I hope the rest of you will post!
And thanks to those so far. Lots of interesting things to think about, talk about, in weeks ahead. I made note of Erika not learning English until 16 (long tradition in US literature of writers who learn English as 2nd or 3rd language; especially in modernism). Meg trying to back up and map. Dennis talking about brain (the article on how hexameter regulates your heart is back in archive somewhere).
I am submitting the current draft of this poetic statement that I have had to write for this collection that Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell are editing. I can't get the piece right but I thought I would submit anyway. I put off writing it all summer. I worked on the poem I had to submit for some time but kept saying, oh I can write the statement at the last minute and now I know I can't. But I've got this as a beginning. I might cut the last paragraph. It feels too optimistic. But it might be an attempt to answer Dillon's question of what is that poetry does that other modes (genres?) can't?
***
I love reading all those optimistic things that people say about poetry. Those sweeping statements about poetry being all about love or poetry being all about countering the oblivion of darkness or poetry being the genre to comfort in times of trouble. They make me feel good about poetry. But poetry really doesn’t work that way for me. For me, poetry is a troubled and troubling genre, full of desire and anger and support and protest, primarily useful because it helps me think. Lyn Hejinian’s essays, her explorations of inquiry, have been really helpful to me on this. My theory is that poetry helps me think because it is a genre that is so open right now. There are so many rules about how to write poetry that there might as well not be any at all. Poetry moves words around. It rearranges them from their conventions. It re-sorts them. It uses more than one language. It repeats. It pursues aconventional language and divergent typography. It often experiments. It can be ephemeral and occasional. It often uses pleasing patterns as it does all this. And all that helps me think.
And yet . . . it isn’t only the way that poetry moves words around that makes it matter to me. There is something deeper also. Whenever someone like my uncle, the university professor in engineering, asks me as he does every holiday, why are you interested in all this poetry stuff and why does it matter?, I want to answer with Gertrude Stein’s words who said when asked how she felt about modern art: “I like to look at it.”
But if I really want to figure out why poetry helps me think, there is also another story, this story: The town I grew up in was ugly and dirty. The town was dirty because it had an barely environmentally regulated papermill. It had a barely environmentally regulated papermill because nothing else was in the town. It was a one industry town. Nothing was in the town because it was in the middle of nowhere. What had once been a thriving crossroads and trading spot that the Shawnee Indians built on the Shawnee river, a spot once called something like the Chauouanons, was no longer an active trading spot because of nineteenth century globalism aka European expansion and then those related tools of globalization like airplanes which made the town part of what coasters call fly over land. Because the town was dirty, whenever I read poems about the beauty of the English countryside or New England woods, they made little sense to me. So then I went and found by accident this stuff by Stein, and because I was looking for something that didn’t seem to be some sort of weird lie, and because this stuff by Stein was so weird it at the least didn’t seem to be lying in the usual ways, I clung to it. And that began an interest in stuff, in poetry.
“It’s an exciting time to be a poet” Lisa Jarnot was once quoted as saying in Glamour. It is an exciting time to be a poet. It is always an exciting time to be a poet, the genre of all people at all times. There has never been a culture without poetry. And that has to tell us something about how deep our roots are with this genre. It is always an exciting time for poetry because poetry feels like the moment when the knot finally comes untied after appearing to be impossibly tangled. Or the moment of being aware of the exact meaning of words and of all the changes that occur in the exact meanings of words in thoughts and sensations, the difference between feet and feat, between there and their, between red and read. A moment of coming to the end of the road, pulling up right in front of the concrete bunker that symbolizes the end of the road, getting out, climbing over the bunker, walking out into the grass of the field, slowly and steadily. And poetry feels like the springing off the diving board and moving into the part of the dive that feels aerodynamic and smooth, feels just right to the body, the feeling of moving through the air, and then the feeling of entering into the water as if in slow motion, as if floating but really with a certain quick sensation of smoothness. And it feels like what the inner smoothness that moves plovers, monarchs, whales, garden snakes, herds of walking animals from one place to another must feel like. The feeling of being set in motion, a feeling that moves one to another place, a place of water perhaps or a place of dryness or a place of coolness or of warmness. Or it feels like beginning to walk up several long flights of stairs, letting the intenseness of breath and the tightness in the legs develop while knowing at any moment you can just turn around and walk back down and then turning around and walking down them quickly and easily. Or suddenly noticing a clenched fist and then unclenching this fist and how this sensation of unclenching travels up the hand and into the chest and into the breath. And the reverse, clenching the unclenched fit and noticing how this sensation travels up the hand and into the chest and into the breath. Or just spreading hands wide and putting them on the floor and then kicking up into the air and balancing there. I guess what I mean is that it is always an exciting time to like to look at it, to like to look at poetry.
And thanks to those so far. Lots of interesting things to think about, talk about, in weeks ahead. I made note of Erika not learning English until 16 (long tradition in US literature of writers who learn English as 2nd or 3rd language; especially in modernism). Meg trying to back up and map. Dennis talking about brain (the article on how hexameter regulates your heart is back in archive somewhere).
I am submitting the current draft of this poetic statement that I have had to write for this collection that Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell are editing. I can't get the piece right but I thought I would submit anyway. I put off writing it all summer. I worked on the poem I had to submit for some time but kept saying, oh I can write the statement at the last minute and now I know I can't. But I've got this as a beginning. I might cut the last paragraph. It feels too optimistic. But it might be an attempt to answer Dillon's question of what is that poetry does that other modes (genres?) can't?
***
I love reading all those optimistic things that people say about poetry. Those sweeping statements about poetry being all about love or poetry being all about countering the oblivion of darkness or poetry being the genre to comfort in times of trouble. They make me feel good about poetry. But poetry really doesn’t work that way for me. For me, poetry is a troubled and troubling genre, full of desire and anger and support and protest, primarily useful because it helps me think. Lyn Hejinian’s essays, her explorations of inquiry, have been really helpful to me on this. My theory is that poetry helps me think because it is a genre that is so open right now. There are so many rules about how to write poetry that there might as well not be any at all. Poetry moves words around. It rearranges them from their conventions. It re-sorts them. It uses more than one language. It repeats. It pursues aconventional language and divergent typography. It often experiments. It can be ephemeral and occasional. It often uses pleasing patterns as it does all this. And all that helps me think.
And yet . . . it isn’t only the way that poetry moves words around that makes it matter to me. There is something deeper also. Whenever someone like my uncle, the university professor in engineering, asks me as he does every holiday, why are you interested in all this poetry stuff and why does it matter?, I want to answer with Gertrude Stein’s words who said when asked how she felt about modern art: “I like to look at it.”
But if I really want to figure out why poetry helps me think, there is also another story, this story: The town I grew up in was ugly and dirty. The town was dirty because it had an barely environmentally regulated papermill. It had a barely environmentally regulated papermill because nothing else was in the town. It was a one industry town. Nothing was in the town because it was in the middle of nowhere. What had once been a thriving crossroads and trading spot that the Shawnee Indians built on the Shawnee river, a spot once called something like the Chauouanons, was no longer an active trading spot because of nineteenth century globalism aka European expansion and then those related tools of globalization like airplanes which made the town part of what coasters call fly over land. Because the town was dirty, whenever I read poems about the beauty of the English countryside or New England woods, they made little sense to me. So then I went and found by accident this stuff by Stein, and because I was looking for something that didn’t seem to be some sort of weird lie, and because this stuff by Stein was so weird it at the least didn’t seem to be lying in the usual ways, I clung to it. And that began an interest in stuff, in poetry.
“It’s an exciting time to be a poet” Lisa Jarnot was once quoted as saying in Glamour. It is an exciting time to be a poet. It is always an exciting time to be a poet, the genre of all people at all times. There has never been a culture without poetry. And that has to tell us something about how deep our roots are with this genre. It is always an exciting time for poetry because poetry feels like the moment when the knot finally comes untied after appearing to be impossibly tangled. Or the moment of being aware of the exact meaning of words and of all the changes that occur in the exact meanings of words in thoughts and sensations, the difference between feet and feat, between there and their, between red and read. A moment of coming to the end of the road, pulling up right in front of the concrete bunker that symbolizes the end of the road, getting out, climbing over the bunker, walking out into the grass of the field, slowly and steadily. And poetry feels like the springing off the diving board and moving into the part of the dive that feels aerodynamic and smooth, feels just right to the body, the feeling of moving through the air, and then the feeling of entering into the water as if in slow motion, as if floating but really with a certain quick sensation of smoothness. And it feels like what the inner smoothness that moves plovers, monarchs, whales, garden snakes, herds of walking animals from one place to another must feel like. The feeling of being set in motion, a feeling that moves one to another place, a place of water perhaps or a place of dryness or a place of coolness or of warmness. Or it feels like beginning to walk up several long flights of stairs, letting the intenseness of breath and the tightness in the legs develop while knowing at any moment you can just turn around and walk back down and then turning around and walking down them quickly and easily. Or suddenly noticing a clenched fist and then unclenching this fist and how this sensation of unclenching travels up the hand and into the chest and into the breath. And the reverse, clenching the unclenched fit and noticing how this sensation travels up the hand and into the chest and into the breath. Or just spreading hands wide and putting them on the floor and then kicking up into the air and balancing there. I guess what I mean is that it is always an exciting time to like to look at it, to like to look at poetry.
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