life inside the lyric

The narrative in a lyric poem is the poet’s life instilled up to that point.

be peak

A poet intends to make the poem a peak experience.

[after Maslow]

made thing

I went to a poetry reading tonight: Just wow—the human voice and all the experience contained therein expressed openly, asking for no safety—trusting the made thing that is the poem.

[The 59th Wallace Stevens Poetry Program with Brenda Hillman]

felt again by language

Sensations fade but words tie us to existence by allowing us to recover the felt aspects of experience.

universal resources

The poet has a vocabulary and experience enough for a universe.

poor substitute

In literary works imagination proves to be a poor substitute for experience.

essential experience

Imagination fails the further it gets from experience.

inferred from life

A good line of poetry is an inference from experience.

one and done

There is art you are grateful to have experienced but wouldn’t want to own. There are poems you’re grateful to have read but wouldn’t read again.

two types

A memory hoarder v. an experience giver.

know a poem

In phrases, images, rhythms, style,...you can know a poem without having memorized a single line.

experience everlasting

The first time you read the poem you knew you’d encountered an inexhaustible resource.

false to experience

The more artifice the poem has, the more false it is to experience.

faithful record

Though he did create texts he resisted being called a ‘creative’ writer—he preferred thinking of himself as making a faithful record of what humankind he’d encountered and those parts of world he’d experienced.

predilection and its limits

When it comes to writing, our predilections will inevitably shape our practice, but they should not constrain our purview when it comes to the experience of literature.

experience of the encounter

A poem may frustrate understanding without diminishing the experience of the encounter.

experience, interpretation, opinion

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.—Susan Sontag

Someone posted the above quote without a reference. Likely it comes from Sontag’s great essay “Against Interpretation.” However, I do want to quibble with her statement. Of course 'experience' should be regarded as being of a higher order than 'interpretation'. But then one realizes in the dialog with others how odd and even cockamamie experience can be, which drags experience down to the level of opinion. (Opinion being what we all have, as the saying goes.) So I think there are smart people (call them intellectuals, if you will) who we should look to for interpretation. Not that we must accept their interpretations at face value, but they give us something worthy with which to argue over, and challenge us to refine our own thinking about the work/art.

place and experience

When I read "Epic” by Patrick Kavanagh for the first time, I realized that documenting seemingly insignificant events and objects—buses included—are neither ridiculous nor melodramatic. The more I studied his poems and essays, the more I revered how Kavanagh sought to develop a praxis that is both inclusive and individual: not solely concerned with audience and legacy, but more aligned with place and experience.

—Roan Ellis-O’Neill, Hold Open the Door: The Ireland Chair of Poetry Commemorative Anthology 2022 (University College of Dublin Press), edited by M. McCann, S. Meline, N. Zak/Aria Eipe, M. Prince, and F. Ormsby.

backward or forward

Both memory and imagination must rely on experience.

life elevated

Art is an experience that arouses us beyond what our day-to-day offers.