of a new nature

The nature poem. So inscribed, so written, so set into the tradition of poetry that it can look like an arcane code. But it is not arcane. In fact, the nature poem is volatile: an accurate register of cultural and historic change. Before the Industrial Revolution it was a pastoral poem; and after a pessimistic one. It has always been there, in the center of the action. Like other poetic conventions, it has its roots in deeply human things. Change those things, alter that angle, and the roots will shift, ready to be put somewhere else.

I believe Plath—the other Plath—changed the nature poem. She shifted its course. She re-directed its historic energy. Ariel may seem a slim text to argue with. Then again, many of the shape-changing texts of nature poetry—whether The Lyrical Ballads or North of Boston—are modest, apparently unimposing single volumes. Unimposing that is, until you read them.

—Eavan Boland, “The Other Sylvia Plath,” A Journey with Two Maps (Norton, 2011)

change it

Print is only a temporary arresting of the text—change it if you need to.

line into lie

A poet who changes a word to make a rhyme turns the line into a lie.

not it

Poetry: It’s not what you think it is. As you catch hold of it, it changes. As you define it, it becomes different

age overturned

The movement to free verse at start of the twentieth century, the turning away from regular meters and rhyme schemes, was much like the great shift in painting that occurred in the late 1200s in Italy. Driven by Cimabue and then Giotto, it brought naturalism into painting that too long had relied on the formulas that make early paintings look stilted and unreal to modern eyes.

demotic speech

If poetry had not turned to demotic speech after Modernism, after Beat, after New American Poetry, etc., it would have become like a collection of antique music boxes that are only wound from time to time to keep the springs in good working order.

makes itself new

Unless the world stands still, poetry will change.

against the stream

Poet, don’t go with the flow. Think of the stones in a stream, the way they impede and change the direction of the water. Make that a model for revision.

plural difference

Its plural form can change a word quite a lot.

no return

As with Heraclitus’ famous remark, ‘You cannot enter the same poem twice’.

cut that alters

A line break that preempts the full thought and thus alters it.

passage lodged

We call them ‘passages’ in literature yet some lodge themselves inside of us for the remainder of our lives.

first and last art

His art never shifted or changed in any significant way. He continued to produce variations of his original vision.

repeat and change

According to the critic Bob Thompson, one of the criteria of Yoruba art and sculpture is “repetition of changes.” This is significant to “For Our People” as well, for the poem does not repeat monotonously but moves unexpectedly, piling on moments and incidents authentic and sensitive to the Black experience, gathering momentum until it reaches a crescendo.

—Angela Jackson commenting on her poem “For Our People” in The Eloquent Poem (Persea Books, 2019) edited by Elise Paschen.

act of survival

Because those poems that move me are enactments of discovery, not retellings. In those poems that change me the speaker is most often the protagonist, not the narrator. The narrator knows he will survive the poem. The protagonist never knows if he will even make it to the end; the poem itself becomes the act of survival, the act of flailing and probing, an open desire for grace or change. I think this is what Stevens meant when he said the poem is the act of the mind in the process of finding what will suffice. Not having found what will….

—Jorie Graham, “Pleasure,’ Singular Voices: American Poetry Today (Avon Book, 1985), edited by Stephen Berg.

by your hands

Poet, don’t accept the form, shape it.

my roller coaster

ROLLER COASTER

For half a century
Poetry was the paradise
Of the solemn fool.
Until I came along
And built my roller coaster.

Go up, if you feel like it.
It's not my fault if you come down
Bleeding from your nose and mouth.


by Nicanor Parra, Poems and Antipoems (New Directions, 1966), translated by Miller Williams

[I changed this post because I realized in 2016 I'd posted the same poem, "Young Poets." Not that a good poem, one I've memorized since my youth, shouldn't be posted twice or thrice or a trillion times, but I'm trying not repeat myself. Parra, for me, is one of the unique poets.]

inflection point

A book of poems that if it didn’t change the course of poetry, at least inflected it.

skirmishers

Fighting an editor over suggested changes to a poem that once printed will be consigned to oblivion.

sure surrender

It is not possible to understand without surrender. As long as the slightest inclination to criticism remains in the consciousness it is hopeless to do justice to what is strange.

Beauty is not intrinsic in any form—it comes to make that form.

To critics: Write of the quick, as you do of the dead, with the same detachment.

Every aesthetic expression is dynamic and therefore involves distortion.

Too much craft in art ruins the art in the craft.

One can live for years with nothing on outside but a few hours with nothing in inside; that applies to art also.

Art never improves, only changes.

—Margaret Preston, Aphorisms (Art in Australia, LTD, 1929)