Finding
the Undercurrent: Three Essays
On
the Reading, Writing, and Teaching of Poetry
The
poem escapes the clock
because
it is water
and
it grows with the wind.
—Luis
Alberto Ambroggio
(transl. C. M.
Mayo)
Funny Things Happen on the Way to the Forms
Many
years ago I was invited to ply my trade at a weekend poetry festival
celebrating “The Limits and Shape of Language.” Right down my alley—but a few hours before I was due at the lectern I
discovered that the theme had been changed. Only one word was changed, but the
change seemed to me an indication of something that is sadly wrong in our
culture’s dealings with poetry. Somehow it was decided that we could better
spend the weekend thinking about “The Limits and Shape of Meaning.” Not
language; meaning . . . .
[Read the essay here: Funny Things Happen on the Way to the Forms]
Creative Indifference
I’ve just read Marianne Boruch’s
essay, “Line and Room,” from her book In the Blue Pharmacy. It’s
a fascinating excursion into the many ways that line functions in the
total makeup of what a poem is. We understand how poetry’s pressure and
classical restraint are strengthened by lines which use punctuation marks at
their ends, letting sense and meter pause between lines so that each line
functions clearly as a unit in a structure. But—much more excitingly—Boruch demonstrates the gain in breadth, movement,
and complexity when a poet breaks lines using enjambment, letting lines flow or
jerk, hush or clamor, set up tensions, surprise us as they run on through the
end-stops. She freshens an old truth:
that the line is a unit not of sense but of attention. . . .
[Read the essay here: Creative Indifference]
The
Tyranny of the Accessible
Out
in the wilds beyond the lands inhabited by readers of journals like Poet Lore, there has always been, and
probably still is, a silent tribe of teachers and readers and non-readers who
dare not venture beyond what they call accessible poems. Their safest poems can
be found in anthologies with titles like Best
Loved Poems or 501 Poems of Courage
and Inspiration. Such anthologies protect them from the embarrassment of
their expected confusions with strange or “difficult” poems. Some of us might
view this attitude as a retreat into cheap-perfume sentimentality and easily memorized
plink-a-plonk verse—whereas these people see themselves as the upright
conservators of real, no-nonsense, direct talk. . . .
[Read the essay here: The Tyranny of the Accessible]
These essays first appeared in Poet Lore.
Rod
Jellema, long associated with the University of Maryland and with The Writer's
Center (Bethesda, MD), won the Towson University Prize for Literature for A Slender Grace. His most recent book, Incarnality: The Collected Poems (Eerdmans,
2010), includes a CD of his readings of many of them.
