Interesting article (very accessible I might add).
I fund myself agreeing with or at least having heard each point in some form before. I had not heard of this particular exchanges before:
My favorite recent response about this is from an interview with Philip Levine, after he was named Poet Laureate last year. The interviewer, Andrew Goldman, asks:
"I wonder if you agree with John Barr, the president of the Poetry Foundation, who, with the help of a $200 million endowment, has been trying to popularize poetry by encouraging poets to write more upbeat poems."
And Levine responds:
"Hell, no. I can't believe this guy Barr is a poet, because I don’t think a real poet would think in that way. When a poem comes to you, you’re not going to say, 'Oh, no, this goddamned poem is just too mean-spirited.' You’re going to run with it."
As poets we get these musings, inspirations, or whatever, "a poem comes to you," as Levine says. What we then do is craft the poem resulting. This does not mean that we might not start writing in hopes of getting a poem, and while doing so the poem arrives. A poet then crafts the poem. The poem may even come as they did to Jackson Mac Low, through computer generation, from following ideas that could be programmable, resulting in rather "inaccessible" poetry until you get to the point of how it was created, and thus drawn into it, such as what he did with Gertrude Stein's poetry. Or it might be that the poet's inspired to test the limits of what a poem is as with Harry Mathews' Butter and Eggs, extremely accessible until you get to an important point about the poem, to ask if it is a poem at all.
What all good poems at least tend to have in common, whether in between these two in the more standard forms we are use to, or at their own extremes, is that the musing is legitimate, in the sense that it is worth the crafting and reading that will then come, and whether it is crafted, which I would say both those examples are in their own right. If this is taking place in the world, not whether there are zillions of so-called poems being posted on web sites, then poetry is not dead.
Hi Frank,
ReplyDeleteInteresting article (very accessible I might add).
I fund myself agreeing with or at least having heard each point in some form before. I had not heard of this particular exchanges before:
My favorite recent response about this is from an interview with Philip Levine, after he was named Poet Laureate last year. The interviewer, Andrew Goldman, asks:
"I wonder if you agree with John Barr, the president of the Poetry Foundation, who, with the help of a $200 million endowment, has been trying to popularize poetry by encouraging poets to write more upbeat poems."
And Levine responds:
"Hell, no. I can't believe this guy Barr is a poet, because I don’t think a real poet would think in that way. When a poem comes to you, you’re not going to say, 'Oh, no, this goddamned poem is just too mean-spirited.' You’re going to run with it."
As poets we get these musings, inspirations, or whatever, "a poem comes to you," as Levine says. What we then do is craft the poem resulting. This does not mean that we might not start writing in hopes of getting a poem, and while doing so the poem arrives. A poet then crafts the poem. The poem may even come as they did to Jackson Mac Low, through computer generation, from following ideas that could be programmable, resulting in rather "inaccessible" poetry until you get to the point of how it was created, and thus drawn into it, such as what he did with Gertrude Stein's poetry. Or it might be that the poet's inspired to test the limits of what a poem is as with Harry Mathews' Butter and Eggs, extremely accessible until you get to an important point about the poem, to ask if it is a poem at all.
What all good poems at least tend to have in common, whether in between these two in the more standard forms we are use to, or at their own extremes, is that the musing is legitimate, in the sense that it is worth the crafting and reading that will then come, and whether it is crafted, which I would say both those examples are in their own right. If this is taking place in the world, not whether there are zillions of so-called poems being posted on web sites, then poetry is not dead.