communication in depth

Dickey offers a provocative definition of poetry in the discussion of Alun Lewis: “It’s not ‘literature’; it’s that human communication in depth that the best poetry is.” To say that a poet is great is not to praise indiscriminately. “Human communication in depth” can miss the mark. Dickey cautions the audience during the session on William Butler Yeats: “There are small writers that you can like without equivocation or without reservation, but I think there are no great writers that you have no reservation about whether or not you like them. Toward the end of this volume in the lecture on Dylan Thomas, he identifies two of his choices for greatness: “Of the great original users of the English language, who brought something truly original to the use of English in poetry, the two finest, the most original in whole canon of English poetry, are Gerard Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas…But of the two, the more original is Dylan Thomas.”

Quoted in James Dickey: Classes on Modern Poets and the Art of Poetry (U. of S. Carolina Press, 2004), edited by Donald J. Greiner

religious perpetuation

Creative writing teachers who go on repeating the same pieties they’d learned when they were students.

at one remove

A professor so steeped in secondary sources, one could imagine a student leaving a poem on his desk and him not recognizing what it was.

rules-based writing

A poet teaching composition is dangerous to both student and teacher.

regurgitative poetics

Too many teachers of creative writing are content with passing on received materials instead of finding their own pedagogical texts and promoting those.

prime directive

If MFA programs in creative writing did nothing else creating life-long readers would be a worthy accomplishment.

leap or fall

There is something in art that can’t be taught: What can be taught is an approach, an address or a stance, a way of being available to what might come next. But in all art, after that, it’s the leap, or the fall, and those events can only be experienced.