[New-Poetry] Art of Finding, Linda Gregg's essay

[Bob Grumman]

Bob, I think you'll like it...it's partly advocating using our visual senses more fully,
    with deep scrutiny and a wide-open aperture. Something that a vizpo poet couldn't too strenously disagree with. 

  I haven't read the essay yet, so I won't comment more fully. I just wanted to respond to what Jim said.

  The only problem I have with this thesis is that it comes across as "fuzzy hippy talk" for lack of a better phrase-- its easy to agree with.  In fact agreement is ubiquitous.  I mean for heaven's sake what poet is going to disagree with this?  Its too general.  Of course we all advocate "using our visual senses more fully, with deep scrutiny and a wide-open aperture", and finding what is inside the poem!  Everyone is going to nod their head in reverent agreement and ignore the fact that it doesn't actually say much.  

  How many poets honestly sit down to write and think "Yo! I think I will write something today that doesn't deliver the content of the poem and while we're at it, I'll deliver it dead!    Muwwaaahh!"  And please don't tell me that this is what language poets aim to do-- they don't. Their content might be the nuances and music of language, but that is still content.  It might *seem* to you that a poet you dislike is doing that, but realistically speaking that probably isn't true.   

  The real issue is what *is* inside the poem-- and you really can only address that by looking at actual poems and taking them on their own terms.  How the poem succeeds or fails at its goal is never going to be summed up as just one thing.  There just isn't any crafty technique that is going to help you.  

  Back when I taught it was always a challenge to get my students to go beyond the subjective.  I really had to train them in the art of the "I" statement when critiquing a poem.  "This is very alive and beautiful.  There is really something inside this poem" doesn't actually say very much that is useful  because it begs the question "Yeah... and...this means what?"   "Alive" and "beautiful"  means one thing to one person and something completely different to another.  And "Oh, there is nothing real inside this!" wafted out without anything more substantial to back it up sounds to me like an easy way to dismiss something just because you don't particulary like or "get" it.  

  My two bits,

  Suzanne


  Haw, I think you may just written my blog entry for me, Suzanne.  I read the essay yesterday and found it to be just about nothing but gush.  I happen to disagree with a few things she says, but am willing to accept that her outlook on these is equal to mine (well, almost).  For instance, I think it's the objects we find inide our poems and how we treat them with craft that counts.  I also think craft is what gets our best objects into our poems.  I'm also a poem-as-art-object rather than a poem-as-instruction person.

  But where I think the essay next to worthless is its telling us to use our eyes but not really telling us how.  Gregg tells us about her childhood experience of Nature but doesn't seem to me to tell us explicitly how it helped make a poet of her.  Nowhere, from what I got from my first reading of her essay, does she say more than developing good poetic eyesight is as or more valuable than working on one's craft.  I suppose I can grant that she suggests ways to do this--by trying to see things from a slant different from the conventional.  I got this from her listing the three wrong ways her students tend to see objects.  But those three wrong ways all seem to me to reduce to connecting the wrong words to the objects they see rather than wrong seeing.

  Yikes, you got me going.  No brakes, so here's more.  She describes the student who "sees" objects as poetic things--for example, a sunset as "gorgeous" or "fiery-colored" (I'm going by mmeory so will be off, maybe by a lot, but getting the gist, I hope).  I say the problem here is verbal--due to lack of the craft to filter out cliche.  Later, she comends a student for writing of "a mirror reflecting nothing."  Why isn't that seeing the mirror poetically?  Then there's the student who Gregg says sees objects in too much detail.  Again, the student has a verbal problem--he can't find details to describe objects with anything but standard mundane details.  Then the third kind of student, who only sees sensationalistic objects.  This student, I would agree, has a problem with seeing--too limited a seeing.  Some lesson, so far: don't limit your seeing.

  Earlier Gregg claims that seeing similes rather than objects was a flaw.  I differ.  I see no point in using objects unless you can use them figuratively.  Or to set up a figure of speech, perferably a metaphor.  As I wrote that, I took it back.  Pure imagistic use of objects can be effective, too.  But metaphoric use is better.  

  Of course, being a poet interested in many more techniques than Gregg seems aware, I didn't like, but understood, the implicit assumption that standard fifties American poetry is all that any poet would be interested in making.

  My amplification of what Gregg seems incompetently (as essayist; as teacher, she is probably reasonably good) to say: learn what words and attitudes are now too dead to connect effectively to the objects in your poems; do this by reading a lot of poetry, and by shoving your poetry at others and getting their reactions.  Oh, and learn to recognize the archetypal depth I think Gregg is talking about but doesn't say she it, and keep after your poems until it seems to be in them somewhere.

  Banal lessons, but better than her essay's.  Her Academy of American Poets position paper, I should say (why, I confess, is one reason I'm not being very nice to it--but yow, how I wish someone would be as unnice to my blog babbles of what I post here, including this, but about all I get is agreement/disagreement).  

  I suspect I went out of agreement with you here and there, Suzanne, but I think we're in near-100% agreement about the essential ingushpidness of the Gregg essay.

  --Bob G.

   
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