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Tuesday, March 1, 2005 |
Anne Stevenson will be the keynote speaker at this year's West Chester University Poetry Conference. I didn't remember reading anything of hers (it turns out I had: "The Trouble with a Word like Formalism," in Annie Finch's After New Formalism), so I went to the St Mary's College library and checked out her Collected Poems 1955-1995 and a book of essays, Between the Iceberg and the Ship. The next day I ordered both.
One essay in particular, "The Way You Say the World Is What You Get," has come to mean a lot to me already — for one thing, she pays serious attention to Robert Graves and his engagement with the world, in poetry and life, in contrast to Wallace Stevens, and clearly loves both poets. If the creek don't rise, I'll post a response to that essay this weekend. Meanwhile, here's her poem of the same title:
The way you say the world is what you get.
What's more, you haven't time to change or choose.
The words swim out to pin you in their net
Before you guess you're in the TV set
Lit up and sizzling in unfriendly news.
The mind's machine—and you invented it—
Grinds out the familiar formulae you have to fit,
The ritual syllables you need to use
To charm the world and not be crushed by it.
This cluttered motorway, that screaming jet,
Those crouching skeletons whose eyes accuse,
O see and say them, make yourself forget
The world is vaster than the alphabet
and profligate, and meaner than the muse.
A bauble in the universe? Or shit?
Whichever way, you say the world you get.
Though what there is is always there to lose.
No crimson name redeems the poisoned rose;
The absolute's irrelevant. And yet…
8:23:09 PM 
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Today and much of last week Greg Perry has been posting about Richard Wilbur, and comparing his work to that of Weldon Kees. Greg likes Kees better; I'm in no real position to say, since I know only a few poems from Kees. But Wilbur is the poet I most often turn to these days. He has an essential joy in and for the world — without ignoring human evil or natural indifference — that sustains me in my blackest moods. I'll point again to David Mason's review of Wilbur's Collected Poems 1943 2001, which quotes the end of "For C.," a magnificent poem for Wilbur's wife:
We are denied, my love, their fine tristesse
And bittersweet regrets, and cannot share
The frequent vistas of their large despair,
Where love and all are swept to nothingness;
Still, there's a certain scope in that long love
Which constant spirits are the keepers of,
And which, though taken to be tame and staid,
Is a wild sostenuto of the heart,
A passion joined to courtesy and art
Which has the quality of something made,
Like a good fiddle, like the rose's scent,
Like a rose window or the firmament.
2:53:29 PM
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I've got Mark Woods' wonderful wood s lot in the wrong damned list, so I don't visit as often as I should. Today he's posted, among other good things, poetry from and links to Robert Lowell and Howard Nemerov.
1:59:49 PM
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In the unlikely event this is the only poetry blog you've visited for a week or so, you might not know about Tom Beckett's interview of Nick Piombino. Now you have no excuse — go read it.
12:45:59 PM
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Josh Corey quotes just one poem from Ilya Kaminsky, and now I have to go over my budget.
9:38:10 AM
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I like poems that fart and break dishes. My peeve with "experimental" poetry is that too often there's no one there to do the farting nor any dishes to break.
9:31:50 AM
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
2006 Michael Snider.
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