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Excerpts from a Manifesto (1924)
I put this post together last year, while writing my annual Adventures in Reading post. Then I forgot to post it! So, for your reading pleasure, a few excerpts from “Surrealism Manifesto,” by Yvan Goll (October 1, 1924), translated by Nan Watkins and published in full in The Inner Trees: Selected Poems of Yvan Goll, edited by Thomas Rain Crowe. Much wisdom here! Reality is the basis of all great art. Without it there is no life, no substance. Reality is the ground under our feet and sky over our head.Read More
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On “The Uses of Difficulty”
Sometimes it’s only when a difficulty is removed that we realise what it was doing for us. […] Our brains respond better to difficulty than we imagine. In schools, teachers and pupils alike often assume that if a concept has been easy to learn, then the lesson has been successful. But numerous studies have now found that when classroom material is made harder to absorb, pupils retain more of it over the long term, and understand it on a deeper level.Read More
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The Poetic Process
I’m always at a loss for words when someone asks me about the process of writing poems.Read More
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Hapax Legomenon Redux
Harriet celebrates Poetry Month with this hilarious post by con man Kenny Goldsmith, in which he makes good on his promise of “uncreative writing” by quoting a vacuous, jargon-ridden exercise in what passes for criticism in the back alleys of academe. “Conceptual writing signaled the end of the era of individual voice,” opines Ms. Johanna Drucker. “Poetics of the swarm, mind-melding writing, poiesis as the hapax legomenon of the culture?” (No, that question mark is not an typo. It is in Drucker’s text and is as mysterious there as it is here.Read More
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Poiesis
James at ursprache has a typically pithy post today on the nature of poetry. He writes, “It is often cited that the root of the word poetry comes from the Greek term poïesis meaning ‘to make.’ But make how? And make what? So much lies undisclosed in the concept of mere ‘making’.” I couldn’t resist commenting, then thought I should share the response here as passable material for rumination: I think the “making” has been defined, in “Symposium,” where Socrates recounts a conversation he had with his tutor, the seer Diotima.Read More
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Algorithms and Poetry
This fascinating TED talk by Kevin Slavin focuses on algorithms that are shaping our world in the arena of finance. But I wonder if there aren’t algorithms at work in poetry. Various flavors of “uncreative writing,” perhaps? Of course I’m being old fashioned in using the word “poetry.” There are no poems or stories, after all, only “texts.” The concept of the “text” is what makes things easier for the algorithms.Read More
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If the Suit Fits…
Thanks to James at the venerable ursprache for posting this: Like a good tailor who fashions a suit that fits one man (or even two) resplendently; and an overcoat that might suit two or three—thus for me might my poems be made “to fit”, in one case (or perhaps in two or three). This comparison is somewhat deprecatory (only in a superficial sense); but it is, I think, accurate and reassuring. If my poems do not fit in a general sense, then they fit in a particular sense. This is no small matter.Read More
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The Revealing Agent
The poet and the novelist who express a mood certainly do not create it out of nothing; they would not be understood by us if we did not observe within ourselves, up to a certain point, what they say about others. As they speak, shades of emotion and thought appear to us which might long since have been brought out in us but which remained invisible; just like the photographic image which has not yet been plunged into the bath where it will be revealed. The poet is this revealing agent.Read More
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Szymborska’s “The Joy of Writing”
Wisława SzymborskaPhoto: Adam Golec©Agenca Gazeta THE JOY OF WRITINGby Wisława Szymborska Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?For a drink of written water from a springwhose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.Silence—this word also rustles across the pageand parts the boughsthat have sprouted from the word “woods.” Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,asre letters up to no good,clutches of clauses so subordinatethey’ll never let her get away.Read More
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Ammons’s “Poetics”
Self-portrait watercolor paintingby A. R. Ammons, dated 1977.Image courtesy Joyner LibraryDigital Collections, East Carolina University.(Read the Terrain.org interview here.) POETICSby A. R.Read More
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2019, has published 20 collections of poems and edited or co-edited three poetry anthologies. He currently directs two master’s-level programs for University College at the University of Denver: Professional Creative Writing and Arts & Culture Management. Joe lives with his wife, Melody Madonna, in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. 
