[New-Poetry] Re: Prolific poetry

[David Graham]

I'd love to hear more on this thread, from more people.  A subject  
close to my heart at the moment.

The daily sonneteer is Ronald Wallace.  He's published a couple of  
books collecting them, if I recall rightly, one being *The Uses of  
Adversity* from Pittsburgh.  (Years ago he told me he was thinking of  
writing a book of 39 sestinas, a kind of super-sestina; but don't  
know what ever happened to that project.  He's certainly published  
some fine sestinas.)

Two things interest me about such daily practice, neither having to  
do with publishing or the problem of the obvious unevenness of  
quality that results.  My slogan has always been First Thought First  
Draft, and I see no conflict between the prolific & the well-crafted.

But as Jarrell suggested in his comment on Stevens, writing a lot,  
regularly, does seem to lubricate the gears.  I see a real difference  
between the best work of, say, Dylan Thomas, and the best of, say  
Roethke.  Perhaps I should say I hear a difference.  Neither could be  
accused of being a slacker, craftwise, but Thomas for all his  
brilliance lacks a certain fluency, to my ears.  His poems, even the  
best, are labored-over, stylized, and in sense static.  So too are  
Yeats's, so I'm not saything this is a flaw.  Roethke's way is much  
slipperier--not better, necessarily, but different.  I'm thinking of  
"The Lost Son" poems, mainly, and the "North American Sequence," less  
so his Yeatsean explorations.  It's not the only game in town, but I  
am interested that kind of fluency and even sprawl as one tool in the  
toolbox.

I am equally interested in another thing touched on by Jarrell.  Not  
only can prolific practice create fluency (what Jarrell calls  
"accustomed mastery"), but perhaps paradoxically it can do something  
entirely different, leading to what Jarrell calls "adaptations and  
elaborations and reversals of old ways, new ways, even."  In other  
words, it can lead *away* from "accustomed mastery" into wild  
experiment, shifts of stance, etc.

In my own practice, I find that, when writing a lot daily, the  
pressure on any single piece is greatly lessened.  Failure, which is  
always likely, is no big deal:  there's always tomorrow.  Or later  
today.  I feel much freer, accordingly, to try stupid things, give  
myself silly exercises, contradict myself, explore different tones  
and voices, and so forth.  Not worrying at all about finding or  
maintaining "my" voice, and not fretting at the moment of composition  
about whether my blurt will become a monument of unageing intellect-- 
well, this can be very liberating.  Or so it feels.


========================================
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 Oct 30, 2007, at 7:43 PM, AlMaginnes at aol.com wrote:

> Funny that this discussion comes up right after the obit of Jon  
> Anderson, a poet who quit writing for almost twenty years is  
> posted. For my own part, I've always written a lot and published a  
> fraction of that. I seem to be one of those writers who has to  
> write a lot of bad ones to get a few good ones. I've never tried to  
> write a poem a day or anything like that; I read some of Lehman's  
> output and it didn't strike me that he spent a significant portion  
> of any given day writing those poems. I do remember, some years  
> back, reading an essay by Robert or Ronald Wallace (I get them  
> confused) about making himself write a sonnet a day for a year. He  
> had some hard and fast rules--he had to write one a day even if he  
> wrote two or four the day before. It had to be a sonnet, not just  
> fourteen lines of something. It seemed like there were a couple of  
> other things as well. As I recall he published a book with some of  
> the best of these sonnets. Write that many sonnets and you might  
> end up thinking in sonnets. I will have to see if I can find that  
> book again.
>
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20071031/9700981c/attachment.html