This is essentially the New American Poetry maxim, especially as articulated by Robert Creeley, saying, more or less, I write to discover what it is I am given to say.
Although various other ways have come along since, & when they work I admire them, I try to follow that way as best I can… (Note the concept of ‘gift’ in art there.)
Doug
> On Sep 11, 2016, at 7:34 PM, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Would you like to write like Ashbery, Bill? NB she says:
>
> Ashbery always sounds as if he’s thinking, even when you can’t quite get at the thoughts. Jorie Graham uses those expanding and compressing lines, which defeat the eyes and jumble the body’s rhythms so that your mind sort of breaks open. Dickinson actually exposes the pauses in the brain. They all seem to articulate indecision, as if the poem was writing itself in an unfinished moment.
>
> On Sep 11, 2016, at 16:45, Bill Wootton <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> This is interesting don't you think, from this Alice:
>>
>> ALICE OSWALD — British poets might put thoughts into their poems, but they
>> pour them in as if the poem is a container and the thought drops in.
>> Something about the American line just incorporates thinking.
>>
>> I suppose I am guilty of thought popping rather than using the poem as a
>> vehicle for thinking.
>>
>> Bill
>>
>> On Monday, 12 September 2016, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> http://www.thewhitereview.org/interviews/interview-with-alice-oswald/
>>>
>>> this is very striking, I think
>>>
>>> Max
>>>
Douglas Barbour
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https://eclecticruckus.wordpress.com/
Recent publications: (With Sheila E Murphy) Continuations & Continuations 2 (UofAPress).
Recording Dates (Rubicon Press).
Four or five couplets trying to dance
into Persia. Who dances in Persia now?
A magic carpet, a prayer mat, red.
A knocked off head of somebody on her broken knees.
Phyllis Webb
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