My CommonPlace

W. H. Auden once said: “In poetry you have a form looking for a subject/and a subject looking for a form./When they come together successfully you have a poem.” This reminds me of what I used to tell my students about creating forms that would do justice to their contents ….

Robert Frost had a wonderful way of talking about the language of poetry. He referred to it as “the speaking tone of voice, somehow entangled in the words and fastened to the page for the ear of the imagination.”

Geof Hewitt defines poetry as “any writing where the author, not the typesetter, decides where to end each line.” He makes it seem much easier than I thought it was….

Major Jackson, associate professor of English at the University of Vermont, has some interesting ideas about poetry. He says, “I’m attracted to the possibilities of the relationships between words. How they pun; how they illuminate each other; their etymological roots…. I value symmetry. I value sound. I value a certain kind of organic order….It’s a magical thing that happens when you hear two words that sound alike and you detect a relationship ….” In talking about poets, he says, “The best-case scenario is a poet who doesn’t define himself, but looks at poetry as a big room in which he can occupy himself at various times.” He goes on to talk about the virtues of formal poetry. For the formal poet, he says there is the benefit of “writing in a tradition and borrowing the accumulated power of that tradition…. The poet sees form and convention as generative. The blank page is just too daunting.”

I wonder what happened to my interest in poetry? Jackson reminds me that it’s still there somewhere ….