[nyctom]

Well Greg, a few more for ye:

When a student wants to move from writing in iambs to experimenting with substitutions, what advice or writing exercises to you the student to do?

What do you think of free verse?

Who are your favorite poets?

What do you do when rewriting a piece, and you are hitting the proverbial point of diminishing returns (ie the rewrite is making it worse, draining the life out of the poem, etc)?


Thank you and happy holidaze:

Tom

[Greg Williamson]

Tom,

I'm afraid I don't have any general advice about substitutions except to make it sound good. We take it line by line. And I don't think I've ever given any exercises designed specifically with substitutions in mind (but now that you mention it...). My first poetry teacher, however, once brought in a poem full of substitutions and gave us about ten minutes to replace all the words but keep the rhythm exactly the same. Then we all read them aloud, and he would alert us to spots that departed from the original meter. And the "poems," being nonsense, were pretty funny.

Free verse? That's broad. I enjoy it at probably about the same ratio as expensive verse.

There are too many fabulous poets to try to start naming favorites, but one poet I sometimes mention because he doesn't seem to be read that much these days is L. E. Sissman.

When a poem is still fresh I can keep after it, but after it's been sitting for a few months I have a hard time getting back into it with whatever intensity I originally had. When I try at that point, I think I wind up making things worse as often as I make them better.

Greg

[nyctom]

Expensive verse, lol. I did have a good laugh at that.

Thanks for the answers. Interesting exercise. I may try it.

Enjoy the holiday.

Tom

[Tim Murphy]

No imitation, no parody, here's the first nonce stanza of an unpublished early Williamson poem:

Boggled, I muttered Wow!
as the destroyer sliced the rusty scow
where me and my best girl
nuzzled for a week.
I watched it sink and swirl,
thinking: “Is this the metaphor I seek?”

[jasonhuff]

who were your poetry teachers?

jason

[Greg Williamson]

Tim, I don't think that's me. I sure don't remember such a poem.

Jason, At Vanderbilt I had two workshops with Mark Jarman. Later I workshops with Wyatt Prunty, Peter Sacks, and Charles Martin. I also had a lot of literature classes, and have had the extreme good fortune of wonderfully charitable friends and mentors whose criticism and advice and literary knowledge has been invaluable.

[Roger Slater]

Leaving aside the "expensive verse" comment, do I correctly understand that you enjoy reading free verse as well as metrical verse? And, if so, what/whose free verse do you admire the most/least? Do you write both, and if not, why not? Do you think there's any truth to the charge that metrists often write reactionary or "old fashioned" poems (in diction and content) or that free versifiers often write undisciplined or self-indulgent poems? And finally, a more specific question: What do you think of the poetry of Jorie Graham, who obviously is not a metrist but I think also can't be accused of being lazy or undisciplined in her work?

[Alan Sullivan]

Roger, I think we've lost Greg now, as Tim has elected to cram two working professors into the Christmas break period. Maybe Dave will opine on Jorie Graham.

A.S.

[David Mason]

I'm sure Ms. Graham is intelligent and has some idea what she's doing, but I have yet to read a poem of hers that impressed or moved me. I re-read much of her work in consideration for an anthology lately. I found the early verse comprehensible but rather shallow and flaccid. The later work I've generally found either prosaic--it reads like fragmented philosophy--incompetent or enormously dull. Ted Kooser has written a mini-essay on one of her recent poems, faulting her for inaccuracy of observation. I have not studied the intellectual content of her work--I haven't lined up all of her quotations to see if they make sense--but that's because I'm not attracted by the surface of her poems. I'm not charmed or beguiled by the writing. Another rather prosaic poet who makes collages of ideas, Anne Carson, interests me a bit more than Jorie Graham does.
A few years ago an article about Graham appeared in the New Yorker, accompanied by a new poem that, to me, read like unintended self-parody. Adam Kirsch's review of her recent work in the New Republic a year or two ago is a must-read.

------------------

[Robert J. Clawson]

[quote]Originally posted by David Mason:

"Adam Kirsch's review of her recent work in the New Republic a year or two ago is a must-read."

If you can quickly be specific, that would be grand.

I'm reading in January with a delightfully witty poet who does "Renderings of Jorie Graham." She's Robyn Su Millerz, whose signature poem is, "Women, Take Back the Word, 'Cunt'"

I had the "pleasure" of introducing three poets, touring for their publishers, at the Concord Festival of Authors (which claims to have exceeded the audience of the Boston Globe's Literary Festival). They were Mark Doty, Maxine Kumin, and Jorie Graham (peddling "Swarm"). I'm a homework freak and read all of their work so that I could build intros that characterized them by using their lines. Doty and Kumin were no trouble. Graham proved difficult, because her earlier, accessible, work wasn't the stuff to light up an audience, and the later work baffled me (and I do study poetry). I found a few pieces that worked well enough for an intro, and she thanked me rather over-profoundly, then delivered what I'm kind to call a desultory performance, a reading that appeared unprepared, and bordered on what I'd have to call sloppy behavior, aloof beyond any notion that among the 200 people listening to her, there might have been a half dozen who cared.

She left before the book-signing, while Kumin, aging and physically broken these days, patiently signed books for a line of fifty people who looked as though they were waiting to take communion.

Graham is in a way a wonderment like George Bush: how do such people become exemplary? She believes in the oxymoron, "Celebrity Poet," and her belief has taken her to the promised land. Like the President of the United States, whose job is to SERVE his nation, she actually inspires fear in poets who dare to associate with her. I have heard her students call her a "mindfucker." She raves about their work, calls them in the wee hours, them drops them with no explanation, not even a postcard.

Sorry to be such a gossip, but I did a batch of serious research in order to do a simple little job, Master of Ceremonies. Her "ceremony" was insulting, enough to kill off another year of poets at the Concord Festival of Authors.

Bob