[New-Poetry] Declaring your doubt

[David Graham]

On Keats, uncertainty, etc., here's a passage from a recent essay by  
David Kirby, the whole of which I also recommend:

"Indeed, part of a great poem will be its enduring mystery. Keats  
interrogates his urn mercilessly: Who are these figures depicted on  
you? Are they human or divine? Where are they going? What are they  
doing? He gets an answer—”‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’” Yet it’s  
only a partial answer, for, as the urn says, “‘that is all / Ye know  
on earth, and all ye need to know.’” In other words, shut up: I, the  
urn, will tell you earthlings what you know already, and the rest  
you’ll find out later, if at all.

There’s a stack of recent poetry books by my desk. Almost at random,  
they declare their doubt. In some cases, the titles themselves give  
away the author’s air of uncertainty: There’s Incomplete Knowledge by  
Jeffrey Harrison, as well as John Gallaher’s The Little Book of  
Guesses. “Yesterday for you / I wrote a poem so full / of lies it  
woke me”, writes Matthew Zapruder in The Pajamist, and the first line  
of Paisley Rekdal’s “The Invention of the Kaleidoscope” says simply,  
“I am going to fail.”

Yet certainty and doubt are two sides of the same coin, and each of  
these collections seems to begin in shadow just so it can work its  
way into the light. If there’s a single quality common to all good  
poems, it’s that each takes the reader on the full roller coaster  
ride of idea and emotion, up the peaks and down the valleys. It then  
drops the reader off at the starting point again, the same person  
still, though changed."
--David Kirby.  "Why, Poetry?"  The American Interest Online.  July/ 
August 2007.
http://the-american-interest.com/ai2/article.cfm?Id=300&MId=14





========================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu

Home Page:
http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/About%20Me.html

Poetry Library:
http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html
==========================================



On Jul 2, 2007, at 9:07 AM, jforjames at aol.com wrote:

> Jackson's quote is a good one...though it's like so many quotes  
> that have some "certainty" in their saying.
> He's framing the battle for poetry's soul as 'either/or' or 'zero  
> sum' matter. That poetry can live with unceartainty
> and indeterminancy should be pretty well established by now. It  
> seems to me that's much the fashion
> of poetry these days, particular post-avant poetry. Personally, I  
> wouldn't want to avoid a poetry strove,
> at times, for fixity and exactness. I think a poet is capable of  
> finding the stil-point amid the welter.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20070702/dcfb95b7/attachment.html