[Rose Novick]

Originally Posted by Max Goodman

So is your point about Williams, Rose. Thank you. What should I look for in his poems? The standard harping on "the thing itself" has never helped me much appreciate them.

Have you ever read the complete Spring and All? If it doesn't speak for itself to you I don't know that I have any secret key, because all I'd say is to repeat less beautifully what Williams says there...

But, in brief: Williams is (alongside, and differently from, Stevens) the great 20th century poet of the imagination. Spring and All is a great paean to and treatise on the imagination, an overflowing maximalist masterpiece.

That "maximalist" is important. Read the wheelbarrow poem out of context, and you'd think Williams is a minimalist. But in the context of Spring and All it's wholly different: a dense condensation and crystallization of numerous lines of force stretching into and out of it from the rest of the poem.

I never "got" Williams until I read Spring and All last September. But now it's among the 5-7 books I consider truly sacred.

[Roger Slater]

Of course the focus should be on writing (for those of us who write). I am certain that everyone here agrees with that proposition. However, that doesn't mean we cannot sometimes have discussions that do not involve our focus. Every single one of us often engages in activities and conversations that are not the absolute focus of our lives, but focusing on one thing does not require us not to notice or discuss other things. To say that we shouldn't discuss poetics because our focus as poets should only be on our own writing presents a false choice. Most of the poets I have admired also write about poetry and enjoy discussing it. A bit of thoughtfulness about one's craft may also help us better focus on the writing itself.

And Max, my main point was that poetry does not inevitably depend on a connectedness to nature, even if modern life has made us less connected. But I think the extent of our so-called disconnectedness has been exaggerated. Wordsworth thought our ties were severed two hundred years ago, but plenty of wonderful nature poetry has ensued. The city/country divide has long been a subject of poetry. Yes, I suppose we would be more "connected" to nature if we all slept in caves and had to club our dinner entrees to death before tearing them apart with our teeth and roasting them on a fire, but countless millions of us still visit parks and beaches on a regular basis, go bird watching, garden, sail, surf, meditate, jog, etc. I don't see sleeping on a mattress or having a roof over your head as a disconnect from nature.

But even if it were a disconnect, why would it be impossible to write a poem about lying in bed under a roof? Who decreed that poetry must always be about a connection to nature? Whoever it was, I guess, didn't have me on their mailing list.

[Quincy Lehr]

Walther is an archetypal TradCath Bozo. The Chapo guys (plus Amber A'Lee Frost) got to his essence HERE.

[W T Clark]

One of the reasons the opening statement to this thread is beneath my contempt is that Eliot's influence on modern verse has now filtered down to a very low base. Sharon Olds, and John Ashbery (to a lesser extent) exert as great if not greater influence on the types of poetry being published now. But the New Formalists, of course, don't read enough poetry to know that. Poetry is neither worse nor better than it ever was. We are not living through a "golden age" of poetry, nor is "poetry dead". It is certainly not on a life-support machine as some on this thread think. As Sturgeon's law makes out: if 90% of it is bad, what matter?! 90% of everything is trash.

[James Brancheau]

"But the New Formalists, of course, don't read enough poetry to know that." Hahaha, I fell off my chair reading that, Cameron. Yes, true. Wowza. To be fair, poetry has become too much of a niche culture generally. And more cross-pollination, and appreciation has to happen. I'm fv, but extremely sympathetic to formal verse. I like music, and there's not a poem I write that ignores that.

*And Sharon Olds is terrific.

*I think Sylvia Plath was shafted. Yes, Sylvia. She gets a certain designation. Read her again. Incredible technician.

[Sarah-Jane Crowson]

Oh Lordy, here too?

Well, for such a dead art-form, all I can say is that wherever I've tuned in on social media and in real life the last day or so has been full of poets debating this, some more eloquently than others, some verging on WWE-style brawls. Down the pub last night I thought one poet of more advanced years was going to have a heart-attack and we'd need to find the nearest defibrillator (which would have meant a five mile drive down dark lanes under the influence).

I'm with Neil Gaiman and Chris Riddell, I think. We just need to keep writing. I've lent my copy of Why Art Matters to yet another student (it's my fault, I push it into their hands, insistently) but here's a blurry link to one of my favourite images in the book:

https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/com...i/26646409.jpg

(Alt text - line drawing of female holding up a pen. text on image reads: Make Interesting Amazing Glorious Fantastic Mistakes. Break Rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make Good Art).

Sarah-Jane

[James Brancheau]

Withdrawn.

[Sarah-Jane Crowson]

Originally Posted by James Brancheau

That's kind of the problem, Sarah-- you pretty much don't have much to say about the conversation except to name drop and promote whatever you're doing now. I understand the need to promote copying and pasting deer horns on a woman in a wedding dress, with birds somewhere around, but there's time and place.

Sorry James, I didn't mean to offend or promote my work or name-drop (for the record, I don't know Chris Riddell or Neil Gaiman). I guess my overall point was, although I tried to put it across a bit more lightly, aligned with Michael Cantor's original thoughts.

And as an aside I was trying to imply that how can poetry be dead if all these people are debating its death everywhere.

Sarah-Jane

[Yves S L]

I read these "poetry is dead" essays as one person or group of people's describing their own particular (not universal) journey through poetry, and combined with the fact that being a poet is not part of my identity that creates defensive reactions(many, many intense interests), I can read these things without being defensive by trying to draw a history which justifies what I myself decide to write, or otherwise trying to diminish or ridicule the author, and am happy trying to tease out the patterns in the person's thought as they compare to my own.

It is interesting to discuss perspectives on what poetry is, because it widens the possible conscious choices one can make while writing poetry, especially if a perspective goes against the grain of what one likes to do or habitually does. The contemplation of one's own craft apart from doing it is a basic mental action in numerous disciplines. It is the meta-perspective which guides the doing.

Each perspective is not something for me to fight against or ridicule, but is more like a tool. If Eliot is like the end of a line of poetry, could I myself write poems to show the progression that leads to Eliot's conclusion? What would that even mean? What is my personal stance towards modern industrial civilization, and what are the poetic tools that might express that stance in relation to previous tools of earlier eras? How would one even investigate the question? How would one attempt to begin?

When it comes to connectedness with nature and effects on cognition vis-a-vis the foundations of literacy, I like to post the following suggestive quote:

"I don't have to start with really intelligent or cultured people to make trackers. In fact it happens the other way around. There was a young student from Washington who was having terrible reading comprehension scores and was doing really badly in public school. I took him under my wing and mentored him in the art of tracking. It turned on aspects of his personality, of his brain, and of his mind, so that when he finally went back for his reading comprehension and the SATs he scored very very well, and there was no tutoring in reading, there was no academic training, there was only tracking. It's the most interdisciplinary inter-sensory demanding task that a human brain can experience, and it's also the most beautiful. It turns on the human computer in a way that nothing else can." [https://www.newvillage.net/Journal/Issue3/3young2.html]

There is a hidden topic about nature, sensory awareness, the mind, and words, a topic which can be applied to the reading and writing of anything, but can be applied to poetry in particular. The topic goes all the way down to how words are first introduced in schools and how a person personally interprets words, goes all the way down to the differences between the mental patterns of a developing child in the country as contrasted with the differing mental patterns to a developing child in the town.

But, yeah, I will just leave it there, though there are numerous paths one can take from here and wind up back to ... what kind of poetry would someone with dampened sensory systems which are somewhat disconnected from their world, what kind of poetry would such a person write? Heck, how would such a person write generally? How would the disconnected mental patterns be displayed in words?

[Shaun J. Russell]

"Yawn" is right. I taught an Intro to Poetry course at OSU in the spring, and there were 37 students. Course reviews were full of students saying "I was always intimidated by poetry, but I now love it" -- paraphrasing, but that was the gist.

Teaching composition this past semester (i.e. a non-poetry course) I had a student choose to focus his semester-long writing project on Duffy's "Delilah." I didn't even mention poetry in the course -- he had simply come across Duffy's work in the past and liked it.

Poetry's not as ubiquitous as other art forms, but so long as lips can kiss, and eyes can see, it's not going to the grave.