[New-Poetry] Prolific poetry

[Anny Ballardini]

You remind me of Rollo May's The courage to create.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: jforjames at aol.com 
  To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
  Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2007 11:03 PM
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Prolific poetry


  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


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


  Poetry Library:
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