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Two Ways of Looking at Stevens’s Blackbird
There’s an interesting discussion (at least I find it interesting) over at The Plumbline School. A poet/academic named Conrad DiDiodato, after a post with a few ripostes, has offered up an example of the sort of reading he practices. He’s chosen to write about the first poem in Wallace Stevens‘s famous sequence “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” I recommend you read his comments before reading mine, which I’ve deposited in the comment stream to his post. I’m pasting my reading of the poem below, some of which won’t make sense unless you read his commentary first.Read More
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Poetry Qua Money
Thanks once again to Jilly Dybka‘s Poetry Hut Blog for the link to this brief meditation by Writer’s Market and Poet’s Market editor Robert Lee Brewer on the perennial question, “How much money does a poet make?” Brewer correctly answers “peanuts,” though it’s likely to be less: seeds and stems at best. “Bottom line: There’s no money in poetry,” he writes.Read More
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What Poetry Can Be
I wonder if there’s room on a post-avantist’s reading list for this. Are the sample poems SoQ? If so, what would a Silliman or a Goldsmith or a Spahr do with such an irruption of brutality in their lives? More broadly, what would Wallace Stevens or any of the other “High Modernists” have done with it? (Is Williams a “High Modernist”? If so, there’s at least one who could do it.) I don’t put these forward as rhetorical questions: I genuinely wonder if the avant-garde and their acknowledged masters haven’t narrowed rather than expanded what poetry can be.Read More
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Mexico Books 2009: Immanent Visitor
I can’t pretend to understand the writing of Bolivian poet Jaime Saenz. It seems to arise from the imaginal without taking on the perceptual particularities we’ve come to expect from poetry in the long wake of Imagism and Objectivism (no, not the silly philosophy of Ayn Rand). For me, reading Saenz is similar to reading Blake‘s prophetic books, but Saenz doesn’t seem to be presenting a coherent visionary system; his poems are more surreal than symbolic—but in many ways even stranger and more compelling than almost any surrealist poetry I can think of.Read More
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Poetry and the Poet’s Character
Reginald Shepherd, in a typically thoughtful and eloquent post, successfully critiques the notion that poets associated with Donald M. Allen’s seminal anthology, The New American Poets, wrote with political and/or social change as a goal. Unfortunately, as he reaches his conclusion, he uses his valuable analysis to make a puzzling claim: “If we were to judge works of art by their creators’ political positions, much would be ruled out of bounds.” On the surface this sounds admirably dispassionate; but the implications of his statement are troubling.Read More
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The Poetic-Critical Complex
This is an expansion of my response to a comment from Reginald Shepherd regarding one of my posts below: I’ve never developed a settled opinion on the relationship between poetic complexity and poetic durability. Do Shakespeare’s sonnets trump Michael Drayton’s because they are more complex? (They are more complex both conceptually and rhetorically.) And if so, are we to value Conrad Aiken above William Carlos Williams, for example, or Louis Zukofsky above Philip Levine? These are ultimately questions involving The Canon and the people in charge of it. I do not mean you and me, of course.Read More