Poetry

what is poetry for?
this              silence

A reminder: Jane Hirshfield is engaged in a conversation about poems, poetry, and other matters at The Well. This conversation is open to the public, and you are invited.

I've been reading Ted Kooser's The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets. Yes, I've been doing this for nearly twenty years, and I'm still a beginner.

I do recommend it for beginning poets; he offers lots of technical reminders they will find useful. He also offers some observations and opinions that I think apply to almost any creative endeavor -- and since I like what he says, I'm going to share some of it with you:

A poem is a machine of language designed to accomplish something.... a poem is a way of assembling a little bit of order amid chaos.

The poem is the device through which the ordinary world is seen in a new way -- engaging, compelling, even beautiful.

... the best poems seem to reach through the opaque surface of the world and give us a glimpse of an order beyond.

Any well-made poem is worth a whole lot more to the world than the person who wrote it.

Poetry is a lot more important than poets.

...what would be wrong with a world in which everybody were writing poems? After all, there's a significant service to humanity in spending time doing no harm.

By writing poetry, even those poems that fail and fail miserably, we honor and affirm life. We say "We loved the earth but could not stay."

The Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney, writing on William Butler Yeats, said (the emphasis is mine), "The aim of the poet and the poetry is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual work into the larger work of the community as a whole."

The poet Linda Gregg asks her students to take a close look at just six things each day. What seems like a simple discipline turns out to be quite difficult because, by habit, most of us go through our lives without paying much attention to anything.

[Writing a poem is] a kind of play, and there's a lot of happiness in it.

...most of the fun you'll have as a poet will come about during the process of writing.

The work and study of writing happens not in the company of others, but in solitude.

Revision, and I mean extensive revision, is the key to transforming a mediocre poem into a work that can touch and even alter a reader's heart.

There's no money in poetry because most of my neighbors, and most of yours, have no use for it . . . A lot of this resistance to poetry is to be blamed on poets. Some go out of their way to make their poems difficult if not downright discouraging.

Some of his observations seem particularly relevant to blogging:

[quoting John Fowles]: "I remember years ago watching the commercial folktale-tellers in a Cairo bazaar. All writers ought to have observed this ancient practice of oral narrative . . . Getting the audience . . . depended not at all on preaching and philosophizing but very much on baser tricks of the trade: in short, on pleasing, wooing, luring the listeners into the palm of one's hand."

...your gift -- the refreshment you serve up to your readers -- can come as a very small serving.

... self-indulgent poetry almost always disappears in time, a victim of its own failure to engage the needs and interests of others. It takes a grateful audience to keep a poem alive.

Too much cleverness in poetry can be a real killer.

Well, perhaps not that last one. Cleverness in blogging is more welcome than cleverness in poetry. Stay warm. Make something.

Comments

[endment]

thanks for a stimulating post

[Elizabeth]

ohh this was WONDERFUL and how odd I was just having a conversation with my friend this weekend about TK cause she had him on her radio (NPR) show--- I actually agree with him wholeheartedly on the cleverness thing-- I don't enjoy "clever" much at all, actually-- not in fiction or film or poetry-- i generally am rather Shaker in my tastes and love clear, simple truths.

[Patia]

I've been saving this to read ... just did, although probably not as thoroughly as I should. But I like this line: Some go out of their way to make their poems difficult if not downright discouraging.

YES. I am in the midst of reading -- and, worse, trying to understand -- dozens of poems every week. It's exhausting.

But I'm really enjoying the _writing_ part of the class! (Because of course _I_ make perfect sense.)