After a long hiatus (study commitments..) I needed some poetry back in my life. Blackmail Press #28 came out recently in which I modestly appear; a kind gift by a family member means I'm attending a 2-day poetry course over the summer - so I picked up a few books. Okay, that's not always necessary, but who could resist?
When considering buying books (not just on poetry), I always think in terms of what I would want to refer to again and again. A short term read is better coming from the public library rather than a bookstore, unless I plan to pass it on in some way, or want to support the author.
There are some recommended books by the course tutor which I bought, not because you have to have them but because my poetry collection is looking a bit sparse at the moment. I've weeded my books twice in the last year or two and try to borrow rather than buy, as I've just said. I also picked up a few others that looked intriguing...
The distinction between books on poetry and books of poetry isn't clear-cut, in my mind. If you want to learn more about writing poetry you need to read poetry. If you're not reading poetry, why on earth would you bother trying to write it?
So here are the books sitting on my desk at the moment, waiting to be read properly, and later joined by a couple of others I'm waiting on from Fishpond.
Strand, Mark. & Boland, Eavan (eds). The Making of a Poem : A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. New York / London : W. W. Norton & Co., 2000
"If example is the best teacher..." I'd never heard of this book before I came across it in Borders yesterday. But I'm always interested in learning more about forms, and when I opened it I realised it was chockful of poems arranged by form, and not just sonnets, villanelles, heroic couplets etc, but also the elegy, the ode, the pastoral, and a section on open forms. Less technical perhaps than other books but all the basics are here and then some.
Fry, Stephen. The Ode Less Travelled : Unlocking the Poet Within. London : Arrow Books, 2005
I'd knocked around buying this one for a while but was always put off by the author. Why would I want to learn about poetry from Stephen Fry, despite his perfect performance as Jeeves? But looking through it again in Unity Books recently, I realised how unpretentious and downright funny he was about poetry - and we all need that. I certainly do. How about his 3 Golden Rules for reading his book?
1. Take your time
2. Don't be afraid
3. Always have a notebook with you.
Rules for life, in fact. And he isn't afraid to talk technically. So a breath of fresh air.
Harvey, Siobhan (ed). Our Own Kind : 100 New Zealand Poems about Animals. Auckland : Godwit, 2009
Recommended reading for the poetry course, whose tutor incidentally is Harvey herself. I do come at this book from a strong animal rights perspective, being a vegan for ethical reasons. On the whole I thought I couldn't pass this one up, and when browsing it I came across several poems that prompted me to bring out my notebook and pen - a sure sign of success. In particular the strong bitter ending of Brian Turner's Pig, Fleur Adcock's Crab which talks about eating the "permitted parts of the crab" (I doubt the crab permitted it), and Our Cow by Cilla McQueen, which after reading a couple of times unfastened itself for me and began to spread in lots of possible directions, including a respect for the cow itself. Plus the book has lots of cute black & white pictures of animals (and people interacting with them) by Mark Smith.
Green, Paula. & Ricketts, Harry. 99 Ways into New Zealand Poetry : over 85 key poems plus 25 poets talk about their work. Auckland : Vintage, 2010
Recommended reading again. Anthologies about New Zealand poetry are frequently published, with different slants (spirituality, animals, Auckland, Wellington etc) but this book intends, according to the preface, to open up rather than fix, celebrate rather than criticise, and introduce rather than assume. When looking through it I'm struck by how little I know about the poetry scene in New Zealand. This book covers the usual suspects like form and effects, but also has significant sections looking at the history of poetry in NZ, and other ways to look at poetry by "identities" - ethnic identities, New Zealandish, women, children. These aspects are what most interest me at first glance.
Carey, John. What Good are the Arts? London: Faber & Faber, 2005.
This is a question I ask myself often. Carey also had some controversial reactions to this book, and when I began to read I found out why. He does prick the balloon of pretentiousness that exists around (seems chiefly the visual) arts. Claims of spiritual eminence and elitism etc. He also has a great sense of humour, particularly when talking about what a work of art is. I want to write about this more in a later post, and I'm only half-way through, so all I'll say here is that he starts by asking what a work of art is, then examining the usual arguments around the arts (high art vs low art, scientific work on arts, do arts make us better, art as religion), and then talks specifically about literature (including poetry), and why he thinks literature is better than all the other arts. A couple of interesting concepts here are - literature's ability to criticise itself, and the idea of indistinctness (see my comment on Cilla McQueen's poem from the animals anthology).
Not specifically poetry, but very relevant.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Saturday, September 11, 2010
The scholar of one candle
I have been thinking about readers of poetry, and a phrase by Wallace Stevens keeps occuring to me - "the scholar of one candle" in The Auroras of Autumn. Various writers have interpreted this as Stevens himself, the poet, and the reader...
Nevertheless I have often come across this poem, and the short lines I have quoted above, discussed as key aspects of Stevens' work, and when thinking about the idea of "the reader of poetry" (in which I include myself, of course), as someone overwhelmed with a light that they also possess in part - someone who is afraid of, but recognises and loves, this light. For me the idea of a reader is not a distant, passive, objective function, but immediate, passionate, and active - the poem is not complete unless the text is read or listened to and responded to. The poem is not just words on a page or in the air, but the creator, creation and recipient interacting together.
This is not an original idea; I have found it in many guises, including in poets and poems. One of these is another Stevens poem, The House was Quiet and the World was Calm. The word scholar is used for the reader, who blurs into the book which blurs into the house and the world. The activity of reading becomes or makes a quiet, calm space in which everything, including the reader, is indistinguishable from everything else:
.......He opens the door of his houseThe scholar, here most identifiable as Stevens/the poet, only has one candle, a meager source of light (truth), energy, force, beauty, transformation, power. As a late poem this naturally seems to reflect on Stevens' sense of approaching death as well as the power of nature (the aurora borealis) over the puny skill of individual humans. This isn't a summary of the poem, however - not only is it 10 sections long, but Stevens can skilfully compress ideas into powerful symbols that mean more than he states.
On flames. The scholar of one candle sees
An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame
Of everything he is. And he feels afraid.
(Auroras of Autumn, section VI.)
Nevertheless I have often come across this poem, and the short lines I have quoted above, discussed as key aspects of Stevens' work, and when thinking about the idea of "the reader of poetry" (in which I include myself, of course), as someone overwhelmed with a light that they also possess in part - someone who is afraid of, but recognises and loves, this light. For me the idea of a reader is not a distant, passive, objective function, but immediate, passionate, and active - the poem is not complete unless the text is read or listened to and responded to. The poem is not just words on a page or in the air, but the creator, creation and recipient interacting together.
This is not an original idea; I have found it in many guises, including in poets and poems. One of these is another Stevens poem, The House was Quiet and the World was Calm. The word scholar is used for the reader, who blurs into the book which blurs into the house and the world. The activity of reading becomes or makes a quiet, calm space in which everything, including the reader, is indistinguishable from everything else:
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:Reading this poem, I recognise that special space I have often felt when reading, especially poetry.
The access of perfection to the page.
Friday, September 10, 2010
Representation and resistance
The September issue of Poetry is now out. There's an interesting article by Tony Hoagland comparing two types of poetry - designated by him as perspective and entanglement. Two kinds of poetic meaning, value systems, "tribes". Hoagland makes the important consideration that both of these functions are important, and then goes on to talk about the second, "entanglement", also called resistance, derangement, disorientation, as the most recent, and less well-known. An intimate struggle between the poem and the reader that resists the mind, and a way to talk about "collective dizziness" as a "fundamental symptom of modern life".
To me this construct of meaning is interesting in the opposite way I personally react to it. With communication overload, a hyperawareness of the subjectivities and imperfections of language and culture, the time-pressured and ephemeral conditions of our existence, is poetry to work with this by using fractured sentences, phrases, words, constructions? Undercut assumptions of narrative, meaning, hierachy, place? So many poems I've read have this uncertain play going on, either in the text itself as in many LANGUAGE-influenced poems, or in the concepts put together. I find it bewildering, exhausting, and not, in the end, useful to me - which puts me firmly in the first, more conservative tribe, of perspective, I assume. Especially with the concept of a poem as a made thing, an artifice, a work.
What I'm not sure of, and which haunts me as I read and reread this article, is the idea of a poem as an experience. When I write, I am trying to induce an experience of a certain kind in the reader (the reader being usually me but hopefully others too). The vertigo Hoagland talks about fits as an experience, but so does the blossoming of emotional recognition, surprise, elation, transcendance which many historical poems evoke in me (I'm thinking of a poem such as the lone and level sands of Ozymandias, for example, or more recently, Anthony Hecht's Peripeteia.)
So a poem must create an effect (or why read it), whether emotional, and/or intellectual. But must it represent the times? I.e. induce a state in the reader that is intended to replicate, maybe at an accelerated or focused way, conditions we already live in? Or could it, instead, create a slow place, a safe place, where those emotions, truths, and facts, that we often forget or miss in our hectic lives, can surface, and be considered? Where we can love at a depth not expressed in any other way, where we can remember death, or those quiet voices telling us we have forgotten to take a breath, change course, speak up, listen?
Hoagland's excerpts of Lyn Hejinian's The Fatalist as an example of incorporating both "tribes" are interesting, however, and as I've never read the book, warrant some investigation.
I re-read my post, and wonder if these comments attempt to make a complex thing too simple. Probably. This is the sort of issue that should never be resolved, but considered, argued about, and struggled with, by anyone interested in reading or writing poetry.
To me this construct of meaning is interesting in the opposite way I personally react to it. With communication overload, a hyperawareness of the subjectivities and imperfections of language and culture, the time-pressured and ephemeral conditions of our existence, is poetry to work with this by using fractured sentences, phrases, words, constructions? Undercut assumptions of narrative, meaning, hierachy, place? So many poems I've read have this uncertain play going on, either in the text itself as in many LANGUAGE-influenced poems, or in the concepts put together. I find it bewildering, exhausting, and not, in the end, useful to me - which puts me firmly in the first, more conservative tribe, of perspective, I assume. Especially with the concept of a poem as a made thing, an artifice, a work.
What I'm not sure of, and which haunts me as I read and reread this article, is the idea of a poem as an experience. When I write, I am trying to induce an experience of a certain kind in the reader (the reader being usually me but hopefully others too). The vertigo Hoagland talks about fits as an experience, but so does the blossoming of emotional recognition, surprise, elation, transcendance which many historical poems evoke in me (I'm thinking of a poem such as the lone and level sands of Ozymandias, for example, or more recently, Anthony Hecht's Peripeteia.)
So a poem must create an effect (or why read it), whether emotional, and/or intellectual. But must it represent the times? I.e. induce a state in the reader that is intended to replicate, maybe at an accelerated or focused way, conditions we already live in? Or could it, instead, create a slow place, a safe place, where those emotions, truths, and facts, that we often forget or miss in our hectic lives, can surface, and be considered? Where we can love at a depth not expressed in any other way, where we can remember death, or those quiet voices telling us we have forgotten to take a breath, change course, speak up, listen?
Hoagland's excerpts of Lyn Hejinian's The Fatalist as an example of incorporating both "tribes" are interesting, however, and as I've never read the book, warrant some investigation.
I re-read my post, and wonder if these comments attempt to make a complex thing too simple. Probably. This is the sort of issue that should never be resolved, but considered, argued about, and struggled with, by anyone interested in reading or writing poetry.
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