[Annie Finch]

Alicia, in an interview I saw recently, you said you felt lucky to have been freed by your education in Classics from pressure to write poetry that is "new" or "original" (I hope I'm paraphrasing accurately).

I'm curious as to how far you would take this position. Do you think there is an authentic role in poetry (either poetry in general, or your own poetry) for any kind of "newness" --whether timeliness, innovation, or progress, either aesthetic or thematic?

I'm looking forward to reading your answer and the thoughts of others on this question, which as you know has often been turned into a bone of contention as far as formalism is concerned.
--Annie

[A. E. Stallings]

Annie, thanks for the question.

Well, in a sense there is nothing new under the sun--in fact, all of what I am going to say in answer has been said elsewhere, by others (as T.S. Eliot, Hollander, etc.)!

First, I think it is important to differentiate newness from novelty. Novelty wears off awful fast. It's a one-trick pony.

But I do believe in freshness, in regeneration--newness in that sense. And certainly there are changes or developments in arts. Though I don't believe that change equals improvement. There have been a lot of wonderful, great, interesting, different, sophisticated poems since Homer. But none is greater.

The radical has to have deep roots (if you pardon the pun). Originality springs from deep sources (more puns). Traditionally, poets who have been original have gone back to their poetic grandparents (or great-grandparents), if you will, rather than their immediate poetic parents--as Keats to Spenser.

It's not that I don't believe in originality, per se, it is just that I probably define it differently from how most folks use it. Catullus is in many ways an original and very modern sounding voice. But he is up to his eyeballs in polished Hellenistic tropes. Indeed several of his poems are actually translations. Heis bringing in some meters that might be newish to Latin, but they aren't new in Greek. They are very, very old even by the time he gets hold of them.

It is, for instance, even an ancient trope to say that I am doing something for the first time in this language! Great poets are steeped in traditions. They may use them in exciting new ways--that is true newness, true originality--but that is because they are so well-versed in the traditions they are transforming. Take Virgil--the Eclogues are fundamentally modeled on Theocritus; the Georgics on the Works and Days; the Aeneid on Homer, etc. The Inferno is largely modeled on the Aeneid. Etc.

But mainly, if you try too hard to be original and new, you will probably come up with something fairly superficial and transient, and easy to parody or copy. (And probably someone has been there before you, anyway.) Simply by being oneself--a unique human being with unique experiences--you are going to write things that no one else would write in exactly that way. I actually think I first saw that in C.S. Lewis somewheres as a very young poet, and remember that it came as a big relief to me.

The arts-as-evolutionary-progress model puts a lot of pressure on there being some sort of direction for art, so that one is either ahead of or with or behind one's time. I think this can be damaging for a young artist ambitious to make his or her mark. Instead, one should simply try to do the best one can--to write the best poems one can. To write the sort of poems one likes to read rather than the sort of poems that will help one's career. That is not to say that I don't believe in ambition. I do. And I think most contemporary poetry suffers from a lack of it. But that ambition should simply be to write great poetry. Great poetry will be original in its way--it will not be EXACTLY like anything that went before. But it will be richly influenced by what went before.

My poems--or anyone's--are original because they come from me, and from the particular stew of influences that I bring with me.

But I do think you have to have that rich stew of influences--or origins--to be original.

(A long disorganized rant full of self-contradictions, but there it is.)

[Roger Slater]

I think there's a difference between "new" and "original." Of course, as Alicia said (more or less), any poem that any of us may write is "original" in the sense that no one else could have written that particular poem. But it may not be the least bit "new" in the sense of poetic tradition and technique, e.g., it might be just another Shakespearean sonnet in iambic pentameter promising that the poet's lover will live forever in his verses, etc. And, I think, a poet can be "great" by merely being original and writing brilliantly within received traditions. Though some poets bend and "advance" tradition through bold and successful experiments --e.g., Whitman, Hopkins-- most just seem to "make it new" through their own individual voice and stylistic command.

[Tom Jardine]

Alicia,

Your answer is a wonderful answer, and I think
you might want to make an effort to save what
you are saying for lectures, etc.

I'd like to add a question/s.

Apart from form, how do you read the development
of subject through the classics to today? When
all the meter, the rhyme, the poetics, and apply
the question, "What is the poem about?" —— have
you noticed any, for lack of a better word,
'progression?'


Have subject matters changed, progressed, stayed
the same, (apart from current events in any
poet's time?)

Has science and knowledge made changes to the
approach of a poet to their poetry? This is
related to the 'original or new' question.
Have psychological studies influenced poetry?

Has awareness increased through your readings
of the classics, or is it the same? Could you
have a conversation with any of the classic poets,
and could they understand your approach to poetry
that you have now in todays world?

TJ

[Tim Murphy]

I've always agreed with Pound's "Make it new." Of course as he knew well, that required immersing yourself in the old. I also like Alicia's bit about our grandfathers and great-grandfathers. Ransom was Warren's teacher, and Warren, mine. But my verse is much more like Ransom's than Warren's. And my really heavy influences, Hardy, Yeats, and Frost, were born 75 to 111 years before me. I try to make it new by writing about my rural existence in short lines, short lines I learned to write through study of those three afore-mentioned masters.

[Tom Jardine]

"Do you think there is an authentic role in poetry (either poetry in general, or your own poetry) for any kind of "newness" --whether timeliness, innovation, or progress, either aesthetic or thematic?

I'm looking forward to reading your answer and the thoughts of others on this question, which as you know has often been turned into a bone of contention as far as formalism is concerned."

Annie, if I understand the question, is there a role
for 'newness'? I say yes of course, in each category,
timeliness, innovation, and progress in aesthetic and
thematic realms. Also, is it possible to add to the question
originality? Of course. Adding, as far as formalism
is concerned, there is the attitude, if I read the question
right, that since rhyme and meter has been done, new writers
want to throw it out and be "new"! and not use meter and rhyme. Half the argument, I think, is that in order to
proceed, a poet needs to understand the past, which is
the case in all the arts, and to be able to utilize the forms of the past.
Elsewhere I have said that a poet is a master of words,
and can write in any fashion they put their minds to,
free, formal, whatever, prose, etc. The discussion is not
really form at all, but awareness, as I call it. Awareness
comes first, then poetry. First the thought, then the words.

What counts is the integrity of expression, in any form.
What counts is whether the person has anything to say.
The medium is not the message. What does the poem say?
The essence of the individual will come through in any form.
Look at the thoughts, if the thoughts are false, the form will be false as well.

I read Alicia's poetry as formal, but in no way do I read
it as 'copying' or even deferring anything from or to the past. Look close, and she's doing some pretty fancy footwork there in her poems. I don't know classics, but
Alicia has a few with cutting edge —— she does some things I can't find anywhere else in English —— technical feats not yet termed in prosody books. She picks up formal and takes it further. And she says things. It is the mind that is the exception and not the type of forms.

Poets are born. Annie, if anyone has a bone of contention
about "forms" of poetry, then "poetry" is not their interest
in life. Form is about 1% of 1% of poetry, and the rest is
creativity. All art is a sham, what really matters is the artist. (famous quote by some artist, Pablo somebody)

(Just to drag myself into the picture, I will be soon, next week, be posting a poem I have been working on which starts
out as prose, moves to prose poem, then free verse, then
language poetry, then shrieking ballistic, then high lyrical verse, all in the same poem. Of course, the idea is to make it work. The danger in this is that opinions may lacerate the poem for not being serious, but we know what happens to those who take themselves too seriously — they defect!)

Gotta go.

TJ

[Annie Finch]

Alicia, I think that's a wonderful answer (and very coherent). I think you're saying that your education in Classics freed you to look for originality in new places--freed you to define originality in a way that didn't depend on novelty. That's a good illumination of your postion, and one I agree with completely, having myself turned to great-grandparents and even earlier poetic ancestors with the same goal.

As you say, and Tim says, and Eliot said, the only way we can make really new traditions is by returning to the past in new ways. Postmodern art has shown us that if it has shown us anything.

I thnk it's fascinating how many of the great poets were innovative in terms of their materials--Dickinson, Wordsworth, Milton, Spenser, and Keats, as well as the more obvious examples like Hopkins, made significant technical innovations at the same time they were doing everything else they do in their work. Of course, there are plenty of non-great poets who made technical innovations as well--Bridges, Lanier--and, as someone said in this thread, plenty of great poets who did not innovate in any describable way, but simply were themselves. So again, there seems to be no discernible principle in common.

I'm interested in your response, as a classicist, to Tom's question about changes in poetry thematically over the centuries. Tom seems to be implying that the themes may have changed more than the forms have, and seems to me that could be right: Graves' remark that there are only three subjects for poetry notwithstanding (love, death, and the changing of the seasons), it seems that the take on those things has altered quite a bit over the centuries. As you say, progress in poetry is a nonsensical idea in the sense that no-one has "improved on" Homer, and yet there are as many Homeric themes that are outdated today as there are themes that are still relevant and vital. He was of his own time, completely, at the same time that he was preserving traditions that long predated him. And this does not detract from his greatness.

[Len Krisak]

Which Homeric themes are outdated?

[Tim Murphy]

Which Homeric themes indeed? As proprietor here, I get to post my own poems when I think they contribute to a discussion. From Deed of Gift:

The Gift of Hera

....for Dick Davis

In an unbroken line
the heirs of Herakles
harvest their golden trees
and splice the fruitful vine.

Today I play my part.
Paring an apple graft,
I hone an ancient craft
half science and half art.

With an impartial knife
I notch and interlock
host wood and scion stock,
marrying them for life

just as I marry rhymes
and rhythms into lines,
borrowing my designs
from other minds and times.

But where would Virgil be
had Homer not retold
a tale already old
learned at his father’s knee?

[A. E. Stallings]

Thanks for quoting the Davis!

Well, I think it IS fair to say that there are some Homeric themes that Moderns, or even Greeks of the classical period, would not be able to enter into fully. Surely it would be strange if it were otherwise. (As Achilles' great and grand and glorious sense of agrievement for his honor, or the sacrificing of slaves at funeral games, or the fact that only aristocratic characters are of any importance whatsoever, or the blood bath--including the stringing up of the housemaids who colluded with the suitors--at the end of the Odyssey that is actually part of the "happy ending", the manliness of weeping, etc.) We are--of course--a great distance culturally. And each era has its own preference for the Iliad or the Odyssey--one that reflects something of its own values. We are currently very much in an era that favors the Odyssey.

And yet, the differences hardly seems to matter--they seem almost superficial. It isn't the differences that strike us--we take them for granted--it is the things that are unchanging--universal but particular. (As Astyanax shrinking in fright from his father's horse-hair-crested helmet, or the effect Helen has when she walks past a knot of yammering old men, or the last tail-wag of Argos.) The humanity of both poems is so completely and convincingly portrayed that there does not seem to be any degree of separation at all. The characters seem absolutely real, and the events feel like they are happening before our eyes. Anyway, Homer needs no blurb from me!