Pickings and Choosings:
Recent Pronouncements on Poets and Poetry
Selected by Dennis O'Driscoll
Poetry Ireland Review
Issue 84
'Poetry is an act by which the relation of words to reality is renewed.'
— Yves Bonnefoy, Times Literary Supplement, 12 August 2005
'Every poem requires a new language.'
— Paul Hoover, American Poetry Review, March/April 2005'Language is not commensurate to the world. Something slips in the telling.'
— Carolyn Forché, Dublin Writers Festival, 16 June 2005'Poetry is only there to frame the silence. There is silence between each verse and silence at the end.'
— Alice Oswald, The Observer, 19 June 2005'A poem for me displaces silence the way your body displaces water.'
— Billy Collins, The Cortland Review, Spring 2005'Poetry is chiseled breath.'
— Jeffrey McDaniel, Here Comes Everybody, 17 May 2005'Poetry values the unknown, the real, the potential, and the silent – everything, that is, which has no value.'
— Paul Hoover, American Poetry Review, March/April 2005'In my book, poetry is a necessity of life, what they used to call nontaxable matter.'
— C D Wright, Cooling Time, 2005'Reading a bad poem is like having a bad dream: you can't / Ask for your money back.'
— Richard Jackson, The Georgia Review, Spring 2005'Poetry to me is lucidity, clarity, being clear about things that trouble you or puzzle you.'
— Brendan Kennelly, Ireland's Own, July 2005'When you first write a poem, you haven't traced the thought to its lair. You're only getting a bit of what's happening.'
— Rita Ann Higgins, The Irish Times, 11 June 2005'The poet has to wait longer and harder, with more exasperation, I think, than other writers, because the sense of the poem and the music have to come together in an apparently effortless whole.'
— C K Williams, Literary Imagination, Winter 2005'The greatest risk for any poet absorbed in the act of writing a poem is the loss of nerve. Many things can cause this, but chief among them remains convention, that ubiquitous goop that shows up in poems as the stock performance of emotion or the tidy notation of good sense.'
— Peter Campion, Poetry, June 2005'Poets always dry up... It demands a concentration that you are no longer able to give – a combination of concentration and energy.'
— Thom Gunn, posthumously-published interview, The Georgia Review, Spring 2005'If I had my time again... I'd arrive on the scene at the age of about 33. I feel like I've done all my apprenticeship in public.'
— Kathleen Jamie, The Irish Times, 15 June 2005'Unlike musicians, writers do not usually mature early. To write richly and well, they need to know something about the world and about ideas. And while students may profit from taking a creative writing class among their other courses, they need to learn about subjects like history, political science, and astronomy.'
— Timothy Steele, Contemporary Poetry Review, August 2005'Writers are readers who go karaoke. After years of hearing the voices of masters in the poems and stories we read, we begin, at first timidly, humming along; then singing along, mimicking the tunes and lyrics we most admire. Soon enough the voice we hear sounds like our own.'
— Thomas Lynch, The Independent, 5 August 2005'Quoting a poem to someone is like telling a joke: You might have an effect, but the act itself is a monologue, and it's clear that you're trying to impress your listeners, not listen to them.'
— David Kirby, St Petersburg Times, 10 July 2005'The poetry voice? It's sing-songy without being musical. It's incantatory without being hypnotic. It's slow, it's monotone, it's somewhat self-important and it's always slightly reverential. It's not unlike the voice of a clergyman who is doing the daily service on Radio 4 and wants to sound a bit like God without actually giving himself airs.'
— Miles Kington, The Independent, 8 March 2005'Even an otherwise undemanding poem by a poet today will be muddled up in the reading. The poet very often recites with a slight trailing up at the end of the otherwise randomly broken line, in a pompous, breathy seriousness that hardly befits the slightness of the poetry itself.'
— Ernest Hilbert, Contemporary Poetry Review, May 2005'The very best readings are pheromonal – when the room fills with the sweet subliminal scent of aroused communication.'
— Mario Petrucci, Write Words, 2005'By and large, audiences respond to performances, not to poems.'
— Donald Hall, American Poetry Review, March/April 2005'Writing for any audience is the wrong way to win one... Rather, a poet should be writing to an audience – one listener or many – the poet's own soul, or an ideal reader, or a nation.'
— A E Stallings, Poetry, April 2005'The word "communal" is treacherous when it comes to the enjoyment and appraisal of a work of poetry, in a way that it is not treacherous when used of a piece of orchestral music or a great religious or mural painting or a public sculpture.'
— Michael Schmidt, PN Review, May/June 2005'I have no collective feelings. No one will ever catch sight of me in a crowd.'
— Wislawa Szymborska, quoted in Parnassus, Vol. 28 Nos. 1 & 2'If there is an audience for poetry, it is an audience of privacy. Who isn't appalled to find someone else standing in the poetry section of a bookstore?'
— Dean Young, Poetry, April 2005'Whereas physics abstracts an experience in such a way that it holds for anybody, poetry can never have any other ambition than that it can hold for somebody... In real poetry there are no universal generalities... it is the subjective in the experience which must achieve a sort of objectivity.'
— Lars Gustafsson, Rotterdam Poetry Festival, 2005'I sometimes find the whole protocol of writing a poem strange and presumptuous. One is meant to speak for humankind but has, by definition, carved out a lonely space, a life that doesn't feel like anyone else's.'
— Glyn Maxwell, The Daily Telegraph, 20 August 2005'Readers like some puzzlement, some baroque, perhaps, and certainly some material that doesn't release all its savor at a first lick. Really, writers and readers alike, we work beyond our own intelligence; necessarily so. That's the raison d'être, the road to the trance which art exists to provide.'
— Les Murray, The Paris Review, Spring 2005'A poem creates pleasure through the impossibility of completely grasping it.'
— Paul Hoover, American Poetry Review, March/April 2005'Most people reading a poem (as in watching a TV ad) value resistance... Working out, using your own imagination to go deeper, is part of the joy. For then you have a stake in the meaning you find, in the relationships of rhythm and consonant, feeling and thought.'
— Ruth Padel, PN Review, May/June 2005'"I find poetry difficult", some people say. My response to this remark is: "Yes. And that is only one of the good things about it." Difficulty, after all, is magnetic, much desired: hence the video game, the crossword puzzle, golf. They are reliable, packaged forms of difficulty.'
— Robert Pinsky, The Washington Post, 31 July 2005
— Ben MacIntyre, The Times, 4 June 2005'Among poets themselves are some of the most aggressive people on the planet.'
— Blake Morrison, The Guardian, 11 June 2005'Like warfare, poetry can result from the collision between romance and reality...'
— Lt Gen William James Lennox, Jr, Poetry, April 2005'If you're a poet, you've earned the right to blow off whoever you want. There used to be dozens of cranks and scolds, but there aren't any anymore.'
— August Kleinzahler, New York Times, 3 August 2005'If there's one thing that ties good books of poetry together... it' s that they let us enter a private space in which time slows down and possibilities expand. In that space, we're allowed to be tentative, instead of being asked to sign on the line, answer the phone or pick up a weapon.'
— David Orr, The New York Times, 26 June 2005'Poetry's greatest task is... to foster a necessary privacy in which the imagination can flourish.'
— Dean Young, Poetry, April 2005'I'm against lying in life, in principle, in any other activity except poetry.'
— Charles Simic, The Irish Times, 23 July 2005'If you're not going to be honest as a writer, there's no point in starting.'
— Hugo Williams, The Guardian, 4 June 2005'Poetry can work as the highest form of talking cure, but you have to tell the absolute truth, so far as you can dredge that up. I'd always disapproved of the idea of poetry as therapy; but get sick enough and you'll shed any such snobberies! I said to the Black Dog: "You bastard, you make me cry, I'll make you sing...".'
— Les Murray, The Paris Review, Spring 2005'Among poets there are probably higher than average rates of clutch burnout, job turnover, rooting about, sleep apnea, noncompliance, nervous leg syndrome, depression, litigation, black clothing, and so forth, but this is where we live...'
— C D Wright, Cooling Time, 2005'One of the hardest things about being unwell is feeling disempowered and out of control. Writing poetry can make you feel in charge again.'
— Julia Darling, The Poetry Cure, 2005'Would you let a poet take your pulse or read your X-ray? Probably not, if you hoped to recover. While I'm still breathing I wouldn't even let one push my bath chair.'
— Rosemary Goring, The Herald, 20 June 2005'At its best, the lyric opens a door in the everyday and allows me to pass into the otherworld behind the taken-for-granted; this art is not therapeutic as such, yet it is an attempt... to heal the imagination.'
— John Burnside, Poetry Review, Summer 2005'... poetry's awareness of itself as a partially opaque medium that seems to involve a force beyond itself has much about it of what is thought of as the holy.'
— C K Williams, Literary Imagination, Winter 2005'We deal with poets and poetry, which transcends all communication, except divine intervention.'
— Michael Keohane, President of The Yeats Society, The Irish Times, 6 August 2005'Poetry is in some ways lordly or aristocratic: It gets bored more easily than prose, it likes to skip steps, and it is very interested in pleasure. The rectangular blocks of print embodying its young, middle-class nephew, the novel, seem too confining for poetry, which prefers speed and glamour.'
— Robert Pinsky, The Washington Post, 26 June 2005'Every evening and every weekend I wrote poetry for 15 years, no matter what kind of day I had in the office.'
— Dana Gioia, NorthJersey.com, 10 May 2005
— Robert Pinsky, American Poetry Review, May/June 2005'A poem has far more power to show up a critic than the other way round.'
— Ruth Padel, PN Review, May/June 2005'There is a point when the poem has lost its magical intimacy with you and become an external object. That's when you usually know whether it has failed or succeeded...'
— Les Murray, The Paris Review, Spring 2005'You keep working on it until you're tired of it, or lose interest – and that's how I know that a poem is finished.'
— Rita Ann Higgins, The Irish Times, 11 June 2005'Walking can animate the body and senses in a way conducive to poetry's wandering alertness, moving through things, looking around – purpose without system.'
— Robert Pinsky, American Poetry Review, May/June 2005'A poet is revealed less in his subject matter, however personal, than in his rhythms – just as a painter is most truly revealed in his brushstroke.'
— Adam Kirsch, The Wounded Surgeon, 2005'I'm tempted to say that translation is like tracing. Going over an original on onionskin paper.'
— Michael Hofmann, Ashes for Breakfast, 2005'Writing is so strange, especially writing poetry, because you're supposed to be sensitive and attuned, and yet also tough-skinned and able to accept all this criticism of your work and your life.'
— Nick Laird, The Sunday Telegraph, 24 July 2005'Poets, perhaps, have thinner skins to their souls, as well as sharper eyes.'
— Michael Viney, The Irish Times, 4 June 2005'The poet shouldn't be in the poem at all except as a lens or as ears.'
— Alice Oswald, The Observer, 19 June 2005'You need reality to make the imagination do interesting things, to renew itself. Take the reality out of the equation and you simply repeat yourself.'
— Charles Simic, The Irish Times, 23 July 2005'Surrealism didn't realise that the truest defamiliarisation is that of poetic form, the breaking up of prose rhythm, prose syntax, prose convention by devices such as the line, as meter and rhyme. It is a singing kind of defamiliarisation.'
— George Szirtes online, 15 June 2005'A poet without a strong libido almost inevitably belongs to the weaker category; such a poet can carry off a technical effect with a degree of flourish, but the poem does not embody the dominant emotive element in the life process.'
— Stanley Kunitz, The Wild Braid, 2005'Intercourse also means communication; words are a crucial part of lovemaking. That's why half the tradition of poetry consists of love poems.'
— John Poch, The Writer's Chronicle, May/Summer 2005'There is always an element of the erotic in a poem about death. In fact I would venture that all one's feelings about death are a kind of elegy for the erotic, just as all poems about age have that element.'
— Stanley Kunitz, The Wild Braid, 2005
Poetry Ireland Review
Issue 84
Editor: Peter Sirr
Assistant Editor: Paul Lenehan,
with Colleen Bazdarich and David Maybury
Copyright © Poetry Ireland, Ltd. 2005
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Poetry Daily / Amazon.com
Selected books available by Dennis O'Driscoll:
New & Selected Poems Paperback
Exemplary Damages — Paperback
Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams: Selected Prose Writings — Paperback