[lit-ideas] Re: POETRY SCHOETRY
- From: Julie C <juliereneb@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2011 12:30:02 -0500
Where do you put (how do you categorize) these? They are the poets who, for
many years now, have spoken to me --
cummings
Sexton
Sharon Olds
Neruda
T. S. Eliot
Mary Oliver
Octavio Paz
Celan
Rumi (odd man out, I guess)
Julie Krueger
On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 11:51 AM, Mike Geary
<jejunejesuit.geary2@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:
> I'd rather read a good short story than a good novel. I'd rather read a
> good poem than a good short story. It could be that I'm just lazy (I am),
> or it could be that the more concentrated the experience, the more intense
> the experience.
>
> Poetry is not everyone's cup of tea. Those I know who don't like poetry
> usually say things like: "why doesn't he just say what he means?" Good
> question if poetry were about meaning. Or maybe I should say "totally about
> meaning." When I think back to my high school exposure to poetry I
> remember Frost (Hired Hand, Mending Wall, Stopping By The Woods On a Snowy
> Evening), some easy sonnets by Elizabeth Barret Browning and Shakespeare.
> Mostly good old home grown thoughts and emotions within a rhyme scheme.
> College brought the study of poetry as canonized period pieces. But the
> period that interested at the time was my own -- it was the Beats -- the
> wild men who had grabbed the labels of the culture and were shaking it:
> "Listen to me, listen to me." But most of their poetry was just
> evangelizing an unarticulated alternative culture. Still, it was fun. Then
> I discovered the "sensitive poets" -- Merwin, Bly, Hall, Hect,
> Bishop, Galway Kinnell, Levertov, Plath, Wright -- to name a few that come
> immediately to mind. And so many unclassifiables: Cummings,
> Roethke, Snyder, Stafford, Koch. All are rich veins of versification. But
> I never took to Ashbery. Never understood how he was using words, but I
> persisted. At first he seemed as disconnected as Ritchie's Gardening
> Guy. Where's the poetic language in his poetry? He seems to write prose
> sentences. Where the emotional nexus? He seems have no center. Then it
> began to dawn on me that he uses everyday language as the most poetic of
> poetic language, and that the nexus is the whole of the poem. Most of the
> poems reflect he helter-skelter of our experience of the world and our
> wanting, needing, crying out for a nexus to our lives. All of us as lost as
> he is and read that way I find him very powerful. I'm reading Jorie Graham
> now. Love her. A genius at metaphorization -- is that a word? It is now.
>
> Mike Geary
> not giving a damn what you think you know, I know better
> in Memphis
>
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