She loved poetry. She loved making. She loved painting. She loved “mucking around.” In answer to a question one of my students asked after a reading about process, she said she thought when she was writing she was actually trying to paint. Sometimes she did think it might have been better to be working with her hands. In later years, in the many readings she gave throughout the country, she read equally from her own work and the work of others which sometimes annoyed those who had invited her to read. When I last heard her read, she read poems by Emily Dickinson, Miroslav Valek, Edwin Muir, John Haislip and Laura Riding with an equal number of her own. She believed that poetry, that literature, was a communal endeavor.
—Maxine Scates, recalling her friend the poet Brigit Pegeen Kelly, “Uncovering What Is Brave: A Remembrance of Brigit Pegeen Kelly” by Joy Manesiotis and Maxine Scates, Plume #151 March 2024
Showing posts with label communal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label communal. Show all posts
6.11.2026
10.24.2024
recalling past voices
A poem…has the power to remind poet and reader alike of things they have read and heard. Also—and this is partly why the subject is so complex—it has the power to remind them of things that they have not read and heard, but that have been read and heard by others whom they have read and heard.
Thus the art, so private in execution, is also communal and filial. It can only exist as a common ground between the poet and other poets and other people, living and dead. Any poem worth the name is the product of a convocation. It exists, literally, by recalling past voices into presence. This has been no more memorably stated than in Spencer’s apostrophe to Chaucer in Book 4 of The Faeire Queene:
through infusion sweet
Of thine own spirit, which doth in me survive,
I follow here the footing of thy feet.
Poetry can be written only because it has been written. As a new poem is made, not only with the art but within it, past voices are convoked—to be changed, little or much, by the addition of another voice.
—Wendell Berry, “The Responsibility of the Poet,” What Are People For: Essays by Wendell Berry (North Point Press, 1990)
Thus the art, so private in execution, is also communal and filial. It can only exist as a common ground between the poet and other poets and other people, living and dead. Any poem worth the name is the product of a convocation. It exists, literally, by recalling past voices into presence. This has been no more memorably stated than in Spencer’s apostrophe to Chaucer in Book 4 of The Faeire Queene:
through infusion sweet
Of thine own spirit, which doth in me survive,
I follow here the footing of thy feet.
Poetry can be written only because it has been written. As a new poem is made, not only with the art but within it, past voices are convoked—to be changed, little or much, by the addition of another voice.
—Wendell Berry, “The Responsibility of the Poet,” What Are People For: Essays by Wendell Berry (North Point Press, 1990)
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