Re: [New-Poetry] “What is your work about?”

[Anny Ballardini]

I'm a detached active agent as defined by Jean Baudrillard.

p.s.: that was a transatlantic flight Bob, wasn't it?
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Bob Grumman 
  To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &Views 
  Sent: Sunday, October 28, 2007 11:17 PM
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] “What is your work about?”




  JforJames at aol.com wrote: 
    http://www.gtweekly.com/10-25-07-/something-like-a-poem-4
    Something Like a Poem  | Print |   E-mail  
    Written by Dan Gerber     
    Wednesday, 24 October 2007  

    The most common and certainly the most difficult question I might be asked by a stranger on an airplane is, “What is your work about?” It’s a conundrum for any artist. And I suspect the one single quality that may peg one as an artist—as opposed to, say, a craftsman—may be the artist’s inability to form a satisfactory answer. 

    I could say it’s about the process of discovering what it’s about. And that would be honest. I could quote William Faulkner and say, “it’s about the human heart in conflict with itself.” And that would be honest too. 

    What my poems are about is

  I'd make that "What my poems are about is is."

  To expand, here are my preliminary thoughts about Gerber's question:

  What are my poems about?  I'd rather say what they are:

  Voyages into the workings of the English Language, and--often--past it, into mathematics
  and/or the explicitly visual..

  Mines whose explosions are intended to multiply those stepping on them vividly and
  pleasurably into Manywhere-at-Once.

  Attempts intensely to capture the moods conveyed by land, sea, sky, and what humans
  make of them.

  Puzzles whose solutions will feel both right and deeply rewarding to their solvers.

  What they are not:

  Sermons laying out how governments should function, and individuals act.

  Descriptions of the little things that happen in everybody's life intended to warm those
  encountering them into friendship with the poems' so-wonderfully-human author.

  --Bob G.
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