Arielle Greenberg:
"Why African-American innovative poetics? Mainstream African-American poets—for the purposes of this essay, let’s reductively say that “mainstream” contemporary poetry is that which adheres to a linear narrative and stable speaker, and that “innovative” poetry is that which pushes an anti-linear, anti-narrative, hybridized aesthetic—are also important. But for African-American poets, this issue of how to write about something—that sticky notion of subject matter—seems particularly fraught, because of course the subject of race itself is particularly fraught." Revelatory and Complex: Innovative African-American Poetries
Lytton Smith:
"The Anglo-Saxon riddles had no solutions, as though resolution was not their aim. They ask readers to believe many interpretations at once. What's black and white and red all over? A sunburnt penguin. A sunburnt nun. A newspaper. Riddles work because language keeps moving, won't sit still. Anglo-Saxon poetry, even at its most devotional, engages language's propensity to travel." Beyond the Word Exchange: Translation and the Travel of Language
Andrew Frisardi:
"The Vita nova of Dante (c. 1292-95) ... has been called a mystical itineranium mentis in Deum (mind's journey to God); a hagiography of "St. Beatrice"; a biblical Acts of Beatrice's Disciple; a Bible of Love; an autobiography in an Augustinian vein; the first book in vernacular Italian; the preface to the Divine Comedy; a treatise on poetry by a poet and for poets; a handbook of the art of poetry; an affirmation of a new poetics; an allegorical tractate against the corrupt Church and in favor of monarchy; an allegory of the enlightenment of the Aristotelian-Scholastic passive intellect by the active intellect; a "Joachist document, designed to mark the long-precluded withdrawal of the Holy Eucharist from a world not worthy of this great miracle"; a sentimental novella; and more besides. There is good reason for having many perspectives on Dante's youthful book. It is a complex work, full of inconsistencies and obscurities. In addition, close readers of the Divine Comedy know that it is never a good idea to underestimate Dante's subtlety and genius for packing a lot into a little space. In anything that Dante writes we expect there to be more than meets the eye, and there almost always is. " Dante's Vita nova: An Introductory Note, a Preface, and an Excerpt
Dennis O'Driscoll:
"Great poetry and trite poetry exert a similar effect: both kinds impel me to write. Not the writing of poetry, but—however inadequately—of criticism: in a spirit of celebration or repudiation, as the case merits. Unless we audit what we read, and champion what we truly admire, some of the finest voices of our time and of times past will be silenced by neglect, elbowed out of the way by the charmingly aggressive networkers and shouted down by the loudmouthed attention-seekers." 4x4: Questions and Responses
Emily Warn:
"Brewing a perfect pot of tea was our secret pleasure, our first sip was conspiratorial, the second and third a signal to begin a conversation. In between tea times, we found ways to remember them to stay connected. On one of her travels, Denise bought me a tiny book with illustrations and instructions for each step. I would search Seattle's bakeries and import shops for the most buttery shortbread to bring when we next visited. Her English upbringing meant she could out drink me, insisting that I drink one more cup, eat one more cookie. I'd always accept even though I was buzzing from caffeine and with trying to keep up my half of the conversation." The Almost Wilderness: Remembering Denise Levertov [Start 2012]
Dick Allen:
"Literally millions and millions of poems seek to capture the unholdable experience of Mysticism. Some will compare it to the experience of "the Other," but it's not that. Buberians might say it's the "I-Thou" experience, but it's not that. William James would call it the core religious experience, as would Evelyn Underhill. Even at its most mundane, it's the "runner's high" when the runner enters a trance of homeostasis. Aspects of Mysticism provide the commonality shared by all religions, both East and West." Knock on the Sky and Listen to the Sound: On Zen Buddhism & Poetry
Herbert Leibowitz:
"As editor of Parnassus, I have published several of John Matthias' poems about music and musicians. The first goes back to 1998 when he made a well-received debut with 'The Flagellant,' a poem about the eccentric Australian composer Percy Grainger, whose radical innovations make Charles Ives and John Cage seem timid. Grainger devised weird meters such as 7/35 and 9/17; exploited player piano rolls before Conlon Noncarrow; pioneered pounding on the strings inside the pianos in search of unusual pings, and, wanting to free music from its bondage to intervals and what he called 'harmonic morality,' invented instruments like the 'Melanette machine.' He was almost Glenn Gould's equal in personal quirkiness, designing his own clothes (not to mention a sports bra for his Danish wife) and, while on tour, walking up to sixty miles to the next city on his concert itinerary. As if all this were not enough, he was also a phenomenal polyglot, with eleven languages at his command, and a dedicated Sado-masochist—his habit of whipping himself until he drew blood is the source of Matthias' title." John Matthias' Musical Offerings
G.C. Waldrep:
What kind of poetry do you find most important right now? Why?
Aesthetically, I appreciate work from many camps and traditions. There are a few more aesthetically conservative poets writing now whose work I admire (Rick Barot, Matt Donovan, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, B.H. Fairchild), although in general I tend to like more complexity—of affect and language—than most narrative poetry affords. The living poets I return to most often are Carl Phillips, Brigit Kelly, Anne Carson, John Taggart, Alice Notley, and Geoffrey Hill.
Hovering just past the far edge of the living: Darwish and Milosz, and Gustaf Sobin.
"Important"? It is all important. We live in bodies, we are ambulatory, we possess—each one of us—the capacity to harm. In this context choice is what matters. Interview with G.C. Waldrep by Sean Patrick Hill
Askold Melnyczuk:
Askold Melnyczuk looks to Thomas Sayers Ellis and Tom Sleigh for work that delivers "the kind of news, the sort of truths, that can still help us orient ourselves in a world for which the term Orwellian feels too hollow and shopworn to carry a charge." Shadowboxing: Beating Toms
Donald Revell:
"Robert Creeley was a poet of home-places. For him, the phrase 'where I'm coming from' was ever explicitly literal and specific. And often, the place to which he referred was one particular poet or one particular poem. Myself, I take deep instruction from the fact that, in the later phase of his writing life, the poem he most often alluded to was 'Dover Beach.' Strange to say, given its melancholy and stoic resignation, Arnold's masterpiece turns out to be a honeymoon poem, an epithalamion of sorts." Robert Creeley: The Eventual Victorian
Richard Deming:
"... the curse O'Hara's generation wrestled with is the possibility that in work striving for spontaneity, the emotional life, by being on display, becomes in reality an exquisite representation, ever fragile, and ever pointing to some other thing. Ut pictura poesis... the joy that is so often seen as the defining characteristic of the poets of the New York School needs to be measured against their sadness or even anxiety that the time for immediacy and its corresponding necessary intimacy is always just past. To miss that gap between the ideal and the art is to miss that the spontaneity is never fully achieved, and that what might be called a desperation inflects the attempts of these poets to make life real and present." Poetry in Review
Mark Jarman:
"More than any other American poet writing today, perhaps more than any poet since Whitman and Dickinson, Charles Wright has recorded in his poems a lifetime of spiritual seeking. That pursuit has had more of Emily Dickinson's skepticism than Walt Whitman's affirmation, more of her struggles with Puritanism, than what Galway Kinnell once called Whitman's "mystical all lovingness." And yet the urge toward Whitman's embrace of multitude and the discretion of Dickinson's straitened thought have combined to create through Wright's genius an instrument which is to the spiritual life in contemporary poetry what the sonnet was for John Donne and George Herbert. Charles Wright has, for over forty years of mastery, given us a mode and a means for that journal of the soul which American poetry has, since Whitman and Dickinson, always had at heart. He has almost singlehandedly invented an American form of the devotional poem." Soul Journals: The Daily Devotions of Charles Wright
Rafael Campo:
"Maybe Sontag's premise that illness is mere pathophysiology, to be explicated only biomedically, is not an entirely correct notion either; perhaps illness is a kind of muse, luring us to acts of the imagination and gestures of language that have positive effects on our hearts and minds. Song delighted my grandmother, and prayer consoled her; her joints seemed to move freely again when she danced a merengue, or when she knelt her large form before la virgencita. No wonder I have come to believe in the power of the imagination if not to cure, then to heal." Illness as Muse
Michael Broek:
"It might be somewhat embarrassing to suggest that I could write about Brian Turner's Phantom Noise (Alice James, 2010), not being a veteran myself, and this book and his previous, Here, Bullet (Alice James, 2005), are certainly the chronicles of a veteran, with all of the horrors and mysteries that implies, but then this is no more potentially embarrassing than the thesis suggested by the books—namely that the writer can go to war, an anthology of Iraqi poets in his pocket, and return with a work of art, even before that war has come to its conclusive "end." It's a notion highly problematic from the outset, and it presents a set of unique problems for the reader—the potential simulacrum of the "embedded poet" (Turner's phrase), whereby the poet's proximity in space and time to the events that triggered these poems renders them somehow coexistent with or even co-creative of the war itself. Imagine trying to write about a car crash from the driver's point of view while the car is still on fire." The MFA at War: Proximity, Reality, and Poetry in Brian Turner's Phantom Noise
David Lehman:
"What makes a poem great? What standards do we use for judging poetic excellence? To an extent, these are variants on an even more basic question. What is poetry? Poetry is, after all, not a neutral or merely descriptive term but one that implies value. What qualities in a piece of verse (or prose) raise it to the level of poetry? The questions face the editor of any poetry anthology. But only seldom do we discuss the criteria that we implicitly invoke each time we weigh the comparative merits of two or more pieces of writing." Foreword to The Best American Poetry 2011
Peter Campion:
"If you’re an English teacher, you’ll know a certain type of student, one whose intellectual curiosity, whose sheer imaginative ambition, eclipses simpler things, like turning in papers. The essay that was due last week hasn’t appeared, not because of any lack of effort, but because the assignment to explicate one short lyric has somehow conjured up pages of notes on Greek etymology, Egyptian myth, the latest issue of Scientific American, the Albigensian Crusade, and symbology in the Oz books of L.Frank Baum. You start to wonder if the men with butterfly nets are fast approaching. At the same time, you feel admiration for the student, gratitude even, for his literary overflow. So the questions linger: Will this excitement ever balance out? Will this enthusiasm ever find a form? What will happen to this person in the world?" Self-Starter (on The H.D. Book by Robert Duncan)
Stephen Greenblatt:
"The finding of a lost book does not ordinarily figure as a thrilling event, but behind [Poggio Bracciolini's recovery of Lucretius' On the Nature of Things] was the arrest and imprisonment of a pope, the burning of heretics, and a great culturewide explosion of interest in pagan antiquity. The act of discovery fulfilled the life's passion of a brilliant book hunter. And that book hunter, without ever intending or realizing it, became a midwife to modernity." The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
Stephen Dunn:
"My fear is Stendhal's: 'I may have expressed only a sigh when I thought I was stating the truth.'" Brief Answers to Unspoken Questions: An Intraview
Gabriel Gudding, Catherine Imbriglio, and Terese Svoboda:
Poetry Daily presents three selections from A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line, an anthology of seventy essays, edited by Emily Rosko and Anton Vander Zee, exploring what, exactly, is the line. Featured are "The Line as Fetish and Fascist Reliquary" by Gabriel Gudding, "Lines and Spaces" by Catherine Imbriglio, and "The Thin Line" by Terese Svoboda. A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line
Alberto Manguel:
"Because we see in literature what we want or need to see, especially in literature that demands an effort of investigation and reflection, the fate of Luis de Gongóra y Argote has been a succession of exaltations and denigrations. He was called by his contemporaries 'the Spanish Homer' and also the perpetrator of 'Pestilential Poetry,' he was ignored by the Romantics and rescued by the Modernists, he deeply influenced poets as different as Stéphane Mallarmé and Federico García Lorca, and novelists such as Gabriel García Márquez and Juan Goytisolo. Jorge Luis Borges, not the dullest of readers, expressed, throughout his life, both a fervent devotion and an equally fervent aversion to Gongóra, depending on how the master's overwhelming style suited Borges's own." Introduction to The Solitudes by Luis de Góngora
Bruce Duffy:
"'But when will you and Monsieur Rimbaud be home?' the pregnant Mathilde begged her husband, now anxious to leave as she lay red and bloated on the fainting couch, with a maid to daub each eye. Did Verlaine actually think that a few hours of solicitude would erase a week's utter dereliction? With Mathilde, perhaps, but not with the Dragon now at her daughter's side.
"'Well?' said the Dragoness. 'Will you answer your wife?'
'Not late,' he said. 'This is a reading.'" from Disaster Was My God: A Novel of the Outlaw Life of Arthur Rimbaud
Bob Hicok:
"Grievance and grief are both a kind of loss. Loss of a loved one. Loss of a way of life. The kind of political or social grievance you refer to often has a hypothetical or theoretical dimension, a lament that rises from a sense of how things should or could be. Grief is much more physical and there's nothing theoretical about it. Not sure what you mean by the condition out of which I write. Sleepy. And ... some combination of pissed off and empathetic. I have a scar on my right hand from trying to pet a woodchuck. It had been attacked by a dog and it seemed important to comfort it, to offer redress for what had happened." Poetry in Conversation: Bob Hicok with Laura McCullough
Kim Addonizio:
"My first poem was assigned in about the fourth grade. I remember desperately trying, and failing, to think up similes for the sun. When I was twelve, I wrote a poem in rhymed couplets that began, "Through drifts of white and crusty snow / sped a solitary doe." I must have been reading Frost's "Stopping by Woods... " and unconsciously picked up the meter. The doe gets caught in some barbed wire and dies horribly while her little fawn waits for her return. I guess I knew, back then, that death had to be involved." An Interview with Kim Addonizio
Andrzej Sosnowski with Benjamin Paloff:
"The language that I feel within myself is a language that rarely goes silent, that rarely sleeps. And since it doesn't shut off and doesn't sleep, it usually speaks with itself. It is not, therefore, my monologue. It's not even the monologue of my own language, but a more complicated, polyphonic adventure, sometimes a dialogue, sometimes a polylogue." Fallen Language: In Conversation with Andrzej Sosnowski
Andrew Hudgins:
"Housman's A Shropshire Lad was the first book of serious poetry that I read as a book. The mere fact of being able, with some occasional puzzling over archaic diction and condensed syntax, to understand the poems, to have them yield to my reading without notes and the intervention of teachers, was a pleasure. Pleasurable too was the way Housman's poems sounded both old-fashioned, as the poems in the textbooks did, and modern in a bitter spirit that textbooks protected me from. In their form and language, the poems were comfortingly "poems" as I had learned them, and yet they took me surprisingly into an existential way of thinking that I'd begun secretly to entertain." Housman, My Housman
A. E. Stallings:
"Despite the neo-con vision of early liberty-loving patriots in the film 300, Ancient Sparta was a totalitarian state which depended upon an enslaved population of Helots. Still, it is hard not to find its unique setup fascinating, and fellow Greeks (such as Plutarch) were no exception. Most intriguing, perhaps, was the place of free women. In the rest of Greece, women received no education, needed a dowry to marry, were wed at puberty, stayed in the house, and busied themselves with weaving. Spartan women were citizens and could own property. They wore scandalously short skirts and walked about freely. (No one dared assault them.)" Plutarch's Laconic Women (translated by A. E. Stallings)
Matthew Thorburn:
"As Hinton puts it, reading a poem in classical Chinese is a 'remarkably creative act,' as the reader actively participates in connecting the elements of the poem, character by character, imagining how the poet would fill in absences and gradually moving toward the poem's meaning... This... also makes it clear why there can be so many different translations of a particular Chinese poem." 'Bamboo that seems Always my own Thoughts'
Donald Hall:
"It began when I was twelve. Everything in your life that's really important starts from something trivial." An Interview with Donald Hall
Amit Majmudar:
"[H]ow perfectly Ryan's sound bites subvert the nature of the sound bite. They don't reduce complexity to simplicity. However short and at times epigrammatic, they are surprisingly difficult to quote, and especially to quote from; no part is detachable. Rather, their brevity and irreducible simplicity are pinpoint apertures that focus on vastness—the viewfinder on a handheld camera fitted with a panoramic lens."
Her Seven Ingenious Masks
James Longenbach:
"... whether the Imagist poems were actually compressed from longer poems or not, they inevitably give the impression of having been compressed. The aura of the unsaid is always palpable, and that aura is the poem's tone. And without an immediately identifiable tone, a highly compressed poem would seem merely thin or perplexing, not enticing or seductive, given its dearth of narrative material...What exactly do we mean by tone?" Poetic Compression
Jarica Linn Watts:
"... he picked up a pen and began to write about the plight of Mexican Americans—and, in so doing, set the foundation for Chicano letters and literature. He wanted, he said, to use his words 'as a platform to identify the hurt.' He wanted to 'preserve [his] culture.' He wanted to inspire the movement—as he called it, 'the vast movement for total change.' And in this regard, he was successful: upon his death in 2004, The New York Times characterized him as el abuelito, 'one of the grandfathers of the Chicano literary renaissance' and one of the most 'vivid poets of the Chicano literary revival.'" Introduction to Here Lies Lalo: The Collected Poems of Abelardo Delgado
Peter Ramos:
"The status of Latin American poetry in this country has always been variable. After an explosion of interest in it during the 1960s and 1970s—and as literary camps expanded, sometimes antagonistically, in the 1990s—a commitment to Latin American poetics waned, as did an allegiance to poetry in translation as a necessary cultural value. While the idea that no one culture or ideology could be viewed as superior to another became a commonplace, the days of Robert Bly and James Wright surprising the U.S. literati with translations of Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo were long gone." Modernism in the Contact Zone: Latin American Art and Poetry
Mark Cox:
""Jack [Myers] felt that poetry, no matter what the aesthetic style, always has a larger responsibility and requires our complete investment in it. It's not about the advertising potential of Facebook and Goodreads. It's not enough to make ironic observations, pose obtuse questions or merely list events. The act of writing is to explore, with depth and dimension, why and how the poem and its subject matter have come to pass, what it may have to do with the future, and, most importantly, how it reflects the poet's evolving relationship with the world." Foreword to The Memory of Water
S D Tucker:
"In 1926, two books with wildly different themes were published: A Vision by W B Yeats ..., and the first English translation of the German writer Oswald Spengler's self-explanatorily titled Decline of the West. In both books, however, there was a small similarity; the difference between Greek and Roman thought had been symbolised by both authors in terms of the difference between the blank or painted eyes of ancient Greek statues and the pierced eyeballs of ancient Roman ones.... [To] W B Yeats, the similarity in imagery was to be explained by nothing less than the fact that both writers must have had access to a kind of 'great mind,' existing in some kind of disembodied state in nature, in which the image was stored, entire and complete, before it had actually been written down by them. This 'great mind', to Yeats, was nothing less than the anima mundi, or 'soul of the world' ...." Great Minds Think Alike
Gray Jacobik:
"One day about a decade ago, I found myself scratching the title 'Ode to the Breeze' above a poem I was drafting. Although my effort was a faint breath in every sense, why would I have titled it thus had not Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind' lingered somewhere in my mind?" A Few Ode-ish Thoughts
Charles Bernstein:
"The ordinary is always elusive—'near is / and difficult to grasp'—even as it is the most present actuality. And my sense, when talking about the ordinary, is always how extraordinary it is. Paradoxically, any attempt to fix the ordinary pulls it out of the everydayness in which it is situated, from which it seems to derive its power." The Art and Practice of the Ordinary
David Orr:
"What poets have faced for almost half a century, though, is a chasm between their art and the broader culture that's nearly as profound as the divide between land and sea, or sea and air. This is what Randall Jarrell had in mind when he said that 'if we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help.' The sweetest songs of the dolphins are lost on the gannets." Introduction to Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry
Eavan Boland:
"Of one thing I am sure: There must have been other young women who read for their own protection. Who were agents of their own intimidation. Who chose poems, as I did, not because they brought them nearer to the life of feeling but because they removed them safely from it. Who felt that the power and distance of language would protect them from the limitations made ready for them."
Reading as Intimidation
Cynthia Haven:
"[Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Miłosz] shared a sense of hierarchy and a feeling for the sacred. They rejected what they saw as Western subjectivity in poetry. Both shared what Miłosz called 'sobriety' and an immunity to literary fashions. They represented, however, opposite approaches to exile. They were further divided by their different approaches to language, empire, religion, time, and ultimately their own fates." No Other Place, No Other Time
J. D. McClatchy:
"If Keats's urn is to be believed, and beauty is the whole truth, then the ravishingly beautiful stanzas of a Hecht poem—so intricately plotted, so lavishly detailed, their rhythms such that form and speech are a single pulse—would be truth enough. But a Hecht poem has always been something more. His is a responsible art, an art that responds to history, to political and domestic tragedies, with an awareness of personal accountability. The beauty of a Hecht poem, the very skill by which its material is revealed, often throws into an even stronger, more pathetic light the desolation of the human condition that is his subject." Introduction to Selected Poems of Anthony Hecht
John Rosenwald:
"What is a book? Carson implies. And how does this replicate that? Past the title and copyright information arrives another challenge: a sheet with six iterations of “Michael” scrawled in cursive, covering the paper from top to bottom with pen strokes becoming increasingly thick as the eye moves down the page, the last one smudged slightly in the lower left corner, as if a fingerprint left in haste or anger. In the middle of the sheet, superimposed on the six signatures, dimming but not obliterating the handwriting, printed on what seems a slender strip of paper glued in a position similar to the previous photo and yellow stripe, lie three words:
NOX
FRATER
NOX
Night, brother, night." Books in Brief: Good Night
David Antin:
"So then I had this dream of an epic poem stretching across the United States over twenty or thirty years, three or four lines a year—at two thousand bucks a shot—gradually being written for people who would never see all of it. Which didn't bother me in the least." Fine Furs
Tiffany Atkinson:
"When do we learn to be frightened of difficulty? I mean in relation to poetry of course, but the question may have a broader developmental relevance. Presumably, in early childhood, most things—and language in particular—are 'difficult', being new and unpractised, but I don't recall it being a source of any great anxiety. And while we might expect our tolerance of perplexity to improve as we enter adulthood, in my role as university lecturer, various experts in pedagogy have 'trained' me not so much to welcome students to the dizzying and empowering thrills of complex thinking, as to disguise, simplify or otherwise wheedle into primary shapes any conceptually challenging material that might interrupt the smooth curve of a 'positive learning experience.'" The Uses of Difficulty, Written in the Margins of W.S. Graham
John Koethe:
"I think the abstract, discursive rhetoric of philosophy has influenced the way I write poetry. I know that lots of people associated with poetry hate that kind of language and think poets should avoid it, but I think it opens up all sorts of possibilities it’s foolish to ignore. You can see this sort of rhetorical influence in T.S. Eliot’s work, especially in “Four Quartets,” a poem a lot of the “no ideas but in things” people loathe. It’s no accident that Eliot was trained as a philosopher—unlike Wallace Stevens, say, another philosophical sounding poet who never seems quite as at home with the idiom as Eliot. There’s a popular stereotype of philosophical writing as murky and unintelligible, but actually just the opposite is true of good philosophical writing." An Interview with John Koethe by Wendy Vardaman
David Orr:
"However anxious the poetic life may become; however difficult it may be to resist pressures from the forces, institutional and otherwise, that surround the art; however awful it may be to know that there are panels being organized even now in which poetry will be discussed as if it were a combination of baseball statistics and sloppy philosophy; however bad all this may be, there is always room for confidence in poetry’s own lazy power. Wherever one works, wherever one lives, there is always a way to write poems about bluebirds that aren’t about bluebirds. And with due respect to kindly motivated projects like Poetry of the Law, such work will never be truly "of" anything. It’ll just be poetry—which has always been more than enough." Poetry And, Of, and About
Jeffery Donaldson:
"I never had a real conversation with Northrop Frye when he lived and it might be just as well. But I have been talking with him ever since. His work pays homage to that imaginative cosmology of interpenetrating voices that we all inhabit, in literature and in life. We are made up of voice, and we are the relations between voices, inside and out. They are our judgement and our redemption, our ownness and our generosity, our origin and our promise. Perhaps something like their revelation is possible in real conversation. It may be, after all, what we live for. As Yeats says, 'what do we know but that we face / one another in this place?'" Ghostly Conversations
Katie Ford:
"The willfulness of the poet who begins with a subject in mind will be felt all over a page, pushing the poem into the desired subject, even as the poem wants to stray and find its own way. 'Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting,' Robert Frost said. It is the melting that is the poem's will, its organic and secretive path. Whichever way the ice melts, it is not so much a matter of a poet's choice as it is the demands of the imagination and countless factors of emotion, psychology, music, literary influence, and, perhaps above all, confusion that melt the ice." Writing About the City: New Orleans, Destruction, and the Duty of the Poet
Galway Kinnell:
"A poet should not call himself a 'poet.' Being a poet is so marvelous an accomplishment that it would be boasting to say it of oneself. I thought this well before I read that Robert Frost took the same view."—An Interview with Galway Kinnell by Chard deNiord
Robert Huddleston:
"Ted Hughes thought of the poet's vocation as a gift, a kind of supernatural calling. It was based on a privileged shamanic conversation between the acolyte (or the poet) and the divinity. What is regarded as a gift, as Harold Bloom has noted, may also be seen as compensatory for a psychic loss. That loss was the requirement imposed by reality itself: "defacement"—to use Paul de Man's term—or loss of power, the necessary submission to the wishes and requirements of others in the course of social existence. Hughes's poetry arises in conjunction with the problems of subjection and authority. Despite its attempts to locate a space outside or beyond convention, it remains situated in the matrix of losses and restrictions that compose social life." Myth and Education
Ira Sadoff:
"Memory is required for poetry, but memory of a very specific kind. Not the dimestore memories of reproducing what once happened to you, but rather syntactical memories, gathering the emotional weight of the poem as it accrues from line to line. Poetry is associative, not dissociative: it proceeds neither by fact, nor chronological sequence, nor strictly reasoned argument. It follows the inexorable logic of the way we think and feel and what we notice (which is where the poem's camera focuses)." Poetic Memory, Poetic Design
George Szirtes:
"It was Paul Verlaine, a poet Peter Porter didn't particularly like, who promised to take eloquence and wring its neck. But what was eloquence? What indeed was poetry?" Plain Heaven and the Sound of Truth [Start 2011]
