Let S Think and Talk About Poetry for a Moment

Creative Writing Fall 2006

Let’s think and talk about poetry for a moment.

Below I have provided some notes I took while listening to the performers at the Dodge Poetry Festival. I’d like to share some of the insights of the poets and their poems with you today.

First: Free-write for a few moments after pondering one or more of the following questions:  What is poetry, or what is a poem?  Why write poetry?  What makes good poetry?

Now, below are some thoughts on the subject of poems and writing poetry from the 2006 Dodge Poetry Festival. Let’s read and discuss:

Tony Hoagland: The thing about poetry is that nobody knows what a poem is. It is a source of pleasure, based on both the sound of language, and its meaning.

“Art is a house that wants to be haunted” – Emily Dickinson A poem is a machine that has to do something” “A poem is a plane that needs to be crashed.” A poem tells a truth of some kind.

Mark Doty: Writing a poem is a negotiation between what we think and feel and the language we use. We use language like a laboratory.

For many, a poem is a meditation that the speaker has based on an experience.

When finding and seeking inspiration for poems, we might ask ourselves, why am I remembering that? In writing poetry, we are trying to get at why it matters; to do this, we need to open a door of perception.

In writing poetry we often want to say things that people are afraid to say, or too tired to see, or look at what nobody has looked at.

Often writing poetry, and writing in general, involves discomfort- we don’t want to talks about it but you do.

Good poetry has to move in some way, it must take a turn in some sense in terms of meaning, tone, or both, etc. Writing poetry involves work and inspiration and where these two concepts meet up. Sometimes when writing a poem we say that the poem “came to us.” This idea of assigning a life of its own to a poem indicates that a poem has got to move in some sense.

Poetry is a highly-compressed object Poetry involves shining a laser beam on something, heightening our awareness of it.

Billy Collins: Poetry should involve some playfulness and music in language A poem (art in general) can be playful and serious at the same time. With poetry writing we are always playing with language.

A poem is an arrangement of words, written in lines, whose length is determined my some principle that is other than the width of the page.

Often writing a poem involves ambiguity, ambivalence, paradoxes

Find poets and poems that fill you with envy.

Just because you may feel as though you have nothing to say doesn’t mean that you should stop writing. Write about nothing. Play with how the language sounds. Don’t confuse a serious subject with value of a poem.

A poet is a spider working in a corner of a room at night. A Display of Mackerel each as intricate

They lie in parallel rows, in its oily fabulation on ice, head to tail, as the one before. each a foot of luminosity Suppose we could iridesce, barred with black bands, like these, and lose ourselves which divide the scales' entirely in the universe radiant sections of shimmer--would you want like seams of lead to be yourself only, in a Tiffany window. unduplicatable, doomed Iridescent, watery to be lost? They'd prefer, prismatics: think abalone, plainly, to be flashing participants, the wildly rainbowed multitudinous. Even now mirror of a soapbubble sphere, they seem to be bolting think sun on gasoline. forward, heedless of stasis. Splendor, and splendor, They don't care they're dead and not a one in any way and nearly frozen, distinguished from the other just as, presumably, --nothing about them they didn't care that they were living: of individuality. Instead all, all for all, they're all exact expressions the rainbowed school of one soul, and its acres of brilliant classrooms, each a perfect fulfillment in which no verb is singular, of heaven's template, or every one is. How happy they seem, mackerel essence. As if, even on ice, to be together, selfless, after a lifetime arriving which is the price of gleaming. at this enameling, the jeweler's Mark Doty made uncountable examples, Reading Moby-Dick at 30,000 Feet where men throw harpoons at something by Tony Hoagland much bigger and probably better than themselves,

At this height, Kansas wanting to kill it, is just a concept, wanting to see great clouds of blood erupt a checkerboard design of wheat and corn to prove that they exist. no larger than the foldout section Imagine being born and growing up, of my neighbor's travel magazine. rushing through the world for sixty years At this stage of the journey at unimaginable speeds.

I would estimate the distance Imagine a century like a room so large, between myself and my own feelings a corridor so long is roughly the same as the mileage you could travel for a lifetime from Seattle to New York, and never find the door, so I can lean back into the upholstered interval until you had forgotten between Muzak and lunch, that such a thing as doors exist. a little bored, a little old and strange. Better to be on board the Pequod, I remember, as a dreamy with a mad one-legged captain backyard kind of kid, living for revenge. tilting up my head to watch Better to feel the salt wind those planes engrave the sky spitting in your face, in lines so steady and so straight to hold your sharpened weapon high, they implied the enormous concentration to see the glisten of good men, of the beast beneath the waves. but now my eyes flicker What a relief it would be from the in-flight movie to hear someone in the crew to the stewardess's pantyline, cry out like a gull, then back into my book, Oh Captain, Captain! Where are we going now? I Ask You

What scene would I want to be enveloped in more than this one, an ordinary night at the kitchen table, floral wallpaper pressing in, white cabinets full of glass, the telephone silent, a pen tilted back in my hand?

It gives me time to think about all that is going on outside-- leaves gathering in corners, lichen greening the high grey rocks, while over the dunes the world sails on, huge, ocean-going, history bubbling in its wake.

But beyond this table there is nothing that I need, not even a job that would allow me to row to work, or a coffee-colored Aston Martin DB4 with cracked green leather seats.

No, it's all here, the clear ovals of a glass of water, a small crate of oranges, a book on Stalin, not to mention the odd snarling fish in a frame on the wall, and the way these three candles-- each a different height-- are singing in perfect harmony.

So forgive me if I lower my head now and listen to the short bass candle as he takes a solo while my heart thrums under my shirt-- frog at the edge of a pond-- and my thoughts fly off to a province made of one enormous sky and about a million empty branches.

Billy Collins Snow Day

Today we woke up to a revolution of snow, its white flag waving over everything, the landscape vanished, not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness, and beyond these windows the government buildings smothered, schools and libraries buried, the post office lost under the noiseless drift, the paths of trains softly blocked, the world fallen under this falling.

In a while I will put on some boots and step out like someone walking in water, and the dog will porpoise through the drifts, and I will shake a laden branch, sending a cold shower down on us both.

But for now I am a willing prisoner in this house, a sympathizer with the anarchic cause of snow. I will make a pot of tea and listen to the plastic radio on the counter, as glad as anyone to hear the news that the Kiddie Corner School is closed, the Ding-Dong School, closed, the All Aboard Children's School, closed, the Hi-Ho Nursery School, closed, along with -- some will be delighted to hear -- the Toadstool School, the Little School, Little Sparrows Nursery School, Little Stars Pre-School, Peas-and-Carrots Day School, the Tom Thumb Child Center, all closed, and -- clap your hands -- the Peanuts Play School.

So this is where the children hide all day, These are the nests where they letter and draw, where they put on their bright miniature jackets, all darting and climbing and sliding, all but the few girls whispering by the fence.

And now I am listening hard in the grandiose silence of the snow, trying to hear what those three girls are plotting, what riot is afoot, which small queen is about to be brought down.

Billy Collins