Hello Grasshopper,
Now here I can agree with everything you say because, if I´ve understood you correctly, what you are actually saying is that bad poems about writing poetry should be rejected, not all such poems categorically. When you begin to analyse individual poems and conclude that, whilst many within this category fail, there are others that succeed, you are on much surer ground, I think.
Best wishes, Mike
--- Alkuperäinen viesti ---
Dear Bob,
If writing poems about writing poems was like painting
self-portraits, I'd have no reason to complain. But it isn't. It's more like
Rembrandt faffing on about the difficulties of mixing pigments and choosing
the right brush, and the mental strain of it all - rather than getting down
to paint a self-portrait.
In a way, every poem is about poetry - but the process shouldn't overwhelm
the product. Of course, we will sometimes write a poem about writing poems,
because that's what concerns us,-and there are some good poems about writing
poems - but I think that in general,the impulse should be avoided as much as
possible.
If we want to express the difficulty of writing about a certain subject,
say, there are ways to do this subtly, while writing ABOUT the subject.
I remember years ago seeing Laurence Olivier being interviewed. Melvin Bragg
begin to ask him reverently about how he approached a certain role. Oh,
goodness me, the Great Man replied, I can't be bothered with all that. I'm
an actor. I act. It's my job. You don't ask a baker how he makes bread'.
I thought this was a refreshing change from the usual pretentious
attitude -and it's what I think about poems. Writing them is an author's
job,- so just do it, don't witter on about the technicalities, unless you
want to poke fun at your pretensions.
Kind regards,
grasshopper
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bob Cooper" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, April 04, 2003 12:43 PM
Subject: Re: [THE-WORKS] Discussion topic? Poems about writing poems.
Hi all,
Fascinating discussion going on here!
(and if you think this is mega-long - the bulk of it is an appended list! -
so it isn't all that long a read...)
I think there's a fair few poets have written about poetry (and I'm more
inclined to read their criticsism if I value their work as poets), and a
fair few of them have written poems about poetry too. (And I'm not just
talking academic writing here - poetry wars have been waged in the letters
pages of many poetry magazines, on the web, and probably a fair few other
places as well! But specific poems about poetry...
Perhaps it's a bit like painters making self portraits (and if that's all a
painter painted we may think very differently about him, or her, to someone
who painted just one or two at various stages of their life.
I've never written a poem (yet) I've known to be about poetry - but when I
was writing a lot of poems about rock-climbing I could talk about the links
I saw between the two pursuits.
I can also remember once being told that a poem I had written was "really"
about poetry! I was surprised - but I was still grateful to see that that's
how it was seen. (I can't remember, though, which poem it was - so I guess
the allusion was pretty thinly drawn!). It could be that a poem the poet may
think is about (ahem) poetry may be read by someone else as being about
(say) an orgasm (I seem to recall reading/hearing something about some
virulent 17th Century male poets where that comment was made! And verses by
Victorian women hymn writers are also compared to sexual experience...) or
the poem could be seen as about anything!
Also, a couple of years ago, I was wondering if I could/should compile an
anthology of poems about poetry and about poems (and poem making). I started
a file and eventually came across a list that had been published somewhere
on the Web (I think the Web Site's long since dissolved). I found that I had
a few extra poems I thought were about the craft - and there were a few on
the list, that had been published in magazine's, I'd not come across. But I
lost interest in the anthology idea, or was it that other ideas and projects
came along that pushed it well into the background. I don't really know.
Copper Canyon press, tho, have a good reputation, Gary. Could you let me
know more details if/when they appear?
For myself, I find that I occasionally need to reflect on what I'm about as
a poet. Talking about my art and craft - to people who know what I'm saying
- matters. But I'm very cautious about what I say! I sense if I say
something that sounds too definitive I am restricting myself to merely one
perception of what I'm about - and I sort of feel that poems sort of come
from a flow rather than from a pool. I also moan inwardly when I hear others
offering definitive statements that are aimed at closure rather than
stimulating further thought (But I'm wondering as I type this if I ought to
write this... because this doesn't happen here!). I don't think I would
explore my doubts and fears and insights about writing to someone who had no
interest in writing: I guess I've done that, been hurt by the lack of
understanding of what I'm trying to say, and learnt from that hurt! I guess
I'm probably a shy person. But I also know, when I've said some things about
poetry, perhaps in introducing a poem at a reading, I've sometimes been
delighted with the response.
Anyway, (and here's hoping the formatting holds!) here - with the poet
mentioned first and the poem second - is Tim Love's list:
PaP: List of Poetry about Poetry
· Patience Abgabi
· Transformatrix
· Joseph Addison
· "An Account of the Greatest English Poets"
· A.R.Ammons
· "Classic"
· Auden
· In memory of WB Yeats
· Pat Blackledge
· "I'm not a verse" (Poetry Nottingham International, V54.4, 2000)
· Anne Bradstreet
· "The Author to Her Book"
· Callimachus
· Prologue to the Aitia
· Lewis Carroll
· Poeta Fit. Non Nascitur
· Samuel Taylor Coleridge
· "On Donne's Poetry"
· Metrical feet
· Billy Collins
· "Workshop"
· Wendy Cope
· "Making cocoa for Kingsley Amis"
· "Engineers Corner"
Emily Dickenson
· "This is my letter to the world"
· Tom Disch
· A Tale of Two Metres
· Austin Dobson
· "On the Future of Poetry"
· Rita Dove
· "First Book"
· Michael Drayton
· Sonnets to idea
· Lawrence Ferlinghetti
· "A Coney Island of the Mind, # 15"
· Robert Francis
· "Catch"
· Sam Gardiner
· "Principia Poetica" (The Rialto 40, 1998)
· Nikki Giovanni
· "kidnap poem"
· "poem" (for langston hughes)
· "poetry"
· WS Graham
· "The Beast in the Space"
· Thomas Gray
· "The Progress of Poesy: A Pindaric Ode"
· Paul Groves
· "Chauvinist Verse" (Thumbscrew 16, Summer 2000)
· David HW Grubb
· "The Complete Works" (Iota 52)
· Michael S.Harper
· "On Brodsky's Collected" (Stand 2(4)/3(1))
· Seamus Heaney
· "Digging"
· Horace
· Epistles (various, especially II.iii)
· A.E. Housman
· "Terrence, This is Stupid Stuff"
· Ted Hughes
· "The Thought Fox"
· John Hussey
· "Competition Entry" (Chiltern Writers Group Open Competition 2000)
· Robinson Jeffers
· "To the Stone Cutters"
· Elizabeth Jennings
· "Steps Towards Poems"
· Ben Jonson
· "A Fit of Rhyme against Rhyme"
· John Keats
· "On the Sonnet"
· "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer"
· "Sleep and Poetry"
· "If by dull rhymes our English must be chain'd"
· Ursula Kiernan
· "Hang About!" (Iota 52)
· Naoshi Koriyama
· "A Loaf of Poetry"
· "Unfolding Bud"
· Harry Lovelock
· "Collected Verse" (Envoi 127)
· Archibald MacLeish
· "Ars Poetica"
· Roger McGough
· "it's Only a P..."
· Eve Merriam
· "How to Eat a Poem"
· "Inside a Poem"
· Edna St Vincent Millay
· "I will put Chaos into fourteen lines"
· Barriss Mills
· "Gone Forever"
· Czeslaw Milosz
· "To Robert Lowell" (Stand 2(4)/3(1))
· Elma Mitchell
· "This Poem..."
· Marianne Moore
· "Poetry"
· Helena Nelson
· "Villainelle" (Poetry Nottingham International, V54.1, 2000)
· "To Claude, without whom ..." (Envoi 129)
· "Warning" (Envoi 129)
· "Blood" (Envoi 129)
· Pablo Neruda
· "Poetry"
· Bob Newman
· "Entasis" (Poetry Nottingham International, V54.4, 2000)
· Dennis O'Driccoll
· "The Next Poem" (Quality Time, Anvil)
· Donny O'Rourke
· "Dr Poetry (trust me)"
· Alexander Pope
· "An Essay on Criticism"
· "Sound and Sense"
· Peter Porter
· "The Lying Art"
· Ishmael Reed
· "beware: do not read this poem"
· Dante Gabriel Rossetti
· "The House of Life: The Sonnet"
· Guy Russell
· "MA in Poetry Writing" (The Rialto 47, 2000)
· "One-night stanzas" (iota 53)
· Gary Snyder
· "Ax Handles"
· William Stafford
· "You, Reader, My Name is William Tell"
· Mark Strand
· "Eating Poetry"
· "The Great Poet Returns"
· Wallace Stevens
· "Of Modern Poetry,"
· Elmer Suderman
· "We Must Try Words"
· David Sutton
· "The Birth of Poems" from "A Holding Action" (Peterloo)
· May Swenson
· "Answer to Question: How to Become a Poet"
· Wislawa Szymborska
· "Some Like Poetry"
· James Tate
· "Teaching the Ape to Write Poems"
· Dylan Thomas
· "In my craft or sullen art"
· Anthony Thwaite
· "The Art of Poetry: Two Lessons" (The Rialto 38, 1997)
· Paul Verlaine
· "Art Poétique"
· Judith Viorst
· "Sometimes Poems"
· Carol Washer
· "Political Correctness" (Acumen 31, May 1998)
· Richard Wilbur
· "The Writer"
· William Carlos Williams
· "Poem"
· William Wordsworth
· "Scorn not the Sonnet"
· "A Poet! He Hath Put his Heart to School"
· David Wright
· "Words"
· Al Young
· "For Poets"
Contributors
[log in to unmask], [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask],
Helena Nelson, Jon Corelis, Anne Berkeley, Nicky Monaghan.
See also
· Poetry about Poetry
· LitRefs
Updated August, 2001
Tim Love
>From: grasshopper <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: The Pennine Poetry Works <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Discussion topic? Poems about writing poems.
>Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2003 15:27:39 +0100
>
>I'm surprised, reading various poetry lists, about how many poems are about
>poetry and writing poems. It leads me to wonder what the expected audience
>of these poems is.
>I suspect the majority of people do not write poems - so why should they be
>expected to connect to the writing process? Is is not rather solipsistic to
>expect a general reader to be as fascinated by this subject as an author
>is?
>I'll confess my personal feeling about this. I think Art should mainly be
>about life, not about art. Poems about poems can get very incestuous and
>inbred-- frankly I think it's rather an unhealthy trend.
>I've found most people don't respond that readily to poems about poetry,
>but
>about things they can relate to more strongly -about living life, rather
>than the process of writing about it.
>Could this be why often people feel alienated from poetry these days--they
>feel much of it is aimed at fellow writers rather than the general public?
>I'd be interested to know what others think.
>Kind regards,
> grasshopper
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