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Contemporaries
"I like to think that all the true poets-—young and old, even the dead ones-—are contemporaries." Stanley Kunitz
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Jan/19/2011, 5:18 pm
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Re: Contemporaries
Yes to Kunitz, Kat. And I would add they all belong to the same unendowed college.
Tere
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Jan/19/2011, 6:58 pm
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Re: Contemporaries
"I respect poetry in the very same way that religious people respect religion."
"I believe in being a poet in all moments of life. Being a poet means being human. I know some poets whose daily behavior has nothing to do with their poetry. In other words, they are only poets when they wrote poetry. Then it is finished and they turn into greedy, indulgent, oppressive, shortsighted, miserable, and envious people. Well, I cannot believe their poems. I value the realities of life and when I find these gentlemen making fists and claims-that is, in their poems and essays-I get disgusted, and I doubt their honesty. I say to myself: Perhaps it is only for a plate of rice that they are screaming."
-Forough Farrokhzad
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Jan/20/2011, 4:07 pm
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Re: Contemporaries
Kat, I sure hope Shabfriend sees this. In private I've thought and said the same, but with a little less circumspection. I am convinced that every true poet, to call back on Kunitz, and every dyed in the wool reader of poetry, comes to poetry in the same way the religious go to their devotionals. Absolutely convinced of this.
Tere
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Jan/20/2011, 7:36 pm
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Re: Contemporaries
I sometimes think I read poetry like some people read the bible: For an experience of connection to something bigger than myself. In my case, it's humanity writ large. I'm rarely disappointed.
Chris
Last edited by Christine98, Jan/21/2011, 12:49 pm
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Jan/21/2011, 12:36 pm
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Re: Contemporaries
Christine, we don't actually know each other. Except for the sometime email exchange pertinent to board business, on the boards is where we have, have had, commerce. What you say about your relationship to poetry I've always known, known since we first crossed paths on the Poets.Org site over 3 years ago.
The thread Kat has started keeps bringing to mind an anecdote I've passed on elsewhere. One I think relevant. Some, what?, 2,500 years ago the lyric poet, Confucius, brought together all the ancient Chinese poems available to him. Elegies and ballads, out of which he made an anthology. He is said to have said the biggest lesson he learned from the cannonical poetry is this: have no twisty thoughts.
I've thought on what he is said to have said for quite a long time. Some of my favorite poets can get twisty in syntax, style, and idiom. He was talking about something else. When he said the poetry taught him to have no twisty thoughts he was saying the poetry taught him: do not cheat. I've read the anthology. My reading bears out what I figure he meant.
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Jan/21/2011, 7:55 pm
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Re: Contemporaries
Chris,
I really like what you said. Perfect for the spirit of this thread.
Tere,
I got the Forough quotes from the site Shab linked to in her most recent translation. "Have no twisty thoughts" is a provocative statement.
"Books are the only homeland of the true writer, books that may sit on shelves or in the memory."
-Roberto Bolaño
"I don't have to leave my house to see the world."
-the Tao Te Ching
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Jan/22/2011, 2:17 pm
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Re: Contemporaries
Thanks for that, Tere...and Kat, for the additional quotes. All true.
Chris
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Jan/22/2011, 2:22 pm
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Re: Contemporaries
I came across this poem today by Linda Pastan and thought of this thread:
Q and A
I thought I couldn't be surprised:
"Do you write on a computer?" someone
asks, and "Who are your favorite poets?"
and "How much do you revise?"
But when the very young woman
in the fourth row lifted her hand
and without irony inquired:
"Did you write
your Emily Dickinson poem
because you like her work,
or did you know her personally?"
I entered another territory.
"Do I really look that old?"
I wanted to reply, or "Don't
they teach you anything?"
or "What did you just say?"
The laughter that engulfed
the room was partly nervous,
partly simple hilarity.
I won't forget
that little school, tucked
in a lovely pocket of the South,
or that girl whose face
was slowly reddening.
Surprise, like love, can catch
our better selves unawares.
"I've visited her house," I said.
"I may have met her in my dreams."
http://poems.com/poem.php?date=15014
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Feb/8/2011, 3:37 pm
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Re: Contemporaries
Then there's this from "Ghostly Conversations" by Jeffery Donaldson I also stumbled upon today:
"Poets, like everyone else, live in their own time and their own place. They can be separated from one another by a neighbourhood block, or by centuries, or by the kinds of cultural and linguistic differences that would have made it impossible for them to break bread together. Dante never sat down with Virgil. Heaney will never meet Joyce. Even if they could shake one another’s hands at a wine and cheese, the conversation, as such things go, could well have been stilted and mundane (“Pleased to meet you, Virgil. Why do you suppose they never put out enough brie?”). And yet voices themselves travel quite well over distances of time and space. They sound across centuries. They lie quiet until we are ready to hear them. Our words become ready to listen, our readiness to listen becomes an invitation, our invitation their approach."
http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_donaldson.php
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Feb/8/2011, 4:51 pm
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Re: Contemporaries
Thanks for the link, Kat. I love reading these articles.
Chris
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Feb/8/2011, 5:55 pm
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Re: Contemporaries
I do enjoy coming to the board after work. First I check e-mail, most often to check in and make sure no problems pend. Then I check in with the board. Y'all, or, as one Mississippi gal I know insists is correct, Ya'll somehow help me reclaim something.
Fun poem, Kat. I was a writer before I was a reader and so I can relate to the ingenue's faux pas. Going associative on you, I beleive it was Jane Austen who was not only a bad speller but never grasped the structure of the sentence. It seems her editor(s) had to re-present her stories. Same is true of Thomas Wolfe. Simon and Shuster's then editor, Perkins by name, had to recast his stories. I want to think the poem's young girl kept to poetry.
Now to the quote you give us and this time going tangential on you. I've read Virgil and Dante, Dante in greater depth, and I've never understood why the Florentine chose the Roman as his guide. If ever there was a strum und drang poet it was Dante. Blake said it best: Dante had more fun, covorted more, in hell than in heaven. Perhaps because he had a greater feeling for his infernal characters. Virgil, on the other hand, strove mostly to keep above the fray. Perhaps that is the key. Dante being constitutionally incapable of keeping above any and all frays.
Anyway, your quote brings to mind something I put out on another board once. That there is a poetry of thought closer to the instinct of poetry than any local coloration and usage can get to.
Tere
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Feb/8/2011, 8:09 pm
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Re: Contemporaries
Hi Tere,
What I liked about the Pastan poem is the way the N doesn't shame the "very young woman" with her answer. It could be that the young woman thought Pastan quite old, or it could be that she didn't realize, in keeping with the original topic of this thread, that Dickinson had been dead for a long time because Emily's poems seemed rather contemporary to that young reader. If so, then I agree "the poem's young girl kept to poetry."
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Feb/9/2011, 11:28 am
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