anapoetics

"transcending the dailiness"

The Chronicle's Books section on Sunday had a review of four new poetry collections.

"a tiny handful of her closest friends"

Portrait of a closeted writer:

The cost of caring about something you know you will most likely fail at is that you will look a little ridiculous in the eyes of the people you love. So you dissemble.  You tell people at a dinner party that you’re a teacher, a lawyer ....

"duende! terrible angels!"

"What kind of poetry do you write?"

Some poets take the question seriously:

Poems that make me uneasy. If a poem doesn’t make me increasingly uneasy as I work on it, I toss it, as the absence of unease and conflicted feelings usually means there is too little at stake in the poem.  (Idra Novey)

Some less so:

I sometimes ask if the question might be rephrased as one with multiple-choice answers. What are the possibilities? (Bob Wrigley)

"we bear our own distresses more passionately"

Via Ron Silliman, Auden on Rilke:

One of the constant problems of the poet is how to express abstract ideas in concrete terms.  ....  Rilke is almost the first poet since the seventeenth century to find a fresh solution.

Auden goes on to portend confessionalism in this 1939 review.

"in the wake of a new feeling"

From a Tracy K. Smith review of the poem "Clouds" by Philip Levine:

Looked at like that, clouds almost start to resemble crusty politicians, or mammoth corporations, anything that operates with too much power and from too great a remove.

If I'm not mistaken, that is a reference to Timothy Donnelly's recent book, The Cloud Corporation, winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. 

Poems move quickly.  Sometimes the best thing you can do as a reader is trust them and hold on tight.

"a lost or dimmed sense of bodily immediacy"

From Kenneth Baker's most recent column, a painting that "outruns conscious intention":

"Le Voeu Secret" (2011) by Edwidge Fouvry (Dolby Chadwick Gallery)

The French word "vœu" means vow or wish.  A death-wish?  Pride & Prejudice & Zombies?  A face wiped clean of skin?  "She seems to want to reawaken a lost or dimmed sense of bodily immediacy that may have belonged to her medium in less image-riddled times."

"of course I am exaggerating, but not by much"

An interesting perspective from a high school teacher and poet with, it seems to me, quite a bit of credibility:

If you are a poet and you want some credibility as a professional but don’t teach college, you had better be a doctor or a lawyer.

"not all honesties are equal"

William Logan writes thought-provoking reviews for The New Criterion:

The image of the apron seems merely decorative, until you realize it’s there to introduce the butchery.

Takeaway:  each image should serve a purpose.

The poems witness a degrading world where manners and the grace of language have been eroded by technology.

Takeaway: what does your poem witness?

and too many poems that end on a little pneumatic—or perhaps Plathetic—urgency

Takeaway: "Plathetic."  Like "Shakesperian" or "Homeric," right?  I get it.

There are many poets writing now in what might be called the New Breathlessness.

Takeaway: how hard it is to avoid accusations of pretension.

on the secret life of mirrors

Takeaway:  OK, that could lead to an actual poem.  But would you have to give credit?

These fragments of rural life are like outtakes from Frost, but without the Yankee cunning that made American pastoral so unpredictable.

Takeaway:  what could possibly be said about nature that would be new?  There must be something.

"reassembling an outcome"

From a post by Edwin Torres on the Harriet blog:

When does the poem come to you in the midst of your event? At what moment do you let it steal or scrape off the words you were using for your personal moment to suddenly appear in your artistic moment?

"fraught with poetry"

From "Heaven is Not Verbose: A Notebook" by Vera Pavlova in the April 2012 issue of Poetry.

Poetry should be written the way adultery is committed: on the run, on the sly, during the time not accounted for. And then you come home, as if nothing ever happened.

The comparison to adultery doesn't resonate, but I do like the idea of committing poetry on the sly, in between the rest of life, and having it be that real.