I think that his [the poet’s] function is to make his imagination theirs and that he fulfills himself only as he sees his imagination become the light in the minds of others.
Loved this! It split me in two. Half of me (the “noble” half) joins Stevens in shaking a fist at the bastardisation of an artform rooted in divine impulse (“that imperial faculty” as Shelley so beautifully puts it).
The other half wants to defend the absence of nobility in modern poetry. The world has been secularised to a pulp and our poetic language along with it. When Bukowski (whose intentions were anything but noble) wrote “bullshit is bullshit and that’s all it is”, did the words cease to be poetry? I think what defined them were simply his putting pen to paper and saying “this is a poem”. Much in the same way Duchamp’s urinal had as much a claim to be art as anything in the Louvre. Perhaps Bukowksi and Duchamp’s divine impulse was telling us to get our noble heads out of our arses. (Disclaimer: I can’t stand Bukowski.)
Defending his decision to write Jerusalem in free verse, Blake wrote: “Poetry Fetter’d Fetters the Human Race.”
I find Bukowski's best work noble in spirit. It's a violence of the imagination against the violence of reality, as Stevens says. He wrote a lot of garbage, too, though. But his best ones are the ones where he transcends the nihilism that dogged him, the ones where he fought and won out. He could also be witty and hilarious as a storyteller, even when his poetry wasn't great.
I reckon Bukowski, in true Bukowski fashion, would have rejected the categorisation altogether. But I'll cede that the impulse to create in the face of destruction is noble in itself.
There is something SO special about poetry. Now, I adore fiction (novels, plays, novellas, short stories, etc), but the distilling of language (as in a poem) is like putting the star at the top of the Christmas Tree.
Some great thoughts. For some reason I am also reminded of an article some years back called "The Missing Music in Today's Poetry," whose point was related to nobility perhaps, but aimed more at criticizing the intrusion of tone-deaf commentary or cleverness upon the artistry of aural delight. So, Robert, would you say that poems that lack the qualities you've highlighted here are just bad poems or not really poetry at all? I'd also love to hear more of your thoughts on conventions—we now have "forms" such as "prose poems," which for the life of me I can take no interest in. Free verse is as ubiquitous as high fructose corn syrup. But I want meter, I want music, I want color, I want life. It needn't be the "jingling sound of like endings" (to quote Milton), but the old-fashioned idea that one should master the conventions before they break them seems now, as in visual art, to be treated as a quaint or laughable expectation burdening sad traditionalists like me. What am I missing?
I share a lot of your sentiments Tullius. I think that aural pleasure, that music, is related to the idea of nobility. To conceive of a thing in such a way that it elicits singing or enunciation from us, that it desires to be said as if sung. It's a care and attention to the sound and sense of words, their relationship, their harmony, their interplay. Lineation is a big part of this, which is why I think prose poems lose something essential about poetry.
Are they poetry? Sure, but no more than a jingle for an ad is poem. Something is missing about the intention, the aim of the thing, that is part of the poetic tradition. I think it's useful, as far as experimenting with the form itself goes, but even the best prose poetry lacks something essential about poetry to me.
I started writing poetry when I was just a child, at the age of 25 I had already written 6 books and had given some recitals in local auditoriums. People asked me for poems for their sweethearts! Once I wrote ‘Poetry is the freedom in your flying’. I know the power and magic there is in writing poetry, and I can especially appreciate the meaningless poems, which somehow compel to give them a personal meaning. Writing poetry is not like painting a picture, because verse by verse one reveals a too intimate corners filled with doubts and sufferings, or secret joys. I believe that literary art should be taught without structure, so that it finds its own body in each person.
Thank you for your thoughts Norma. It’s wonderful to see so many people sharing their own personal experiences with poetry. I think it demonstrates how moving the medium is. Poetry is a kind of freedom. I would say it’s a freedom through form.
The following line: “Is it not a way of looking at things that illuminates consciousness and makes the world shimmer?” cuts close to the truth. An excellent piece, thank you.
Poeisis means to create. How does it not belong in physics or mathematics, in biology or philosophy just as much as the English Department. Poetry is all of this. Yes it uses words. It touches upon language. Poetry does not belong to language. It enters into it. The failure of language is what allows poetry to exist.
It leads us into understanding in the metaphor of wisdom beyond the speakable. It lives outside of the literalization of prose. Our culture is getting more and more prosaic. This increasing literalization of reality is a blight on imagination as Robert Harrison warns.
The world invites. It does not require. We are invited to respond. We live into the discoveries, grasping at a mystery that we will never understand. Everything and nothing are angels migrating to a space beyond a name. Necessary angels.
In the end, poetry is what poetry does. It will bring different meaning to every reader who interacts with it, where it meets them. Don Domanski gives me goosebumps as he says, “Poetry helps to enhance and deepen our experience of existence, not just by the use of words, but by the fact that despite their use, something else is carried along with them.” Something else is carried along with the words. Don McKay writes that metaphor’s first act is to un-name its subject. McKay cautions that the act of naming can lead to a feeling of possession. Knowledge has an instinct to possess. Language must go beyond itself. The wilderness is unnameable. Poetry may just be a pause in the presence of that other-ness. A rift in time. A glimpse of soul.
I love everything you say here Jamie. Especially that quote by Domanski. The prosaic, left-hemispheric thinking is the problem of our time. Stevens has this line about how language evolves through the conflict between the denotative and the connotative forces in words: “between an asceticism tending to kill language by stripping words of all association and a hedonism ending to kill language by dissipating their sense in a multiplicity of associations.”
That definitely leans into Wallace’s Motive for Metaphor. Maybe Domanski had it right and our own reality is what gets carried connotatively with those words. Meaning. Something tells me there’s a space around those words that carries even more. A revealing? Neuropsychological Philosopher Iain McGilchrist goes left-right deep in his two phenomenal books:
The Master and his Emissary
The Matter With Things.
McGilchrist underlined the difference between newness and novelty, and that “poetry need not seek novelty, because true poetry makes what had seemed familiar new.” In the end, metaphors do not have to be new to be successful: “in fact the best ones never can be. They are like the language of love, as old as the hills and yet fresh with every new lover. The trick of the poet is to make what seemed feeble, old, dead come back to life. True metaphor is a union like love.”
Poetry reveals- in the failure of language, something else arrives. A knowing. Something that knew us before we existed.
I’ve always considered poetry as the highest form language. Filtered, refined, compact but holds an entire world in one line. People hate nuance but it’s crucial for survival— nuance is best said poetically for its own survival as well as our own
Appreciate the comment Jon. I agree with you. I think nuance and irony, these things live between and beyond the words, but the right words point to them and give us a good sense of them.
This is an exceptional explanation of things admittedly difficult to explain. I find that the fundamental thing poetry does (in composition and consumption) is trains one's attention. We attend to the meaning and patterning of things, but poetry seeks to deepen or stretch those observed patterns by comparing dissimilar things. Chesterton says, "All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry." In this the fundamental pursuit of poetry intersects with that of language itself: to say the most meaningful thing in the least amount of words. When this is done well, the end result is clarity beyond clarity. Thank you for putting so many words to thoughts on the "mechanism" of poetry. Very helpful!
I read with great interest and pleasure. Thank you!
Yet, I remain as agnostic about the subject as I was before. I cannot offer an alternative proposition for the function of poetry but I am hesitant to accept any that uses the language of poetry to define poetry. Steven’s approach is such: nobility is a metaphor therefore a poetic expression in itself.
What I believe we are missing is a metalanguage for poetry. A language that will be outside of the realm of poetry. It’s only from a certain distance that we can distinguish the shape of things. And that is what such a language would offer.
On the other hand, I am not very much opposed to leaving certain things undefined.
Thank you Nikos. I’m tempted to say that the metalanguage is poetry. It’s through poetic language that we’re able to transcend some of the consequences of too rigidly defining a thing. Metaphor lets us know a thing by understanding the similarities or differences between things. We can understand what Stevens means by nobility through his figuring of it, even if we cannot precisely define it.
Thank you Robert, for your thorough yet passionate article. I dare say I can hear that nobility you speak of in the questions you've given yourself, as well as in the answers you propose.
If I may, I would say that both the nobility and the human drive behind it you so well characterise have to do with 'the telling of a truth in song'. The truth may be imagined, deduced, or the result of disquisitions, arguments, internal battles, but it arises unexpected, uncontrolled even to the light. And with it goes forth a tune that lubricates the chain of unremitting thoughts and images flooding the poet's mind.
Such verses cannot wait to be expressed, recorded, and repeated for fear they will vanish in their original conception never to return as they were first experienced.
And this is perhaps the most important point I'd make: despite the imagery (a type of translation for communication purposes the poet is well adept at), despite the imagination which will impact and make its mark on the reader, poetry is, above all, the music of a soul discovering a truth of something deserving of open praise and ready to be sung for all to hear.
Thanks for your thoughts Enrique. I also think truth is an integral part to the conception of nobility. Stevens talks about the balancing that the poet does between the imagination and reality. That balancing is the search for truth, for the right way of figuring things, as opposed to poets who sacrifice one for the other.
This was such a pleasure to read! I will definitely revisit this article. It was very well written!
I often question quotes and one of them is ''poetry is painting with words''. I feel like poetry is a painting as much as painting is a poem, that is, they are actually not the same. As a former oil painter that comparison almost annoys me, because it steals the core of which poetry is made: words. If I wanted to paint an image, I wouldn't have to write a poem.
It's not about painting an image, and sometimes not even causing a sound (although poetry is connected to sounds more). I even think poetry should be independent of sound because it doesn't necessarily need to be spoken. To me, poetry is pure language! Just a thought I wanted to share. :)
Thank you Gio. I agree with you about that metaphor. Words figure things in the mind, but not in the same way as a painting. There's a saying, "all art aspires to the quality of music," which I think is more true, although it also misses that crucial element of language, that involvement of the conscious "I."
It seems that poetry illuminates the human experience by honing our attention on a sliver of the truth, which then can be used to find ourselves in communion with the rest of the experience. In regards to the difference that it offers us, quite simply, poetry is the "stuff" of dreams. At least, in the purest sense of that word.
I'd agree with that Azariah. It is the stuff of dreams, made out of words. I think it hints at more than we know, a sliver of truth we use to get at more than we can on our own.
Personally, I don't ask that a poem grant me access to a realm of "lofty" ideas. I am not looking to be elevated and have no interest in "transcendence" of any sort. Others, you included, apparently are, and that's fine. I just don't get it. Am I not reading properly? Am I not reading the proper things? Am I just dumb?
It's fun coming up with definitions of and explanations for poetry. I do it all the time. It's one of my favorite pastimes! My starting point, though, differs from yours. I don't think in terms of poetic language transporting the reader to a realm of lofty thoughts and feelings. The form, the graphic circumstances are what interest me, why a poem looks like it does, the conventions of shape and structure. The definition I've favored lately is as follows: "A poem is an instance of voluntary space restraints." For a long time a definition I liked a lot was: "Poetry is violence to sentences." There will be others I fancy in the future, I'm sure.
Do you know these lines from Robert Lowell's "The Dolphin": "Failure keeps snapping up transcendence,/bubble and bullfrog boating on the surface,/belly lustily lagging three inches lowered--the insatiable fiction of desire."
Yes that's a good one. I think he one something for that collection. For me nothing's better than Lowell's "Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket." "The Lord survives the rainbow of His will."
Our starting points are very different. And yet I enjoy your poetry very much. At your best, your work has sharpness and strangeness. It's like a mad scientist operating on words for his own pleasure.
I'm not smart enough for "Lord Weary's Castle." Lowell's work doesn't come alive for me until after "Life Studies," when he loosens up and ceases to be pathologically allusive. Several sections of "The Dolphin"--perhaps significantly the ones he wrote while in the hospital after a crackup--contain the poems that have affected me more than any others I've encountered. Thanks for the kind words about my "poetry," but again, what I do with language is not "poetry," although it's hard to find an alternative to that weary old word. "Verbal fetishism" is the best I can do. That's not exactly pithy, but it does carry with it a nice whiff of primitivism and compulsion. I am ready to transition from "composing" to finding, arranging and faking, strategies that are appropriate to our culture of glut. Have spent a lot of time since moving to Philly digesting the ideas of Marcel Duchamp, triggered by the Philadelphia Museum of Art's great Duchamp collection. Ephemera . . . surfaces . . . hints . . . disappearances . . . my idiom is advertising, not "literature."
I agree about language and imagination. Words should be selected and arranged with the goal of prompting meaning-packed imaginative responses. Managed and nuanced.
I like it that poetry permits, even encourages, the reader to be at ease with different imaginative reactions, as if there's no right answer. The novelist seeks precision; the poet teases, isn't it so? Ironically, it's the poet who must be more careful when selecting a word or phrase, as if she's the master of evocation.
Yes, Ron, they must be more careful. Even at the level of the most simple words, like articles or prepositions. They can alter the rhythm of the line. In that way I’d say poets are more precise than novelists, since the novelist doesn’t have to pay attention that closely. They can write approximately
Loved this! It split me in two. Half of me (the “noble” half) joins Stevens in shaking a fist at the bastardisation of an artform rooted in divine impulse (“that imperial faculty” as Shelley so beautifully puts it).
The other half wants to defend the absence of nobility in modern poetry. The world has been secularised to a pulp and our poetic language along with it. When Bukowski (whose intentions were anything but noble) wrote “bullshit is bullshit and that’s all it is”, did the words cease to be poetry? I think what defined them were simply his putting pen to paper and saying “this is a poem”. Much in the same way Duchamp’s urinal had as much a claim to be art as anything in the Louvre. Perhaps Bukowksi and Duchamp’s divine impulse was telling us to get our noble heads out of our arses. (Disclaimer: I can’t stand Bukowski.)
Defending his decision to write Jerusalem in free verse, Blake wrote: “Poetry Fetter’d Fetters the Human Race.”
"Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room." ;-)
"Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down." — Frost
I find Bukowski's best work noble in spirit. It's a violence of the imagination against the violence of reality, as Stevens says. He wrote a lot of garbage, too, though. But his best ones are the ones where he transcends the nihilism that dogged him, the ones where he fought and won out. He could also be witty and hilarious as a storyteller, even when his poetry wasn't great.
I reckon Bukowski, in true Bukowski fashion, would have rejected the categorisation altogether. But I'll cede that the impulse to create in the face of destruction is noble in itself.
There is something SO special about poetry. Now, I adore fiction (novels, plays, novellas, short stories, etc), but the distilling of language (as in a poem) is like putting the star at the top of the Christmas Tree.
Well said Courtenay. Nothing gets me anymore like a good poem
Very helpful and informative, Richard. Thanks!
Some great thoughts. For some reason I am also reminded of an article some years back called "The Missing Music in Today's Poetry," whose point was related to nobility perhaps, but aimed more at criticizing the intrusion of tone-deaf commentary or cleverness upon the artistry of aural delight. So, Robert, would you say that poems that lack the qualities you've highlighted here are just bad poems or not really poetry at all? I'd also love to hear more of your thoughts on conventions—we now have "forms" such as "prose poems," which for the life of me I can take no interest in. Free verse is as ubiquitous as high fructose corn syrup. But I want meter, I want music, I want color, I want life. It needn't be the "jingling sound of like endings" (to quote Milton), but the old-fashioned idea that one should master the conventions before they break them seems now, as in visual art, to be treated as a quaint or laughable expectation burdening sad traditionalists like me. What am I missing?
I share a lot of your sentiments Tullius. I think that aural pleasure, that music, is related to the idea of nobility. To conceive of a thing in such a way that it elicits singing or enunciation from us, that it desires to be said as if sung. It's a care and attention to the sound and sense of words, their relationship, their harmony, their interplay. Lineation is a big part of this, which is why I think prose poems lose something essential about poetry.
Are they poetry? Sure, but no more than a jingle for an ad is poem. Something is missing about the intention, the aim of the thing, that is part of the poetic tradition. I think it's useful, as far as experimenting with the form itself goes, but even the best prose poetry lacks something essential about poetry to me.
Completely agree. We all fall short of the Telos, perhaps, but some more deliberately than others. ;-)
“EMILY: “Does anyone ever realize life while they live it…every, every minute?”
STAGE MANAGER: “No. Saints and poets maybe…they do some.”
– Thornton Wilder, “Our Town”
Wilder knew what was up. I used to think that play was too earnest, but now I don't.
This piece was really exquisite, thank you for writing it.
I started writing poetry when I was just a child, at the age of 25 I had already written 6 books and had given some recitals in local auditoriums. People asked me for poems for their sweethearts! Once I wrote ‘Poetry is the freedom in your flying’. I know the power and magic there is in writing poetry, and I can especially appreciate the meaningless poems, which somehow compel to give them a personal meaning. Writing poetry is not like painting a picture, because verse by verse one reveals a too intimate corners filled with doubts and sufferings, or secret joys. I believe that literary art should be taught without structure, so that it finds its own body in each person.
Thank you for your thoughts Norma. It’s wonderful to see so many people sharing their own personal experiences with poetry. I think it demonstrates how moving the medium is. Poetry is a kind of freedom. I would say it’s a freedom through form.
The following line: “Is it not a way of looking at things that illuminates consciousness and makes the world shimmer?” cuts close to the truth. An excellent piece, thank you.
Thank you Chris. Very kind of you
Thanks Robert. Beautiful article.
Poeisis means to create. How does it not belong in physics or mathematics, in biology or philosophy just as much as the English Department. Poetry is all of this. Yes it uses words. It touches upon language. Poetry does not belong to language. It enters into it. The failure of language is what allows poetry to exist.
It leads us into understanding in the metaphor of wisdom beyond the speakable. It lives outside of the literalization of prose. Our culture is getting more and more prosaic. This increasing literalization of reality is a blight on imagination as Robert Harrison warns.
The world invites. It does not require. We are invited to respond. We live into the discoveries, grasping at a mystery that we will never understand. Everything and nothing are angels migrating to a space beyond a name. Necessary angels.
In the end, poetry is what poetry does. It will bring different meaning to every reader who interacts with it, where it meets them. Don Domanski gives me goosebumps as he says, “Poetry helps to enhance and deepen our experience of existence, not just by the use of words, but by the fact that despite their use, something else is carried along with them.” Something else is carried along with the words. Don McKay writes that metaphor’s first act is to un-name its subject. McKay cautions that the act of naming can lead to a feeling of possession. Knowledge has an instinct to possess. Language must go beyond itself. The wilderness is unnameable. Poetry may just be a pause in the presence of that other-ness. A rift in time. A glimpse of soul.
I love everything you say here Jamie. Especially that quote by Domanski. The prosaic, left-hemispheric thinking is the problem of our time. Stevens has this line about how language evolves through the conflict between the denotative and the connotative forces in words: “between an asceticism tending to kill language by stripping words of all association and a hedonism ending to kill language by dissipating their sense in a multiplicity of associations.”
Thanks Robert!
That definitely leans into Wallace’s Motive for Metaphor. Maybe Domanski had it right and our own reality is what gets carried connotatively with those words. Meaning. Something tells me there’s a space around those words that carries even more. A revealing? Neuropsychological Philosopher Iain McGilchrist goes left-right deep in his two phenomenal books:
The Master and his Emissary
The Matter With Things.
McGilchrist underlined the difference between newness and novelty, and that “poetry need not seek novelty, because true poetry makes what had seemed familiar new.” In the end, metaphors do not have to be new to be successful: “in fact the best ones never can be. They are like the language of love, as old as the hills and yet fresh with every new lover. The trick of the poet is to make what seemed feeble, old, dead come back to life. True metaphor is a union like love.”
Poetry reveals- in the failure of language, something else arrives. A knowing. Something that knew us before we existed.
Keep writing! We need you!
I’m a big fan of McGilchrist. Great quote. Thanks Jamie.
I’ve always considered poetry as the highest form language. Filtered, refined, compact but holds an entire world in one line. People hate nuance but it’s crucial for survival— nuance is best said poetically for its own survival as well as our own
Appreciate the comment Jon. I agree with you. I think nuance and irony, these things live between and beyond the words, but the right words point to them and give us a good sense of them.
This is an exceptional explanation of things admittedly difficult to explain. I find that the fundamental thing poetry does (in composition and consumption) is trains one's attention. We attend to the meaning and patterning of things, but poetry seeks to deepen or stretch those observed patterns by comparing dissimilar things. Chesterton says, "All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry." In this the fundamental pursuit of poetry intersects with that of language itself: to say the most meaningful thing in the least amount of words. When this is done well, the end result is clarity beyond clarity. Thank you for putting so many words to thoughts on the "mechanism" of poetry. Very helpful!
And thank you for your thoughts, Wil. Training attention is right. Good poetry makes us pay attention to it, and thereby augments consciousness.
I read with great interest and pleasure. Thank you!
Yet, I remain as agnostic about the subject as I was before. I cannot offer an alternative proposition for the function of poetry but I am hesitant to accept any that uses the language of poetry to define poetry. Steven’s approach is such: nobility is a metaphor therefore a poetic expression in itself.
What I believe we are missing is a metalanguage for poetry. A language that will be outside of the realm of poetry. It’s only from a certain distance that we can distinguish the shape of things. And that is what such a language would offer.
On the other hand, I am not very much opposed to leaving certain things undefined.
Thank you Nikos. I’m tempted to say that the metalanguage is poetry. It’s through poetic language that we’re able to transcend some of the consequences of too rigidly defining a thing. Metaphor lets us know a thing by understanding the similarities or differences between things. We can understand what Stevens means by nobility through his figuring of it, even if we cannot precisely define it.
Thank you Robert, for your thorough yet passionate article. I dare say I can hear that nobility you speak of in the questions you've given yourself, as well as in the answers you propose.
If I may, I would say that both the nobility and the human drive behind it you so well characterise have to do with 'the telling of a truth in song'. The truth may be imagined, deduced, or the result of disquisitions, arguments, internal battles, but it arises unexpected, uncontrolled even to the light. And with it goes forth a tune that lubricates the chain of unremitting thoughts and images flooding the poet's mind.
Such verses cannot wait to be expressed, recorded, and repeated for fear they will vanish in their original conception never to return as they were first experienced.
And this is perhaps the most important point I'd make: despite the imagery (a type of translation for communication purposes the poet is well adept at), despite the imagination which will impact and make its mark on the reader, poetry is, above all, the music of a soul discovering a truth of something deserving of open praise and ready to be sung for all to hear.
Thanks for your thoughts Enrique. I also think truth is an integral part to the conception of nobility. Stevens talks about the balancing that the poet does between the imagination and reality. That balancing is the search for truth, for the right way of figuring things, as opposed to poets who sacrifice one for the other.
This was such a pleasure to read! I will definitely revisit this article. It was very well written!
I often question quotes and one of them is ''poetry is painting with words''. I feel like poetry is a painting as much as painting is a poem, that is, they are actually not the same. As a former oil painter that comparison almost annoys me, because it steals the core of which poetry is made: words. If I wanted to paint an image, I wouldn't have to write a poem.
It's not about painting an image, and sometimes not even causing a sound (although poetry is connected to sounds more). I even think poetry should be independent of sound because it doesn't necessarily need to be spoken. To me, poetry is pure language! Just a thought I wanted to share. :)
Thank you for such a marvellous piece!
Thank you Gio. I agree with you about that metaphor. Words figure things in the mind, but not in the same way as a painting. There's a saying, "all art aspires to the quality of music," which I think is more true, although it also misses that crucial element of language, that involvement of the conscious "I."
Thank you for your thoughts.
It seems that poetry illuminates the human experience by honing our attention on a sliver of the truth, which then can be used to find ourselves in communion with the rest of the experience. In regards to the difference that it offers us, quite simply, poetry is the "stuff" of dreams. At least, in the purest sense of that word.
I'd agree with that Azariah. It is the stuff of dreams, made out of words. I think it hints at more than we know, a sliver of truth we use to get at more than we can on our own.
Personally, I don't ask that a poem grant me access to a realm of "lofty" ideas. I am not looking to be elevated and have no interest in "transcendence" of any sort. Others, you included, apparently are, and that's fine. I just don't get it. Am I not reading properly? Am I not reading the proper things? Am I just dumb?
It's fun coming up with definitions of and explanations for poetry. I do it all the time. It's one of my favorite pastimes! My starting point, though, differs from yours. I don't think in terms of poetic language transporting the reader to a realm of lofty thoughts and feelings. The form, the graphic circumstances are what interest me, why a poem looks like it does, the conventions of shape and structure. The definition I've favored lately is as follows: "A poem is an instance of voluntary space restraints." For a long time a definition I liked a lot was: "Poetry is violence to sentences." There will be others I fancy in the future, I'm sure.
Do you know these lines from Robert Lowell's "The Dolphin": "Failure keeps snapping up transcendence,/bubble and bullfrog boating on the surface,/belly lustily lagging three inches lowered--the insatiable fiction of desire."
Yes that's a good one. I think he one something for that collection. For me nothing's better than Lowell's "Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket." "The Lord survives the rainbow of His will."
Our starting points are very different. And yet I enjoy your poetry very much. At your best, your work has sharpness and strangeness. It's like a mad scientist operating on words for his own pleasure.
I'm not smart enough for "Lord Weary's Castle." Lowell's work doesn't come alive for me until after "Life Studies," when he loosens up and ceases to be pathologically allusive. Several sections of "The Dolphin"--perhaps significantly the ones he wrote while in the hospital after a crackup--contain the poems that have affected me more than any others I've encountered. Thanks for the kind words about my "poetry," but again, what I do with language is not "poetry," although it's hard to find an alternative to that weary old word. "Verbal fetishism" is the best I can do. That's not exactly pithy, but it does carry with it a nice whiff of primitivism and compulsion. I am ready to transition from "composing" to finding, arranging and faking, strategies that are appropriate to our culture of glut. Have spent a lot of time since moving to Philly digesting the ideas of Marcel Duchamp, triggered by the Philadelphia Museum of Art's great Duchamp collection. Ephemera . . . surfaces . . . hints . . . disappearances . . . my idiom is advertising, not "literature."
“pathologically allusive” is great! I get what you mean. I do really like “The Dolphin”
You should post some thoughts on Substack. I’d love to read what your ideas on the matter.
I agree about language and imagination. Words should be selected and arranged with the goal of prompting meaning-packed imaginative responses. Managed and nuanced.
Well said Ron. One of the advantages of poetry is its ability to compress meaning.
I like it that poetry permits, even encourages, the reader to be at ease with different imaginative reactions, as if there's no right answer. The novelist seeks precision; the poet teases, isn't it so? Ironically, it's the poet who must be more careful when selecting a word or phrase, as if she's the master of evocation.
Yes, Ron, they must be more careful. Even at the level of the most simple words, like articles or prepositions. They can alter the rhythm of the line. In that way I’d say poets are more precise than novelists, since the novelist doesn’t have to pay attention that closely. They can write approximately