[New-Poetry] Prolific poetry

[David Graham]

"Stevens's poetry makes one understand how valuable it can be for a  
poet to write a great deal.  Not too much of that great deal, ever,  
is good poetry; but out of quantity can come practice, naturalness,  
accustomed mastery, adaptations and elaborations and reversals of old  
ways, new ways, even--so that the poet can put into the poems, at the  
end of a lifetime, what the end of a lifetime brings him."

--Randall Jarrell.  "The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens."  The  
Third Book of Criticism.  Farrar, Straus & Giroux:  1965.
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One of the many ways to cut the deck of poetry, I guess:  poets like  
Stevens or Williams on the one hand, and Eliot or Bishop on the  
other.  Prolific and restrained; or, if you're being partisan about  
it, generous versus stingy or sprawling vs. meticulous.

Of course, probably no one wishes that Ginsberg, say, had written  
*more* than he did, and many have wished that he had heeded Jarrell's  
admonition in the second sentence above.  After all, writing a lot  
doesn't require publishing all of it.  Still, I've often thought that  
Ginsberg and O'Hara and Ashbery and Goldbarth or whomever *at their  
best* have something that Bishop, for all her greatness, does not.  
This does not make Bishop a lesser poet in my eyes, I hasten to add.   
But I think a different sensibility is often at work between the two  
temperamental extremes.

I've always tended toward the prolific end of the spectrum, myself,  
in writing though not in publishing.  This year I've embarked on a  
project pushing further in that direction, aiming to write at least  
one poem a day for a year.  Inspired by David Lehman, Robert Bly &  
others who have done so recently, I'm interested to see if anything  
feels different at the end of my year--will there be any more  
"naturalness, accustomed mastery, adaptations and elaborations and  
reversals of old ways, new ways, even"?

I'm almost five months into the process now, but haven't come to any  
conclusions yet.

When discussing drafts this summer, some of my poetry pals and I were  
fond of paraphrasing James Wright's prose poem "Honey."  Describing  
the life of his father-in-law, he concludes, "I do not say a good  
life.   I say a life."  Well, with my daily poems, I do not say good  
poems.  I say poems.

Anyone else ever committed to such a daily-poem project?  I've  
noticed any number of bloggers who seem to be doing something very  
much like this.



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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
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