Do we need another guidebook to tell poets what blank verse is or how many stresses are in a pentameter line? Because most poets can’t access the sources of their art, they write books that lapse into nomenclature and technical know-how. The best books about poetry, however strained and inarticulate, are those that try to explain what it takes to create a poem from the experiences of one’s life within the world in which one lives.
3 comments:
No, we do not need another guidebook. Nor do we need another assignment to write a villanelle, or one to invent five metaphors for Jell-O, or one to describe a childhood trauma in a syllabic scheme based on Moore's "The Fish." We need a new way of thinking about poetry, not because the "old" ways were wrong, but because too many poets have any clue about why poems matter. Easy for me to say! As if I knew....
Agreed, it's not easy to say where poems come from. But I'd welcome the opportunity to hear more poets 'try to articulate' their beginnings, the way the poem developed, and how the poem became the poem that it is in the end (abandoned rather than finished, pace Auden via Valery).
One guidebook is enough: With a very little knowledge one can drop a template over a poem, give it place in some taxonomy, label it, and tell us what it is. And the idea that once you know a template or two, the poems will follow, seems superficial and false to me.
I want to see more of an expression, however imprecise, of how the poem came to be in the deepest sense. The difference between a blueprint of a house and a home in which real people lived.
Blame the MFAia. Screw "craft".
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