Ars Poetica/what is poetry?

Here are a few more notes about this assignment:

1. You will understand ars poetica much better once you’ve read the poems in SM (they start on page 20); read them all a few times, see how the poets are painting you a picture of “what poetry is” by saying “Poetry is …” or “reading poetry is like …” Try to write a brief summary of what you think each poet tries to communicate.

A. - Al Zolynas says poetry is “a pile of clothes on an empty beach at dawn” and our job as readers is to investigate that pile of clothes, try to extrapolate who wore them, what they mean.

B. William Stafford contradicts the old staying that art must come from suffering; to prove his point (stated only in his title), he imagines writing a poem to be like climbing a mountain – it takes self-motivation, the desire to work hard, and willingness not to wait for inspiration, but to MAKE a way, make a trail. The mountain won’t come to you!

C. Ethna McKiernan, too, names her purpose in her title (“Beginning to Name It: Poetry”), then just starts her metaphor as “It is the strange vegetable/that grows outside the garden” and goes from there, expanding the metaphor for awhile, then switching to another metaphor, “It is the mystery scientists/ spend late-night hours researching” and takes off again. She does this several times, trying to find a way to describe what she thinks poetry is. Great way to express what isn’t really expressible!

D. In Maxine Kumin’s “Ars Poetica: A Found Poem” she uses a note left for her by a friend as her jumping off place. She realized that the friend’s comments about a horse being “broken” or tamed could be applied to the writing or “taming” of a wild poem! She uses that metaphor throughout the poem, subtly comparing the hard, tedious, gentle work of breaking a horse with the hard, tedious, gentle work of “conquering” or capturing the wild words of a poem, getting them to settle down and BE a poem.

2. Reading down the list of quotes by various poets, keep a list of comparisons that strike you as interesting or bizarre. For example: poetry is a journal of a sea animal living on land, a healer, a machine, a skeleton… start with one of those and freewrite on it. What would the skeleton of poetry look like? Would sonnets be ribs, would verbs be fingerbones, would metaphor be the skull? Once you’ve done this for two or three of the metaphors, read your freewrites over and see what seems most powerful. Follow that thought in another, longer freewrite.

3. Another way to approach this assignment: what is a poet? The same list of poets give various definitions of a poet, or what a poet’s job is. Write a job description for a poet. What would be required? What would not be useful? What temperament should they have? What skills?

4. Please feel free to email me your ideas for this assignment if you need someone to give you feedback. Also, please contact each other and start forming those smaller, outside workshops that can give you such great comments!

Thanks again for a great week of poetry. I’m looking forward to the rest of the semester. Oh, and remember that Professor Wheeler and Melanie Almeder are reading today at 4 p.m. at the Staniar Gallery (Wilson Hall at Lenfest Center)!!

Professor Miranda



What IS Poetry? What is GOOD Poetry??

We're approaching our next assignment: the "ars poetica," the art of poetry. A poem about poetry. Some people consider this an exercise in navel-gazing gone terribly wrong. However, it is almost irresistable for poets to try and describe what it is about poetry that is so compelling, and writing an ars poetica is almost a rite of passage. Below you'll find a few links to poets reading their Ars Poeticas, as well as a list of poets trying to come up with a one or two line definition. Steal from them! There are some great lines to start you off on your own crazy ricochet here.

"Ars Poetica" by Archibald MacLeish, spoken by MacLeish: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdLZBlYEt_A

Victoria Chang reads "Ars Poetica as Birdfeeder and Hummingbird" from Salvinia Molesta: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSa943Xo9m8

Elizabeth Alexander's 'Ars Poetica #92': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lC9Vyhir2Y

And if you'd like to hear to GORGEOUS Spanish original of Neruda's "Poesia," listen to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCODhcSiYhE


Quotes from random poets:

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. ~Leonard Cohen

Poetry is what gets lost in translation. ~Robert Frost

Imaginary gardens with real toads in them. ~Marianne Moore's definition of poetry, "Poetry," Collected Poems, 1951

A poem is never finished, only abandoned. ~Paul Valéry

Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition. ~Eli Khamarov, The Shadow Zone

Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. ~Carl Sandburg, Poetry Considered

A poem begins with a lump in the throat. ~Robert Frost

The poem is the point at which our strength gave out. ~Richard Rosen

It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things. ~Stephen Mallarme

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. ~Novalis

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing. ~John Cage

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement. ~Christopher Fry

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone. ~Thomas Hardy

The poet doesn't invent. He listens. ~Jean Cocteau

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry. ~Gustave Flaubert

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own. ~Salvatore Quasimodo

Poetry is life distilled. ~Gwendolyn Brooks

Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things. ~Robert Frost

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words. ~Paul Engle, New York Times, 17 February 1957

Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts. ~Robinson Jeffers

You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it tick.... You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in. ~Dylan Thomas, Poetic Manifesto, 1961

[P]oets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science. ~Sigmund Freud

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession. ~Robert Frost

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself. ~Carl Sandburg

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth. ~Jean Cocteau

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. ~Don Marquis

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. ~Rita Dove

A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep. ~Salman Rushdie

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know of. - Emily Dickinson, from her Letters 405

A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words. - William Carlos Williams, from Selected Essays

Poetry is prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea. - Mina Loy, from “Modern Poetry”

A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. - Charles Olson, “Projective Verse”

Poetry is emotional in nature and theatrical in operation, a skilled re-creation of emotion in other people, and, conversely, a bad poem is one that never succeeds in doing this… At bottom poetry, like all art, is inextricably bound up with giving pleasure, and if a poet loses his pleasure-seeking audience he has lost the only audience worth having, for which the dutiful mob that signs up every September is no substitute.
Philip Larkin, “The Pleasure Principle”

Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat… No one should experience anything they don’t need to, if they don’t need poetry bully for them, I like the movies too… As for measure and other technical apparatus, that’s just common sense: if you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough that everyone will go to bed with you.
Frank O’Hara, “Personism”

Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.
Audre Lorde, “Poetry is Not a Luxury”