[New-Poetry] Collins on clarity

[jforjames at aol.com]

David, I think Collins grants too many interviews. This clarity/accessibility thing is always a big part
of these informal conversations, but I'm not sure it's a very interesting topic. Collins success as a poet has nothing to do with his being clear or accessible. Hundreds of poets are as clear (if not clearer) in their poetry as Billy Collins. His humor and his offbeat takes on unexpected topics probably has more to do with his success than clarity. The Collins quote below makes him out be some kind of lone crusader in a land of intentionally obscure poets, and I think that's pretty bogus.

There may be a 'fear factor' among some who don't have anything worth saying. Some of them may make poems 
designed to be inpenetrable, and thus safe from scrutiny on a narrative, notional or psychological level.
That's probably a fairly small group of poets. 
 
Of course there are many reasons poetry may be unclear or obscure or difficult to parse. So it's simplistic to name yourself as brave for being clear and to imply that others are fearful and feigning/feinting to avoid the critical scrutiny that your crystalline poetry can stand up to. 
Finnegan 

-----Original Message-----
From: David Graham <grahamd at ripon.edu>
To: NewPoetry &amp; Views <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Wed, 12 Sep 2007 1:27 pm
Subject: [New-Poetry] Collins on clarity


Billy Collins, interviewed by Joel Whitney:



"I began to dare to be clear, because I think clarity is the real risk in poetry because you are exposed. You're out in the open field. You're actually saying things that are comprehensible, and it's easy to criticize something you can understand. . . . .



. . . by clarity I don't mean that we're always in kind of a simple area where everything is clear and comforting and understood. Clarity is certainly a way toward disorientation because if you don't start out—if the reader isn't grounded, if the reader is disoriented in the beginning of the poem, then the reader can't be led astray or disoriented later. So yes, I see the progress typical in some of my poems as starting with something simple and moving into something more demanding. This is certainly the pattern of weird poetry. Coleridge is an example; we start with someone sitting in a backyard, and we go off into these levels of airy speculation. Frost is a good example. We start by coming across a divided road in the woods, and we're talking a couple of lines later about decision-making and the road of life and the rest of it—I think I'm just following what is a common pattern of lyric poetry and, for that matter, it's a common pattern of songs. Singers know that you start kind of soft and you go out bigger."



Full interview:


http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19796?utm_source=poetsupdate_091107&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=content&utm_term=content_collins&utm_content=newsletter_link#

========================================

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

==========================================








= 


_______________________________________________
ew-Poetry mailing list
ew-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
ttp://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry


________________________________________________________________________
Email and AIM finally together. You've gotta check out free AOL Mail! - http://mail.aol.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20070912/31797478/attachment.html