A quick note on yesterday's post before I hit the road back to Maryland: the mostly fruitless and sometimes dangerous lessons one can learn from reading Merwin, Shapiro, Olds, Wright, or Glück—even Collins—are that poems and poets require a cultivation of strangeness, or at least quirkiness, and that a poem, like the poet, is autonomous, with no responsibility to communicate outside a restricted artificial world. It's his carefully constructed personality, not his skill, that separates Merwin from McKuen, and two proofs are Merwin's dreadful translation of Dante and his worse Green Knight.
The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and certain other avant garde groups also realized this, and their solution was to retreat into a tiny, tidy formal world where personality could not matter. But we are still human beings who live in a real and imperfectly knowable world by communicating that imperfect knowledge. Poems must have referents outside the poem and outside the poet. Meter, and other traditional formal devices (traditional because effective over centuries and in wildly disparate cultures), allow a place for personality, for human difference, without allowing it to overwhelm our shared world.
10:29:05 AM 
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