[New-Poetry] Prolific poetry

Tue Oct 30 17:20:55 EST 2007

"The other question it brings up for me is whether writing is the best
source of poetry? "
Almost a chicken and egg issue.  The poem is not something written
until it starts to be written down, and then I suspect instant
transformations begin.

As for me, many many poems exist long before I get to the writing down
part and the changes then are minimal, or do not occur for some time.
At the same time, I revise them when they exist only in the mental
state and the latest version is the only one that exists until the
writing down stage - memory limitations?

As for one-a-day, poems like pills happen rarely for me and have done
so only by accident, such as the dialogue of daily poems with Halvard
Johnson that became Changing The Subject.

- Jim

On 10/30/07, jforjames at aol.com <jforjames at aol.com> wrote:
> David, I admit to being a bit suspect of poem-a-day type projects. But it's
> probably not that much
>  different from a novelist who tries to bang out a few pages each and every
> day. As long as it's about
>  the process and not the product, I can't say it's a bad thing. I think
> there are some benefits to keeping
>  the 'writing muscles' limber. And I'm not in favor of waiting around for
> the Muse to call.
>
>  I do sometimes think the mind is writing every day without one having to
> commit print to paper. That is:
>  it's mentally sketching out a few lines, forming protopoems, and then
> discarding most of them on the fly.
>
>  The other question it brings up for me is whether writing is the best
> source of poetry? In the end of course it is...
>  the poem must be written. But Stevens, who your quote brings up, was a
> famous walker and was said to
>  compose poems as he walked to and from work most days. I know you read a
> lot and surely that's a
>  important source of poetry as much as writing is for many of us. (And
> reading more than just poetry of course.)
>  But other activities, too. Maybe it's having tutoring. Maybe it's camping.
> Gardening. Sex. Swimming.
>  Folding laundry. Building a boat., etc. I think poets will find poems all
> around them and in all the things
>  they do and prehaps the least likely starting point for a poem is sitting
> in front of a keyboard and screen.
>  Though all it comes to that point eventually.
>
>  Then there is the tradition of the 'poetic journal'.
> http://bootstrapproductions-forthetimebeing.blogspot.com/
>  Being pretty much just a poet's journal. Writing out one's thoughts, maybe
> a quote here & there, recounting
>  the day's experiences, etc., and voila!, like magic, poems percolate now &
> again up through that matrix of text.
>  Maybe that as good as producing a single draft a day.
>  Finnegan
>
>
>  -----Original Message-----
>  From: David Graham <grahamd at ripon.edu>
>  To: NewPoetry &amp; Views <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
>  Sent: Tue, 30 Oct 2007 11:49 am
>  Subject: [New-Poetry] Prolific poetry
>
>
>
> "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.
> -------------------------------------
>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
>
>
> ========================================
> David Graham
> grahamd at ripon.edu
>
>
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>
>
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