Accountability Teams

Our accountability groups are as follows:

1. Lizzie, Ben, Joyce

2. Katie K, Sylvia, Katey G

3. Caitlin, Amanda, Tricia

4. Isabel, James, Kristine

5. Christy, Jessica, Shannon

During the first week of February (4-8) please find an hour when your group can meet to talk about poetry.  Ideally, you will bring your laptops to your group meetings so that you can read each other's work and have it in front of you to discuss. You may also want to talk about other areas of interest related to poetry and/or to our class. Talking about poets you are reading, for example, is useful.  Raising and discussing questions related to course work or to your writing or to poetry itself is also encouraged.

To give you more free time to work with, we will not have conferences that week.

During the second week of February (11-15), we will resume conferences.

It seems good at this point to suggest that we alternate conference weeks with group meeting weeks; but as with anything else in this course, if it is too hard to manage or if we lose rather than gain opportunities, we will make adjustments.

Group meeting - No conference weeks are as follows:

Feb 5 & 7

Feb 26 & 28

March 19 & 21

April 9 & 11

For January 24

In 250 words or less, describe what you have tried to do in your two "2nd task" poems.  That is, what were your thoughts as to how you could find a center to the paragraph poems and as to how you shaped language and line to achieve a sense of that center.

Preliminary Thoughts on the Art and Craft of Poetry

A poem is always more than it appears to be.

When a poem is exactly what it appears to be, we have a problem because the "poem" that is exactly what it appears to be disappears into something else. Sometimes we call this something else "meaning."

Readers often think this "exactly" is what they want, what they hope for in a poem. They will say, disparagingly, "Why can't she just say what she means?" – as if the poem were simply meaning and the experience of reading a poem were simply like reading a newspaper or listening to testimony in court, or as if the poet simply had a "message" to convey.

This observation may strike us as odd because, after all, isn't literature supposed to mean something? Isn't literature supposed to be about something?

Well, yes, of course. But not exactly.

Puzzling.  The poet, for her part, wants an audience.  She wants to be read, as a first priority, and to do that she wants the poem to be accessible. Then, a distant second, she may want to be understood.  These two ideas are not the same.

What the contemporary poet wants is to make something with words that we often today call an object, an art piece. That object by its very nature is meaningful; but the poet will often squirm when she is asked, "What did you mean when you wrote this line or that image, or when you used a particular form?" What the poet means, usually, is that the line or the particular image itself is the point – rather than a consideration of a particular line or image, rather than a condensation of that line or image, rather than a simple symbolic explanation of the same.

Flannery O'Connor once remarked (see Mystery and Manners) that if you can reduce a short story, her usual medium, to an explanation, the story itself is unnecessary.  The same can be said of all art, and great art most of all resists reduction to explanation. Her comment was suggesting here both "art as object" and elusiveness as a test for goodness.

To demonstrate the inexact correlation between being read and being understood, I note that among the giants of 20^th Century American poets, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and e.e.cummings are all examples of highly regarded craftsmen whose work continues to defy explanation, although many have made the effort. Readers of these poets commonly discover they cannot explain exactly or precisely what they are reading or, certainly, what the poet intended.

Definitions and Admonitions

Poetry is the persistent human effort to voice the ineffable, to approach the infinite, to clarify the a-rational urges within, and to settle the disquieting instinct to exist and to make that fact evident.

Poetry is about the mystery of transcendence.

What to do if you want to be a poet

or even just to find out what being a poet means:

Read poems.

Read more poems.

Reread poems.

Read poems that speak to you

            poems you can listen to

            poems with a voice.

Leave the poems alone and then come back to them.

Sit with them until their necessity needs no explanation.

Read poems that confound you, that confuse,

            that leave you at a loss.

Don't imagine that a poem is simply

            the sum of its parts – a good poem

                        is always more.  A poor poem

            can be considerably less.

Don't discard poems that lack

            subjects you are "interested in."

Read those poems. Reread those poems. Delight in them.

Resist the urge to explain, at least right away.

Let the poem breathe in,

            breathe out.

Run your fingers over its face as if, being blind,

            you want that intimacy of human contact.

Reading in this way will not make you a poet.

But it may bring you closer

and it will help you know why.

Getting Started

Begin your adventure by sending me your blog address and NAME (so I can identify you) in the form of a comment.  Please.