Please remember to read Jennifer Moxley and post on her work.
From her intro to Imagination Verses...
Poetry is not for the passive. It is, as Mayakovsky knew, at its very heart tendentious. Even the love poem agitates the beloved to fall in love with the poet.
November 12, 2004 Friday
Late Edition - Final
HEADLINE: Stopping by the Prosaic on an Autumn Day
BYLINE: By FRANCIS X. CLINES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
BODY:
The nation's new poet laureate, Ted Kooser, drove without a second thought across the red-blue fissure of the elections -- two days on the road from his Nebraska home to his splendid aerie by the copper dome of the Library of Congress. He listened to Bach, not Limbaugh, as he crossed the Appalachian Mountains and headed down into this politics-crazed place, arriving as an aberration: an American filled with notions apart from partisanship.
''This is really an apolitical position, and I think it ought to stay that way,'' Mr. Kooser laconically ruled, disappointing anyone who thought that as the nation's first Great Plains poet laureate, he would perch here and make lyrical sense of the latest divide to obsess the capital city.
Mr. Kooser's worldview is hardly that parochial. He writes long-term of mankind, political and not, as one of many skeletons down at your local bone museum: ''This is the only one in which once throbbed a heart/ made sad by brooding on its shadow.'' That covers far more than electoral disappointment, and Mr. Kooser arrives with a far more exotic work ethic than the typical talking head.
He wrote poems for decades as an insurance company executive, arising at 4:30 in the morning to compose. He made sure that his secretary critiqued the 30 or 40 rewrites he did to keep them taut and frill-free.
After decades of writing, the poet likens a poem to a teleidoscope, the playful round-lens device that, when focused on life's routine, turns it extraordinary. The capital can surely use at least one teleidoscope among its batteries of 24/7 news lenses. But Mr. Kooser figures that he'll manage no fresh poems in the year he works as a kind of bardic lobbyist (valued at $35,000 a
year) for more Americans to try a poem.
''Sept. 11 happens, and tens of thousands of people try to write poems about it,'' Mr. Kooser notes, talking about the possibilities of his post. ''What it is, is our need to find order in an extremely disorderly world. Poetry is sort of a small piece of order.'' All the more reason this city cries out for his teleidoscope. But the laureate makes no promise in this bazaar of promises. '
'Maybe there's a chance I can find something small and specific here that I can work with,'' the poet says, waxing doubtful.
FRANCIS X. CLINES
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
LOAD-DATE: November 12, 2004
From her intro to Imagination Verses...
Poetry is not for the passive. It is, as Mayakovsky knew, at its very heart tendentious. Even the love poem agitates the beloved to fall in love with the poet.
November 12, 2004 Friday
Late Edition - Final
HEADLINE: Stopping by the Prosaic on an Autumn Day
BYLINE: By FRANCIS X. CLINES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
BODY:
The nation's new poet laureate, Ted Kooser, drove without a second thought across the red-blue fissure of the elections -- two days on the road from his Nebraska home to his splendid aerie by the copper dome of the Library of Congress. He listened to Bach, not Limbaugh, as he crossed the Appalachian Mountains and headed down into this politics-crazed place, arriving as an aberration: an American filled with notions apart from partisanship.
''This is really an apolitical position, and I think it ought to stay that way,'' Mr. Kooser laconically ruled, disappointing anyone who thought that as the nation's first Great Plains poet laureate, he would perch here and make lyrical sense of the latest divide to obsess the capital city.
Mr. Kooser's worldview is hardly that parochial. He writes long-term of mankind, political and not, as one of many skeletons down at your local bone museum: ''This is the only one in which once throbbed a heart/ made sad by brooding on its shadow.'' That covers far more than electoral disappointment, and Mr. Kooser arrives with a far more exotic work ethic than the typical talking head.
He wrote poems for decades as an insurance company executive, arising at 4:30 in the morning to compose. He made sure that his secretary critiqued the 30 or 40 rewrites he did to keep them taut and frill-free.
After decades of writing, the poet likens a poem to a teleidoscope, the playful round-lens device that, when focused on life's routine, turns it extraordinary. The capital can surely use at least one teleidoscope among its batteries of 24/7 news lenses. But Mr. Kooser figures that he'll manage no fresh poems in the year he works as a kind of bardic lobbyist (valued at $35,000 a
year) for more Americans to try a poem.
''Sept. 11 happens, and tens of thousands of people try to write poems about it,'' Mr. Kooser notes, talking about the possibilities of his post. ''What it is, is our need to find order in an extremely disorderly world. Poetry is sort of a small piece of order.'' All the more reason this city cries out for his teleidoscope. But the laureate makes no promise in this bazaar of promises. '
'Maybe there's a chance I can find something small and specific here that I can work with,'' the poet says, waxing doubtful.
FRANCIS X. CLINES
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
LOAD-DATE: November 12, 2004
<< Home