The Poetry archive online
061001 Dodge
TheWanderingPoet2006@yahoo.com
Dickinson "Poetry is the tooth thatnibbles at the soul."
Jorie Graham "Poetry insists on going through existenceinstead of going around it."
Sunday October 1, 2006, 9:34 AM Tony Hoagland Craft talk.
Jorie Graham's brain storms fume out of the beaker of her skull. Her writing is very much a process, like throwing yourslef against the shore like a wavesover and over.
Poems have a center of gravity, poems have multiple centers of gravity around which the other elemnets of the poems arrange themselves. Jorie Graham's poems are encounters, you encounter things and then you release them.
"A poem makes a wise statement in the third stanza." TH says we have these terrible preonceived notions about poetry. Our job aspoets is to let our version of poetry evolve. Find something you can do well. Some people have atalent forimage,somepeoplehave atalent for syntax,some people have a talent for sound. TH has ametaphor talent, a hugemetaphor image claw like a crab. Start with what you're good at, develop that until you're very good at it, then add other more hard-earned skills. Don't wallow only in your first talent. Contain a poem, allow a poem to have a wild discovery, have passion and intensity (Duende), strong feeling, magnifying glass. Feel strongly, magnify that feeling. The journey of craft.
TH says Emily Dickinson says "art is a house that wants to be haunted."
TH: The poem must embody the whole psyche. A lot of poems fail because they don't embody the contrdictoryness of life and humans. I like things coming in from the side, I like contradictoriness within the poem. Complicate the narratives. Whether it is a narrative poem or not. I like for the ID to be in the poem, the angry greedy animal self, the jealosies and meanness and secret greeds. The walking around civil self. The super ego with it's principles and moral edicts. Catalyze, fume, make conflicts with each other.
TH The Birthday cake, by someone else but I didn't get who. Paul Goodman. I think.
TH The animal self and the child self need to be brought in. The vioelnce of self and the vioelence of feeling that breaks through the surface of the poem and thrashes around. I'm not convinved by all good manner in a poem. A moment of joy, pain, or sorrow. etc.
TH Compare what you are like walking around and talking to your friends. Some of that energy should bein the poem. Poems will always fall short of the full spectrum, but should contain avarietyof experience. Build the dialectical energy of the poem, the differnet energies of the self talking to each other and conflicting with each other.
TH A lot of the dialectical energy of the poem exists in nouns. The turtle with it's plastic palm, the condom and . . . (I keep missing things.) The poem is a snow glob and cannot contain toomany things, but the things it does contain should be disparate in some way. Adjectives have a dialectical energy. rhetorical energy. A pem is a little archtectural contruct. Itneeds a topography.