[New-Poetry] Collins on clarity

[David Graham]

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#
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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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