Two awesome things in the mail today!
The new issue of Gulf Coast, and a Letter in the Mail from The Rumpus! Needless to say, I did not get all of my work done as soon as I wanted.
YAWB – Yet Another Writing Blog
Just another Poetry site
Two awesome things in the mail today!
The new issue of Gulf Coast, and a Letter in the Mail from The Rumpus! Needless to say, I did not get all of my work done as soon as I wanted.
This post is inspired by an essay I wrote about June Jordan’s Kissing God Goodbye, in which I address some of these issues by looking at how she manages the problems. That essay will soon appear here (as soon as it’s turned in), but in the meantime, and as a way to clarify my own thinking on the subject, I offer the following thoughts on pitfalls facing political poetry.
“Political” requires some definition, for which I’ll steal my own introductory paragraph:
Every poet claims that poetry is political – or at least that the act of writing poetry is a political act – no matter what the poem’s contents are. Jane Hirschfield, Richard Hugo, David Orr, Susan Stewart, and Stephen Dunn are just a few of the poets investigated this semester who wrote or intimated this idea. The statement that poetry is political requires a certain understanding of the “political,” meaning an exercise and projection of the voice in the face of the vast ease of being silent. This idea, that saying what needs to be said – whether about a white spider on a sprig of Queen Anne’s Lace, or about the unequal gender treatment in our current society – is a political act opens more than just poetry to political statement, but all fields of art. As a result, the question of which writing is political, and which is not, becomes very important. To hazard one possible boundary, writing which does not offer some access to Truth, or which deliberately obscures Truth (or truth), falls on the far side of the political; these kinds of writing result in either apathetic consumerism, or worse, outright propaganda. Much popular music falls into these categories. The reader (that’s you) may object that even apathetic consumerism or outright propaganda fall somewhere on the political spectrum, and the author (me) may agree. In that case, let us use “political” – in terms of writing and poetry at least – for the positive – seeking awareness and Truth – end of the spectrum, while the previous terms (apathetic and propagandist) can apply to the other, obstructive end.
Continue reading “The Pitfalls of Outright Political Poetry”
Richard Hugo continues the sentence in one of the most powerful essays of The Triggering Town by writing, “but it would be honest and I would like it because it wouldn’t be any tougher than the human heart needs to be” (96). “Ci Vediamo” barely resembles other essays in the collection, with very little direct advice, but instead reflects on Hugo’s return to the little Italian town where he was stationed in WWII. Despite not directly conveying advice to writers, Hugo imbues the essay with a well-modulated experience which brings the reader to tears with the author at the end. This control of modulation offers enough to study in itself, though this response is not the appropriate place. Instead, this essay will examine the way “Ci Vediamo” and other essays in Hugo’s collection urge the reader toward an honesty and openness which leads to better poems.
Continue reading ““I Didn’t Know How Good the Poem Would Be” – Hugo and Finding Out”
Thinking we would hear some good music, a small group of us went to Buddy Guy’s Legends behind the Hilton. The music was pretty good… Continue reading “after the first night of awp”
My peers and professors kept recommending Jane Hirschfield’s Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry to me, and with this class I found the ideal exploration space for this collection of essays. I read Susan Stewart’s Poetry and the Fate of the Senses previously, which she wrote in a density close to that of black holes, as well as Stephen Dunn’s Best Words, Best Order, written in a more clear diction. Maybe one reason for putting off Hirschfield’s book was the concern that it would approach Stewart’s complexity as opposed to Dunn’s clarity. I do not shy away from complex theory, I enjoy it, but find that along with that complexity comes a requirement for time spent contemplating. Continue reading “The Focus Gate Opens: Reflections on Jane Hirschfield’s “Poetry and the Mind of Concentration””
I first ran into Tracy K. Smith’s collection Life on Mars through a National Public Radio interview. It fascinated me that there was a poet writing a collection that seemed in the vein of what I want to produce for my thesis, and I immediately ordered it. As an investigation of the human in the face of grief, it is excellent; as an investigation of humanity’s place in the universe, it is a little bit disappointing. While Smith does interrogate a human understanding of life and death, and the process of coming to terms with dying, the collection is much more centered on that issue than the questions I am interested in. These questions aside, there are a couple of poems which question the human locus within the universe, and it is these poems (“Sci-Fi” and “My God, it’s Full of Stars”) I would like to examine more closely here. “Sci-Fi” polishes up the crystal ball and looks into a future of humanity, while “My God, it’s Full of Stars” investigates the question of life elsewhere in the universe, our relationship to it, and concludes with Nietzsche’s abyss staring right back at us. These two particular poems intrigue me because they remain grounded in a perspective from the human-scale viewpoint; it could reasonably be argued that the group of poems I am pursuing currently lacks this perspective. Continue reading ““So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.””
As poets, as writers, as humans, we cannot afford to ignore the terrifying injustices that proceed around us every day. It may be complacency which drives the majority of our human peers to continue living as though these terrors were simply nightmares – shadows driven by overactive imagination. Or it may be fear of falling through the cultural systems we have developed to a space in which they cannot ignore these crimes we perpetrate against one another – the systems do not kindly treat outliers. A life constantly confronted and challenged by these things is hard, it’s difficult; and difficulty is one thing we in America have forever striven to delay/decrease/divorce. It is clear that a person constantly confronting this madness may go mad – there are plenty of examples. On the other hand, there are plenty of examples of intentional ignorance which also descend into madness. Continue reading “After Reading Sam Hamill’s “The Necessity to Speak””
This Poem for My Wife
Thanks for reading this, everyone. I’ve taken it down for revision, and because I’m thinking about sending it out after that. I hope you enjoyed!
An Important Announcement on Plagiarism
Oliver de la Paz’s collection, Requiem for the Orchard, relies on two organizing threads throughout. Those are the “Requiem” poems, which originally appeared as one extended poem in Guernica Magazine, and the “Self-Portrait” poems which appeared in various places. De la Paz confronts the construction and obfuscation of identity and self through these two threads of interrogation, and it is important that the collection resolves with the two threads together. Continue reading “Reflection on Oliver de la Paz’s Requiem for the Orchard”
How does one write poetry about grief, or heartache? Allen Ginsburg’s “Howl” and “Kaddish” might be one approach, but it is a rare poet who can operate in the verse-libre and still convey the absolute misery without devolving into melodrama. Many poets resort to form, which forces a constraint upon poems. In the case of Ashley Anna McHugh, the constraint of form has allowed her to explore loss in great detail. Continue reading “Reflection on Into These Knots”