's the meter-making argument that Emerson talks about.
Like you I’ve never had anything come out “perfect” though I’ve had some that were only revised slightly. I also think the traditional framework is a scaffold on which to work with an idea. It’s weird how sometimes a poem starts with an idea (and then I use a form to shape it, usually a sonnet or villanelle) and sometimes a poem starts as a line or rhythm and takes on a form of its own (or, in my case, somehow morphs into a sonnet 🤣).
I think love poems are the best example of the intense emotion type; when I was a younger man and just met a new “love of my life” I would dash off entire love songs and ballads in a minute and there seemed to be no shortage of inspiration!🤣 I’m sure all the girls and women I’ve dated have bundles of my poetry stashed away somewhere, which is incredibly embarrassing to think about…
And Bukowski rocks! I didn’t discover him until after the movie “Barfly” came out. I thought he was THE voice of the working man!
About my process: I can only get started writing a poem if something or other inspires me. I consider that a handicap. However, once I have something down on paper, I tend to work it over relentlessly, sometimes because beating it into a specific form seems right, other times because there is an aura of falseness about the original inspiration, and I have to dig past that to get to something more satisfactory.
Partly, this latter struggle comes from my experience as a mathematician. Sometimes, when I am very engaged with a theoretical question, I will have a moment of epiphany, and a wonderfully clear and compelling and obviously true understanding breaks upon me. But then, as the practice of mathematics requires, I examine it step by step, and most times (nearly all the time) I discover a flaw, a hidden assumption, a conclusion jumped to in the heat of inspiration, and there follows a great sense of deflation. I persevere and eventually uncover the truth, and often it really is related to my initial flash of inspiration, but that flash needed to be corrected, worked over, its holes patched and its chasms bridged.
Therefore I don't trust my inspirations, either in mathematics or in poetry. If they can withstand the rigors of my editing process, they can be winnowed down to something true, or at least something I feel no qualm about signing my name to. As you can see, I tend to favor Wordsworth's approach over Ginsberg's. If the original ecstatic inspiration IS the poem and the words are just transcription, why bother writing them down at all? Just be satisfied with the awesome vibrant meaningfulness of the sunflower (pot helps with this) and then go party. Mission accomplished.
I'd say the process you describe in the first paragraph is basically my process too. Inspiration, then a relent working over, chiseling away at, it until it sounds right. It's not like you couldn't train yourself to get it all out in one session, but I just think it's never going to be as good if you do that. I understand the sentiment. The way the thing begins to cool off, you want to capture it at its most salient. But in writing, that stuff is all conveyed by an effect of language anyway, and it's possible to create the effect without having the experience, if you know how to do it.
Yeah, Wordsworth is a vastly better poet and automatic writing is hogwash. There's nothing in Howl that rings the gong in my head like that smoke, sent up in silence. And Ginsberg was always in the shadow of Whitman, painfully, understandably, since most American poets are. But I'm more sympathetic to the guy than you. The output is really the readings, Howl in particular. Tintern Abbey is better than Howl as a poem, true, but spoken performance is another thing, here I think Howl edges out any Wordsworth. An analogous comparison might be Mitchell v. Dylan: Mitchell sometimes beats Dylan on the page, but Dylan always beats Mitchell on the mic. And Ginsberg had his reasons for rejecting reason, much of which are enumerated in the poetry itself, especially Howl. But I'm niggling. Great essay and clever framing, it invites productive disagreement and promotes understanding.
Thanks Matt. I dunno, I don't find the shamanistic performance, the trance-like recitation, that compelling. I do like a good dramatic reading though. Olson is a better for that than Ginsberg, imo. Hell, I like Pound's weird affectations. I also like the understated performance, the one that just feels like someone talking to someone else.
Ginsberg submitted himself, occasionally, to hewing to some discipline and wrote better poems—his, yes, sonnet, "After Reading Kerouac's Manuscript THE TOWN AND THE CITY" for instance: 10 syllables/line, rhyme scheme ABABA/CDCDC/ABAB rises to a finer ecstatic level than "Sunflower Sutra" does.
The Beats eschewed craft in a Howl (forgive me) in response to Modernism—and now, in response, we have to suffer under associative drift, surrealism for surrealism's sake, stream of consciousness leading us out into 40 years in the desert from America's MFA factories ... and don't get me started.
I will get, for lack of better words, an ecstatic line that will take hours, days, weeks, months, years to be *crafted* into something I don't want to throw in the bin. Poems should be cultivated, tended to, loved, disciplined where necessary before they're sent out into the world to face editorial rejection. And I wouldn't do it any other way.
I agree, I think these things take time to make sound right, although I think there's value in an art that tests and inspects the boundaries of its processes. But when a style has exhausted itself and lingers on, that's the worst.
Yes. I'm all for throwing ourselves at the boundaries and experimenting—let's go! What I'm wary of is turning that into a kind of fundamentalist you-must gospel. The grand history of English-language poetry is so vast, everyone should be allowed to play in its fields, it seems to me.
<Regarding Raymond Hammond, this is from a review of his book POETIC AMUSEMENT, which he originally wrote as his master's thesis to satisfy the requirements for graduation from NYU's Gallatin School.>
Only in passing will I note this shoddy little book's many errors of grammar, syntax, and diction, and its redundancy (some passages, particularly citations, are repeated verbatim from one chapter to another). Suffice it to say that POETIC AMUSEMENT is embarrassing even by the fairly lax standards of a master's thesis -- and maybe that's no surprise, given that the author's education in "poetics" (by which term I suspect the author means nothing more than the study of fixed, ossified poetic forms) seems to have come by way of a single mentor, in the setting of a burger joint.
Even though that mentor was the late William Packard, founder and longtime editor of the NEW YORK QUARTERLY (and author of the mean-spirited, hilarious novel SATURDAY NIGHT AT SAN MARCOS), it's impossible for me to believe that anything but the ethics of an old boys' network accounts for Packard's bequest of the NYQ's editorship to such an intellectual nonentity -- or for Raymond P. Hammond's being allowed to edit anything at all.
I'm no apologist for MFA programs and their institutional dominance, but Hammond adds nothing to the discussion by setting up and knocking down the straw man of oppressed MFA students forced to produce a univocal, uniform poetry. And get this: "The responsibility of agonizing revisions and decisions are [sic] left to a committee's caucus rather than to the gut tendencies of an artist who is willing to sacrifice for his art. The resultant work is left gang raped and abandoned in a dumpster, barely recognizable." That's offensive, not to mention ignorant and demonstrably untrue.
Oh, and don't be fooled by "Only 1 left in stock (more on the way)." Translation: "This is a cheaply produced POD volume, and the time it takes for printing will be added to your Amazon Prime 2-day shipping, so make that Amazon Prime 3-day shipping."
I had been looking forward to reading an astute, provocative book of real substance -- the manifesto that "Poetic Amusement" was advertised as being. Instead, the book turned out to be the reactionary, splenetic grousing of a crank, an amateur in the worst sense of the word.
You offer extravagant praise for a poem that describes the ocean as "round," the air as "living," and--O, I swoon at such flashes of genius--the sky as "blue." I guess if I were "originally possessed of much organic sensibility" (I might switch that around to "organically possessed of much original sensibility" and use it in an ad for manure) and "in a healthful state of association," I would be "in some degree enlightened, [my] taste exalted and [my] affections ameliorated" by Tintern Abbey. As it is, I read the thing and think: that's some fine hogwash.
That recitation by AG is awful. Judging by the recordings I've listened to on YouTube, many of the grand poobahs of mid-20th century American poetry read their work like men possessed (with "much organic sensibility"?), chanting and carrying on in a most shaman-like manner. You take Olsen too seriously. He was a kind of performance artist, the clown of Gloucester.
By all accounts he took himself seriously. I don't think you write a three-volume work like the Maximus poems, or do what he did at Black Mountain, without an aim. Although he does seem very arrogant and theatrical about it all. Levertov wrote to WCW that she found him "self-deluded."
As for the Wordsworth's descriptions, they do stick out as being perhaps too plain, too simplistic, but that's obviously by design. Relative to the rest of the poem, their flatness is an effect. Compare this to "Sunflower Sutra" which stays at that level throughout, and tries to transcend it by accumulation and repetition alone.
“Self-deluded”? Who ain’t, Denise honey? I’ve seen a video of him prancing around claiming to be the merman of Gloucester, or some such creature. No crazy like a New England crazy. You gotta love ‘em.
Why anybody “by design” would call the sky blue is beyond me. However, at least it really is “blue” at times (not right now in Philly, though). Calling the ocean round? That I totally don’t get. Sounds like he might have a touch of that “self-delusion” Levertov told WCW about.
Native Floridian, have lived in Kentucky, Atlanta, NYC (longest tenure), Adirondacks, Philadelphia. Aren’t you also from Florida? Seems I recall you taking exception to a writer calling the lakes of Florida “blue” and saying you are from that grotesque swampland. Is this so, or am I, like poor CO, self-deluded? Wouldn’t be the first time I remembered something that didn’t happen.
I'm from the East coast originally, too. Florida for most of it. But I've spent more than half my life on the West coast now, and I feel properly Western.
Thank you, Robert for this interesting piece on inspiration and process. I love that you are referring to work by Ginsburg as neoromantic. In the 80s after studying with Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley and others at Saint Mark’s (which was a very romantic scene), I attended graduate school and studied with Allen, who I had already met. He had written an introduction for a book of mine. His main idea at the time it seemed to me, was to write using meter as a springboard and ruler.
Because of Ted (and also being exposed to early sonnets by Sydney and Wyatt), I settled on the sonnet form. It gives me a structure and by extension a metrical line.
I was intrigued with the New Romantic movement in music and fashion in the ‘80 and ‘90s. I began using the term New Romantic to describe my work and that of others like Elaine Equi, Dorothea Lasky, Kevin Opstedal, Andrei Codrescu, and Bob Holman. This is work that recognizes the triumph of past work and incorporates it into a new sensibility and expression.
The New Romanticism that I profess, is centered on imagery, lyricism, and persona. You can find more in my interview in Rain Taxi.
Always great to read your thoughts and soak up your knowledge.
I've been thinking of the state of inspiration as one of suggestibility. One receives suggestions from what – memories, subconsciously perceived patterns, the ether, some spirit, one's own hubris – and follows one suggestion after another. But to stop there and say, "This is finished," strikes me as the height of gullibility. A poet must be open to suggestions, but exercise judgment in which ones to accept. As with any art, the piece under production should be examined from a step away, and that which does it injury replaced with something else – another suggestion perhaps – that accords rationally and aesthetically with its essence. Or, should the whole be found to be a set of injuries, let the poet be decent enough to scrap it entirely. Let us be suggestible, but of sound judgment.
I agree. That's Wilbur's assessment of his own process. One has to play two roles, the advocate and the critic. The critic is the role that evaluates and makes judgements about quality. But the word 'judgement' is a dirty one in poetry today. The idea of judging art, people don't like it. They respond reflexively with "That's just your opinion" or "If you don't like it just don't read it."
To which the correct responses would be, "No, it's my JUDGMENT," and, "Thanks, I won't."
I'll try to remember that next time I'm in an argument.
This is a great essay! The dichotomy you discuss between Ginsburg and Wordsworth really points out how modern poetry, imho, went astray by abandoning universal themes for individual, subjective ones. In terms of process, it got me thinking about my own verse (I can't bring myself to call what I write "poetry" in any literary context 😂) and whether I'm guilty of the same thing Ginsberg is.
It's funny because Ginsberg has never done anything for me. Even "Howl"; I consider it over-long. I have a book of Kerouac's poetry and I think he was better than Ginsberg and I think it's because it feels more universal. It's like the difference between a gritty Delta blues tune that captures universal suffering versus a British Invasion pop blues tune that uses the forms and has a great tune but can't get that emotional core (as an aside, I think Bukowski got it which is why I think he's the only decent poet from what you call the neoromantic era).
I really don't analyze my own process; I've written poems in twenty minutes that I've thought were quite good, and I've taken years to write a poem I thought was quite good. Length is not the primary factor; as you point out, it's capturing an emotion. Thinking about it I find my quicker poems tend to spring from intense emotion like love, anger or loss; my longer (in time to write) poems tend to come from more complex emotions such as nostalgia or a general sense of either peace (or disquiet) or some form of humor. And I agree with the Ginsberg quote that traditional forms are a way of bringing that emotion up into words, if you will, much like the form of the blues focuses the musician into making specific musical statements. That's why I love form! But I also love form because I can't write free verse to save my life; I write blank verse, yes, but my free verse sucks!😂
Anyway, I never took any poetry classes or anything but if they discuss stuff like this they would probably be a lot of fun. Thsnks for a thought-provoking essay.
I actually like Bukowski. I think he's a great storyteller. Love is a Dog from Hell is a solid book.
I've had writing sessions that went really well, but never so well that the thing came out perfect or fully formed. The times when I did think that, I've gone back, sometimes years later, and found that I can fix something.
I think you're right, the quicker ones spring from an intense emotion. For me, the traditional, received forms is something which provides the framework for the thinking itself. It's the meter-making argument that Emerson talks about.
Like you I’ve never had anything come out “perfect” though I’ve had some that were only revised slightly. I also think the traditional framework is a scaffold on which to work with an idea. It’s weird how sometimes a poem starts with an idea (and then I use a form to shape it, usually a sonnet or villanelle) and sometimes a poem starts as a line or rhythm and takes on a form of its own (or, in my case, somehow morphs into a sonnet 🤣).
I think love poems are the best example of the intense emotion type; when I was a younger man and just met a new “love of my life” I would dash off entire love songs and ballads in a minute and there seemed to be no shortage of inspiration!🤣 I’m sure all the girls and women I’ve dated have bundles of my poetry stashed away somewhere, which is incredibly embarrassing to think about…
And Bukowski rocks! I didn’t discover him until after the movie “Barfly” came out. I thought he was THE voice of the working man!
About my process: I can only get started writing a poem if something or other inspires me. I consider that a handicap. However, once I have something down on paper, I tend to work it over relentlessly, sometimes because beating it into a specific form seems right, other times because there is an aura of falseness about the original inspiration, and I have to dig past that to get to something more satisfactory.
Partly, this latter struggle comes from my experience as a mathematician. Sometimes, when I am very engaged with a theoretical question, I will have a moment of epiphany, and a wonderfully clear and compelling and obviously true understanding breaks upon me. But then, as the practice of mathematics requires, I examine it step by step, and most times (nearly all the time) I discover a flaw, a hidden assumption, a conclusion jumped to in the heat of inspiration, and there follows a great sense of deflation. I persevere and eventually uncover the truth, and often it really is related to my initial flash of inspiration, but that flash needed to be corrected, worked over, its holes patched and its chasms bridged.
Therefore I don't trust my inspirations, either in mathematics or in poetry. If they can withstand the rigors of my editing process, they can be winnowed down to something true, or at least something I feel no qualm about signing my name to. As you can see, I tend to favor Wordsworth's approach over Ginsberg's. If the original ecstatic inspiration IS the poem and the words are just transcription, why bother writing them down at all? Just be satisfied with the awesome vibrant meaningfulness of the sunflower (pot helps with this) and then go party. Mission accomplished.
I'd say the process you describe in the first paragraph is basically my process too. Inspiration, then a relent working over, chiseling away at, it until it sounds right. It's not like you couldn't train yourself to get it all out in one session, but I just think it's never going to be as good if you do that. I understand the sentiment. The way the thing begins to cool off, you want to capture it at its most salient. But in writing, that stuff is all conveyed by an effect of language anyway, and it's possible to create the effect without having the experience, if you know how to do it.
Yeah, Wordsworth is a vastly better poet and automatic writing is hogwash. There's nothing in Howl that rings the gong in my head like that smoke, sent up in silence. And Ginsberg was always in the shadow of Whitman, painfully, understandably, since most American poets are. But I'm more sympathetic to the guy than you. The output is really the readings, Howl in particular. Tintern Abbey is better than Howl as a poem, true, but spoken performance is another thing, here I think Howl edges out any Wordsworth. An analogous comparison might be Mitchell v. Dylan: Mitchell sometimes beats Dylan on the page, but Dylan always beats Mitchell on the mic. And Ginsberg had his reasons for rejecting reason, much of which are enumerated in the poetry itself, especially Howl. But I'm niggling. Great essay and clever framing, it invites productive disagreement and promotes understanding.
Thanks Matt. I dunno, I don't find the shamanistic performance, the trance-like recitation, that compelling. I do like a good dramatic reading though. Olson is a better for that than Ginsberg, imo. Hell, I like Pound's weird affectations. I also like the understated performance, the one that just feels like someone talking to someone else.
Ginsberg submitted himself, occasionally, to hewing to some discipline and wrote better poems—his, yes, sonnet, "After Reading Kerouac's Manuscript THE TOWN AND THE CITY" for instance: 10 syllables/line, rhyme scheme ABABA/CDCDC/ABAB rises to a finer ecstatic level than "Sunflower Sutra" does.
The Beats eschewed craft in a Howl (forgive me) in response to Modernism—and now, in response, we have to suffer under associative drift, surrealism for surrealism's sake, stream of consciousness leading us out into 40 years in the desert from America's MFA factories ... and don't get me started.
I will get, for lack of better words, an ecstatic line that will take hours, days, weeks, months, years to be *crafted* into something I don't want to throw in the bin. Poems should be cultivated, tended to, loved, disciplined where necessary before they're sent out into the world to face editorial rejection. And I wouldn't do it any other way.
I agree, I think these things take time to make sound right, although I think there's value in an art that tests and inspects the boundaries of its processes. But when a style has exhausted itself and lingers on, that's the worst.
Yes. I'm all for throwing ourselves at the boundaries and experimenting—let's go! What I'm wary of is turning that into a kind of fundamentalist you-must gospel. The grand history of English-language poetry is so vast, everyone should be allowed to play in its fields, it seems to me.
<Regarding Raymond Hammond, this is from a review of his book POETIC AMUSEMENT, which he originally wrote as his master's thesis to satisfy the requirements for graduation from NYU's Gallatin School.>
Only in passing will I note this shoddy little book's many errors of grammar, syntax, and diction, and its redundancy (some passages, particularly citations, are repeated verbatim from one chapter to another). Suffice it to say that POETIC AMUSEMENT is embarrassing even by the fairly lax standards of a master's thesis -- and maybe that's no surprise, given that the author's education in "poetics" (by which term I suspect the author means nothing more than the study of fixed, ossified poetic forms) seems to have come by way of a single mentor, in the setting of a burger joint.
Even though that mentor was the late William Packard, founder and longtime editor of the NEW YORK QUARTERLY (and author of the mean-spirited, hilarious novel SATURDAY NIGHT AT SAN MARCOS), it's impossible for me to believe that anything but the ethics of an old boys' network accounts for Packard's bequest of the NYQ's editorship to such an intellectual nonentity -- or for Raymond P. Hammond's being allowed to edit anything at all.
I'm no apologist for MFA programs and their institutional dominance, but Hammond adds nothing to the discussion by setting up and knocking down the straw man of oppressed MFA students forced to produce a univocal, uniform poetry. And get this: "The responsibility of agonizing revisions and decisions are [sic] left to a committee's caucus rather than to the gut tendencies of an artist who is willing to sacrifice for his art. The resultant work is left gang raped and abandoned in a dumpster, barely recognizable." That's offensive, not to mention ignorant and demonstrably untrue.
Oh, and don't be fooled by "Only 1 left in stock (more on the way)." Translation: "This is a cheaply produced POD volume, and the time it takes for printing will be added to your Amazon Prime 2-day shipping, so make that Amazon Prime 3-day shipping."
I had been looking forward to reading an astute, provocative book of real substance -- the manifesto that "Poetic Amusement" was advertised as being. Instead, the book turned out to be the reactionary, splenetic grousing of a crank, an amateur in the worst sense of the word.
What a disappointment. I want my $14.67 back.
Brutal. It makes me almost want to read it.
"neoromantics" compare "neuromantics"
Oddly, my first thought was "necromantics."
that's how I read neoromantics at first !
Great minds snark alike. 🙂
You offer extravagant praise for a poem that describes the ocean as "round," the air as "living," and--O, I swoon at such flashes of genius--the sky as "blue." I guess if I were "originally possessed of much organic sensibility" (I might switch that around to "organically possessed of much original sensibility" and use it in an ad for manure) and "in a healthful state of association," I would be "in some degree enlightened, [my] taste exalted and [my] affections ameliorated" by Tintern Abbey. As it is, I read the thing and think: that's some fine hogwash.
That recitation by AG is awful. Judging by the recordings I've listened to on YouTube, many of the grand poobahs of mid-20th century American poetry read their work like men possessed (with "much organic sensibility"?), chanting and carrying on in a most shaman-like manner. You take Olsen too seriously. He was a kind of performance artist, the clown of Gloucester.
By all accounts he took himself seriously. I don't think you write a three-volume work like the Maximus poems, or do what he did at Black Mountain, without an aim. Although he does seem very arrogant and theatrical about it all. Levertov wrote to WCW that she found him "self-deluded."
As for the Wordsworth's descriptions, they do stick out as being perhaps too plain, too simplistic, but that's obviously by design. Relative to the rest of the poem, their flatness is an effect. Compare this to "Sunflower Sutra" which stays at that level throughout, and tries to transcend it by accumulation and repetition alone.
“Self-deluded”? Who ain’t, Denise honey? I’ve seen a video of him prancing around claiming to be the merman of Gloucester, or some such creature. No crazy like a New England crazy. You gotta love ‘em.
Why anybody “by design” would call the sky blue is beyond me. However, at least it really is “blue” at times (not right now in Philly, though). Calling the ocean round? That I totally don’t get. Sounds like he might have a touch of that “self-delusion” Levertov told WCW about.
Aren't you an East coaster yourself? Must be in the round water over there.
Native Floridian, have lived in Kentucky, Atlanta, NYC (longest tenure), Adirondacks, Philadelphia. Aren’t you also from Florida? Seems I recall you taking exception to a writer calling the lakes of Florida “blue” and saying you are from that grotesque swampland. Is this so, or am I, like poor CO, self-deluded? Wouldn’t be the first time I remembered something that didn’t happen.
I'm from the East coast originally, too. Florida for most of it. But I've spent more than half my life on the West coast now, and I feel properly Western.
Thank you, Robert for this interesting piece on inspiration and process. I love that you are referring to work by Ginsburg as neoromantic. In the 80s after studying with Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley and others at Saint Mark’s (which was a very romantic scene), I attended graduate school and studied with Allen, who I had already met. He had written an introduction for a book of mine. His main idea at the time it seemed to me, was to write using meter as a springboard and ruler.
Because of Ted (and also being exposed to early sonnets by Sydney and Wyatt), I settled on the sonnet form. It gives me a structure and by extension a metrical line.
I was intrigued with the New Romantic movement in music and fashion in the ‘80 and ‘90s. I began using the term New Romantic to describe my work and that of others like Elaine Equi, Dorothea Lasky, Kevin Opstedal, Andrei Codrescu, and Bob Holman. This is work that recognizes the triumph of past work and incorporates it into a new sensibility and expression.
The New Romanticism that I profess, is centered on imagery, lyricism, and persona. You can find more in my interview in Rain Taxi.
Always great to read your thoughts and soak up your knowledge.