Mike Snider's Formal Blog and Sonnetarium :
Poems, mostly metrical, and rants and raves on poetry and the po-biz.
Updated: 1/24/06; 10:05:33 PM.

 

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Saturday, January 10, 2004

  • Yesterday Jordan Davis passed 1000 poems in his attempt, even more quixotic than mine, to write a million poems.
  • Jilly Dybka has had an amazing week of workshops and readings. Jilly, I can't read Jorie Graham either, and I think there's good reason. Here's Adam Kirsch's final paragraph from a review of Swarm in The New Republic:
    Why, after all this, should one go to the trouble of reading Graham? Her answer is to turn the question around on the reader, asking, in effect, "How can you admit that you are unable to read these poems?" To read her is to come across the poet in the midst of an evidently profound deliberation, whose grammar and concepts we must deduce; and if we cannot or will not do so, then we risk missing out on the profundity, and it is our loss. But surely there is no important idea, metaphysical or epistemological, that is immune to the forms of art. To imply otherwise, to suggest that there are thoughts or feelings that are too big or too deep to be made meaningful or beautiful, is really to misunderstand the nature of poetry. The poet's work does not end with the opacity of the mind, it begins with it. As long as Jorie Graham asks her readers to fill in her blanks and solve for her x's, she has not realized, or even approached, poetry's greatest and truest possibilities.
  • For Ron Silliman, the poetic line exists in space, not in time. It's a curiously ahistorical and ascientific view and explains why he and I share so little in our thinking about poetry. He's wrong, of course.
  • There's been some noise (a lot, actually), starting here, about apparently negative reviews of Lorine Niedecker's Collected Works in the current Poetry. I haven't read the reviews, I don't know Meghan O'Rourke at all, and I've only read a little of Niedecker. That last is because what I have read seems accurately described by the sentences quoted from Alicia Stallings. I don't know Alicia personally, but she writes gorgeous and risky formal poetry and she is extremely generous with her time and expertise. Check out her tenure as moderator for the Musing on Mastery board at Eratosphere.
  • Several blogs have gone awfully quiet lately. I particularly miss Chris Lott's Ruminate, and I hope Kasey Mohammad won't be so busy he can't keep me in line.
  • I don't know Nada Gordon or Gary Sullivan except from their blogs, but I hope they won't mind if I wish them all the best for their life together.
  • Thanks to Laura Willey and Josh Corey, and especially to Chris Murray, for noticing my sonnet initiative.

I Forgot (CRS)

  • I have a particular fondness for Double Dactyls, and George Wallace has posted some here, here, and here.
  • Henry Gould is the poetry blogger I most depend on, and, as far as I know, he's the only one, besides me, who plays jug band music.

11:54:05 PM    comment: use html tags for formatting []  trackback []

I can no longer find the post, but some blogger, just before the holidays, noticed the following passage from Ted Hughes's introduction to Sylvia Plath's The Collected Poems:

To my knowledge, [Sylvia Plath] never scrapped any of her poetic efforts. With one or two exceptions, she brought every piece she worked on to some final form acceptable to her, rejecting at most the odd verse, or a false head or a false tail. Her attitude to her verse was artisan-like: if she couldn't get a table out of the material, she was quite happy to get a chair, or even a toy.

That is an extraordinary testament to her skill and to her seriousness as an artist. It makes me a little ashamed of having written about these daily sonnets, a few days ago, "[s]ome I'll make work later; some will change very little; some will be deservedly forgotten." They are necessarily written quickly and I see in them all sorts of infelicity, but come April Fools', I'll get to work on them.


10:50:30 PM    comment: use html tags for formatting []  trackback []

It's Hard To Cook For One

My neighbor brings me things I just can't eat—
Today some "goulash" more like glue than food,
A beany mash that smelled quite oddly sweet—
But mama taught me never to be rude.

I thanked him, took his gift, and shut the door,
Then trashed the stuff, which might have tasted fine,
And waited while I didn't eat before
I washed the bowl, which happened to be mine.

Yes, I take him food, too. I could believe
He likes my garlic-stuffed chicken served with rice
The way he claims, but that would be naive—
His mama also taught him to be nice.

Our little dance lets each of us pretend
We're thrifty, and we call each other "friend."


10:18:31 PM    comment: use html tags for formatting []  trackback []

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2006 Michael Snider.



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