The intelligentsia of this country should be aware that the working classes of this country have as much scorn for them as they have for the working classes.
You can compose a poem whose form is reminiscent of a traditional form in order to both evoke that form and create a sense of dissonance by how the poem does not conform to the traditional form.
“Only one emotion is possible for this painter—the feeling of strangeness—and only one lyricism—that of the continual rebirth of existence.” —Merleau-Ponty, Cezanne
I love reading footnotes—its a way of discovering the text again, but this time seeing the materials with which it was woven.
Perhaps I am becoming a better poet the further I move away from the ‘plain style’ which was so important to me when I was younger.
It is easy to be so committed to the original conception of a piece that we are resistant to abandon that conception to improve the piece itself.
Why torture your work into being, when you can guide it into being? Why guide it at all, when it can guide you?
Perhaps writing is closer to cultivation than creation. In Old English usage, a poet was a “scop” or “shaper”, while the verb “scapen” was used to describe the making of a garden or, secondarily, a literary work.
“In the Dream Songs we are at the mercy, as Henry is, of fantasy—of women, of death, of drink. If indeed dreams, the poems seem to emerge out of the restless boozy sleep of the alcoholic, full of fits and starts; they provide an odd mix of scrambling, sitting, spattering rhythm and underlying monotone…We the audience are captive to the poet’s mesmerizing performance, in equal parts seduced by and coerced into collusion with the poetry, laughing uneasily with Berryman at death or hate or desires that had always seemed unspeakable. Not a comfortable vantage as a reader, but one that revels in the gall that the writing itself demands.” —Kevin Young, from his introduction to John Berryman: Selected Poems
The in medias res technique not only allow the author to enter the story at the height of the action, but even more importantly, it implies that the beginning of the action must be retold and understood before the ending can be reached.
My hope in literary studies is not that we expand and diversify what is considered a ‘classic’ but that we rid ourselves of the concept of a ‘classic’ altogether. It is not merely the case that our cultural elite have traditionally used the classics as a justification for their social position. The conept of a ‘classic’ is in itself inherently elitist. The idea that there must be a set list of works to be studied is the definition of exclusivity. The purpose of the standardization of education is the standardization of young minds.
Keats was the youngest of the second generation of Romantics. And it is remarkable to consider that had he lived even to middle age, he would have been a Victorian. In this context it begins to be understandable why his reputation as a poet was not substantial until the following generation. His synaesthesia, luxuriousness, and remarkable condensation were too advanced even for the other poets of his time. Byron, whose poetic style was formed by reading Pope and Gray, complained to Leigh Hunt that he could not understand the meaning of ‘a beaker full of the warm south.’
I remember my own reaction to reading that line for the first time: I was absolutely astonished. It was one of the lines that made me recognize how expressive a single line of poetry could be, how much it could contain. For the most popular contemporary of Keats, the line was merely a puzzle.
One of the goals of the earliest European colonizers to the New World, before they realized there were two entire continents and the largest ocean on the planet between them and India, was to convert the ‘Indians’ to Christianity. The idea was that if both Europe and the far side of the world were Christian, then Islam would be surrounded by Christianity on both sides, and would eventually be overwhelmed.
As soon as the vastness of the New World was recognized, missionaries hoped to establish in the Americas what they considered to be a purer form of Christianity.
Though these early missionaries possessed a certain amount of pity for the indigenous populations—they were, after all, attempting to ‘save’ them—what is most striking to me about their accounts of their work is how perplexed they were as to why the natives they met should not want to abandon their traditional religion and lifestyle, or that they should ever want to return to such beliefs and ways if such a possibility became available to them.
This is by Fr. Diego de Landa, from Relación de las cosa de Yucatán, from 1566, trans. by A.M. Tozzer, describing a scene in which the friars apprehend a number of Mayan codices, in a Mayan town that was at the time over 4,000 years old:
We found a large number of books of these characters and, as they contained nothing in which there were not to be seen superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree and caused them much affliction.
These codices were essentially the main library of the Mayan people—containing their grammars, their history of their civilization and their world. The ritual burning of the codices occurred following an Inquisition Landa had ordered. During the auto de fé, approximately 5000 pieces of Mayan religious art were also burned. Only three Mayan manuscripts, and a few fragments of a fourth, are known to have survived from the pre-Columbian period. The descendants of the Mayans forced to watch the conflagration kept these in extreme secrecy for three centuries.
They pity the missionaries had for the indigenous peoples was exactly what allowed them to carry out their missionary work, even as so many of those they encountered were dying from disease and war. Yet their cultural bias prevented them from recognizing the ethnocide they were conducting.
Ultimately, their goal was to convert as many people as possible. The more they converted, the sooner the Second Coming of Christ would occur.
Contraception and abortion are not new. They are as old as civilization. Modern technology simply makes the processes more efficient, less dangerous, and less painful.
The critical works that informed my concept of poetry are works that I never see on MFA reading lists: the essays of Paz, Yeat’s A Vision, the letters of Keats, Shakespeare’s plays, and the travel diaries of Basho.
“Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts: it is a way of illuminating the facts. It works by eliciting the general principles which apply to the facts, as they exist, and then by an intellectual survey of alternative possibilities which are consistent with those principles. It enables men to construct an intellectual vision of a new world.” —Alfred North Whitehead, from “Education and its Aims”
I don’t think of a metaphor as an object imbued with significance only so that significance can later be extracted from it. I think every object already carries significance. It isn’t something we assign, but something we hope to find.
“My poems are full of wobble. I like precision, but I also like wobble. I don’t know if you can have both, but I’m trying. The word erasures in the line “my erasures were featured,” for example, has several meanings. I like a particular kind of ambiguity where you’re yo-yoing back and forth between what different words could potentially mean, being bounced around by the different possibilities.” —Rae Armantrout, from The Paris Review “The Art of Poetry, no. 106”