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[Ġakbu]

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http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16915

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16223

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16222


They're all good.

[Father Luke]

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Damn good. And thanks for sharing.

6. We find our models of ambition mostly from reading.
^{(from the article)}

And this from another:

Poets love to parade as victims; we love the romance of alienation and insult.


The third article, I think. Death to the death of poetry...

[Ġakbu]

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I had read these essays about a year and half-ago, courtesy of a friend; they really did make me change my attitude - but only just recently, I mulled over them incosistently, but just about intensely enough for them to hammer some sense into me. They're excellent I think, with many quotes to ponder upon, just like the ones you shared.

[Father Luke]

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Yeah. That anyone even considers Poetry a subject worthy of an article, much less an
entire publication, tingles my raspberries. These were three goodies, and I'll chew
them languor·ous·ly adv with my breakfast decaf coffee this day.

 

[Sana]

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I am too lazy and tired right now to click on anything or read any word, but that's a nice beard there.

[Tobacco]

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[Tobacco]

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[Ġakbu]

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Sana: Yes, it is nice, Lytton Strachey is always willing to help. At 25 or 26 I shall take up pipe-smoking, when I get to 35, if I get to 35, perhaps I'll grow a beard and have people shout pedophile at me, or people thinking that I could potentially hide a herd of goats in their grandmothers' pyjamas.

Yonder: Each poet finds his own method - what I took on board from Hall was the idea to seriously revise. I know that I don't have it in me to do what he does, eighty revisions, or two hundred drafts of a single poem. Dylan (you might have realized by now that I know most things about this man and his work, in fact, I wish to be immolated after or just before my death in a coma, my ashes to be strewn beneath his riverside boathouse - you know, my version of religion at the end!), on writing his 100-line poem 'In Country Sleep', whilst staying for a couple of months in heat-soaked Italy, wrote to a Countess who also published a poetry magazine (now, countesses probably organize garden barbecues for lay missionaries before they go to Kenya for a month, or stopping Japanese-browed fishermen from eating whale sushi on the way back to the dock):

"My poem, of 100 lines, is finished, but needs a few days' work on it, especially on one verse. Then I'll send you a copy. The manuscript is thousands and thousands of foolscap pages scattered all over the place but mostly in the boiler fire. What I'll have to send you will be a fair copy. I think it's a good poem. But it has taken so long, nearly three months, to write, that it may be stilted.”

I remember being told by one of our professors, that Coleridge wrote his Kublai Khan (it's actually one of the few poems of his which I like, Wordsworth I can't abide) thing in one sitting, just after having a most exotic dream - never tried to continue it. But yeah, I think it is very sound advice, but it obviously has to be adapted to oneself. I see exam and university studies as coming in the way of my writing, but still, if I had more time, would I revise more and more? I would write more and more, but it's making the fuse cold that would help me revise more and more, and here, in the Mediterranean, just like in Faulknearth, it's bloody hot.

I really enjoy the way he rips apart most of contemporary poetry i.e. the Mcpoem. Death to the Death of Poetry should be read if you want to instill some optimism, or rather a better understanding of the poetry realm.

I try to drink a glass of water with every glass of wine I drink - funnily enough, I don't like hangovers. Beer doesn't get me thinking, but I'm guessing you wouldn't be interested in thought-inducing drink, would you now?

[redperil]

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I've only read the first essay so far; my first hour at work is one of the few times I get to fully concentrate. I really enjoyed it, so thanks James. Here are some of my thoughts:

let me argue that the common alternative is petty egotism that spends itself in small competitiveness, that measures its success by quantity of publication, by blurbs on jackets, by small achievement: to be the best poet in the workshop, to be published by Knopf, to win the Pulitzer or the Nobel. . . . The grander goal is to be as good as Dante.

I often read poets who have been published more than I've had haircuts, who leave you wondering, is it just me, do these credits mean I'm missing something? I've never been published, but I can count my submissions on one hand. I think deep down, I know that I need to work at my craft, which is why I haven't been throwing my work at publishers.

At sixteen the poet reads Whitman and Homer and wants to be immortal. Alas, at twenty-four the same poet wants to be in the New Yorker. . .

I undertsand what he is driving at, but at 24 the writer probably has rent to pay, possibly a kid to feed, and maybe even a habit of some sort. Lofty ideals are fine when penning a critical essay, another matter when you haven't eaten for three days. Remember, many of the poets he holds up as martyrs to the cause were also from wealthy backgrounds, or had financial support from interested parties. Few were scratching for change inbetween penning their 'stars'.

The poem freed from its precarious utility as ego's appendage may possibly fly into the sky and become a star permanent in the night air.

When we have read the great poems we can study as well the lives of the poets. It is useful, in the pursuit of models, to read the lives and letters of the poets whose work we love. Keats's letters, heaven knows

I knew a guy at art college who studied the lives of artists he admired. The unfortunate result was that he became a horrible pastiche of what he believed an artist should be. Which, he decided, was an angst ridden alcoholic. I read an autobiography by a Cuban poet which was a work of poetry in itself. By understanding his life, it added to the poetry. However, I see an inherent danger in forming a model of what you believe an poet should be.

When a poet types and submits a poem just composed (or even shows it to spouse or friend) the poet cuts off from the poem the possibility of growth and change

He made some good points about this issue. Too often we hold up our shields and draw the bridge when people offer advice or criticism of a newly penned/typed poem. The idea of giving air to the piece before releasing it to the eyes of others probably does help remove the ego from considering feedback. However, in the context of this forum, we may not see many posts if we all did that!

No, we will not admit Horace and Pope to our workshops, for they will just sit there, holding back their own work, claiming it is not ready, acting superior, a bunch of elitists. . . .

I'm taking this completely out of context, but this made me laugh given the way some people act on writing forums (and I'm talking from both sides of the fence here)

"It's only when you get far enough away from your work to begin to be critical of it yourself"—Robert Frost said—"that anyone else's criticism can be tolerable. . . ." Bring to class only, he said, "old and cold things. . . ." Nothing is old and cold until it has gone through months of drafts. Therefore workshopping is intrinsically impossible.

Well, we might as well close the forum now then.

These are some early remarks, but I want to go into more depth regarding his views on what the poet should aspire to. Thanks again James, I really enjoyed the read.

[Ġakbu]

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It's always a pleasure to share stuff which is good and which is appreciated by others who find the same or a different kind of goodness in it.

My thoughts exactly, about certain poets who have got long lists of publications with little worth to be extracted or at the very least admired. It really has to do with one's priorities in life though; A.E. Houseman, that depressing man of Shropshire writing about the Romans and the Greeks - he put his academic work first, poetry second. The American composer Charles Ives was a businessman first and foremost, but because he had lots of money from the business, he could focus on experimenting, for his livelihood did not depend on the production of music. E.E. Cummings came from a rich family, so he ended up (luckily or unluckily, in his case luckily I think) painting during the day and writing during the night. Dylan was a poor scrounger, so he scrounged off from wear benefactors, and always longed for a financial stability that never came. Or William Carlos Williams, a doctor was he not? Larkin: only published four poetry collections, each with around 25 poems - worked as a librarian. Bohemianism isn't really possible anymore, is it - most 'recognized' poets nowadays are university lecturers. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. R.S. Thomas was very astute in becoming a priest - it didn't involve much work, and it allowed him to live off it, if stoically, and be in the countryside which dominated his work.

I think what he wants to say there is this: most poets end up competing with each other, come a certain age: a relativism of sorts; when well and truly, I would say (as Hall would say), that shouldn't be the aim, for that is a kind of capitalistic poetry is it not? - competing so as to publish the most poetry and get the most awards etc. There is also that element which is I think, particular to our age, the fast, destructive pace, the requisite of noise - how can you go to the 'country-side' and put stereo music on? The metropolis has become Unreal, as Eliot said - and so have most poems, interchangeable, like those who write them. Being distinct does not mean wearing a stud earring the size of your cheek, which is the idea of being different nowadays: people try to make it apparent through externalisation - and people talk about how individualism is rife...they confuse petty self-centredness and materialism, and uncaringness with individualism, but anyway. It is the globalized world after all, with critics acclaiming living poets as some sort of demi-gods, with politicians heaping praise upon the dead Polish President just because he's dead - what about his record in office, his Catholic zeal, his apparent homophobic remarks? Poetry I mean, has fallen to the same level as other activities - poetry no longer foresees, or casts its beautiful shadow upon things to come, it's being used to comment mostly, and sometimes, and horribly so, it ends up trying to catch up with things that are happening now! Vision has been sidelined - it's the fucking Dalai Lama who has a vision, it's bloody John the Pole the Pope who is a peace-giver; but you see, that is what happens when those who should be sharing their vision with the world do not: we get cheap, artificial replacements, who due to their lack of authentic vision, are interchangeable, and are hollow - the hollow men of straw! We are still in Modernism really, the added -post means that we are nearing its end.


Yes. Stereotyping poets - angst ridden alcoholic, people love to group others, and I cannot understand why. Not all poets were insane, or eccentric, or downright weird - they were all serious though, even the funny ones.

You know, you sometimes go on an amazon page, on a book say by Ted Hughes - and there you have them, comments by Plathists, saying that Ted Hughes is a bastard and that his work is crap; perhaps he was a bastard, but why say that his work is crap simply because you ""love"" Sylvia, and you think that Ted was the cause of her death? See, it's personality cult, it's elements from this pop-void culture that we have, infiltrating poetry. I look forward to oil running out in a couple of decades, perhaps it will be then that people realize that there are more important things in life than driving a fucking car with a giant inbuilt stereo.

[I realize that my criticism comes across as one directed towards humanity in general, but that is because I think the 'drop' - careful - in standards in poetry has a lot to do with that. Hall explains it much better and much more factually, obviously.]

[redperil]

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I agree with some of the points Hall raises and I am sure I would be a McPoet in his eyes. I think my concern with this type of rhetoric is that it does rest upon one mans view of what poetry should be; an aspiration toward the sublime.

By creating the idea of the poem as the star with the, if you will, poet reaching for said star, he appears to be stating that unless a poet has such lofty aspirations his work should be considered a failure. I agree that what he believes to be the only authentic poetry does have a place, but I don't think every poet who fails to conform with his ideals should be cast into such a giant net (and drowned!).

It all depends on your view of what poetry should be and I'm always interested to read and discuss others opinions. The good thing about discussing these matters is that there are no definites, only definite arseholes propogating their beliefs

[Ġakbu]

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Well, most fail, it's to be expected - I don't think human biology and human society has within itself the 'power' to have many 'successes', or even the need for many 'successes'. As Hall says I think, we aim to do so-and-so, but we also expect to fail in the effort, and that if we succeed, chances are that we will never know that we have succeeded.

Sublime is important, I think, if you're talking about Art. And there are many ways to do it, and there are many levels of intensities - after all, poetry preserves the moment which it creates, the influences and events that may or may not shape the poem, are, after its completion i.e. the poet's death, discarded like a wet-wipe. It is the poem which really remains. It's playing immortality, is it not; isn't that why many people have children (not all, obviously), a subconscious (in most of such cases) urge to leave something behind, in this case, a physical one? But poetry, ah, it's not about the physical. That's already sublime.

[redperil]

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What I am trying to convey is that whilst I enjoy the work of those poets who aspire to create something so awe inspiring I crap myself, I also engage with the poets of the gutter, or the shopping mall, who do battle with their own worlds. These poets, for me, also have a place, despite their lack of academic awareness. Sometimes the force of someones style can overcome their limitations, although I know that you and Jeremy would probably disagree with me on that score.

Yes, we, definitely I, should work at our craft, or we may as well scribble in journals to burn at our death. However, for all this discourse, I will no doubt continue to find excuses for why I have no time to learn, but enough time to write shit.

I'm looking forward to finding time to read another piece of Hall propoganda

p.s. Karl Marx let his children starve and die of disease so as to complete his works. I go to work to pay for Poppy's chicken pox meds. Who will be remembered in 100 years? We'll see, we'll see...

[Ġakbu]

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N.B. I've always seen it ironic that Marx should have been such an intellectual figure - even if his ideology was there for the masses, the idea came from an intellectual and not from a commoner, and when you had revolutionaries, it was the middle-class intellectuals who led, oh well! Marx had a great beard, only Brahms' beard beats it I think, but then, Brahms does look like God - if only, if only...- if only God had stuck to composing symphonies!

There's no need for poetic apartheid; being prejudiced a la merda Christianità is bad, but being able to say that a piece is crap, that a piece which is recognized as brilliant by most is not brilliant, that a supposedly great poet (some academics like to say that Seamus Heaney is a great poet...Famous Seamus R.S. used to call him) is not already great and possibly will never be, without being hounded down as some elitist, dogmatic, conservative and all those other hoar-laden names, is what I'm suggesting. It's relativism gone insane. Everyone is equal, therefore...and so on. When someone like Rita Dove (was she a laureate, I have no idea) says that poets are 'part of a big family of poets' (yeah, nice one, get yourself on a round table with Shakespeare, Pigeon Guinivere), I mean, really, leave that kind of language to the politicians. I'm certainly not suggesting that poetry is a parallel reality to the one we're living in, or some mumbo-jumbo angel-filled cloud etc. I just think distinctions need to be kept and recognized, experimentation encouraged if the priority remains the creation of a poem, those kind of little things I mean, and that way, you can have a diversity which isn't like that of an assembly waiting to enter a prisoner-of-war-camp, with Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses etc: sure, there is diversity, but they're all under lock and key, and they all have to do what they're told - I'm not fond of Nazi analogies, but...  

P.S. Hope your daughter gets better.

[redperil]

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Ok Himmler, I hear you!

Btw: it was recognised by Marx that the Middle Classes were behind every revolution (and necessary), but could foresee a period of struggle where the dirty proles would take it upon themselves to revolt and overturn the work set in motion by the middle people