This is what the poet Ruth Padel’s mother said after she was “dragged” to her first poetry reading. The truth is that many have to be “dragged” to poetry because of the technical issues with rhyme and rhythm or with the way ideas are compressed in poetry. To help … Read More
Category: poetry
“There is something missing in our definition, vision, of a human being: the need to make.”
Frank Bidart, who won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, explores this “need to make” in the twenty-part poem “Advice to the Players.” Yes, that’s right: twenty parts. He’s known for psychological complexity and paradoxical observations, and this poem provides both. For example, he writes, “Horrible is the fate … Read More
“I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak – to be company.”
“Without my voice, and spirit, I am dust, / This is not what I want, but what I must.”
In these memorable lines from Mike Bartlett’s play King Charles III, the lead character explains his decision to oppose a law the parliament has passed. He knows his actions will throw the modern British system of government into chaos. People will revolt, and tanks will roll into London. … Read More
“It should not simplify.”
Up and down and up again – the changes in the temperature this spring have caught me off balance more than once. Uncertain times call for poetry, I think, and for contemplating the purpose of poetry. Seamus Heaney’s book The Redress of Poetry shows how poetry should repair or … Read More
“Is the soul solid, like iron?”
The poet Mary Oliver continues: “Or, is it tender and breakable, like the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?” With these questions, Oliver opens the poem “Some Questions You Might Ask,” which has inspired artists, videographers, and hundreds of bloggers. During this Thanksgiving weekend, … Read More
“There is a great deal of poetry written and published today that turns its back (sometimes with apparent disdain) upon the reader.”
Who is poetry for? What is its purpose? If you like fist fights and barroom brawls, go ahead and ask poets and professors these questions. You’ll see two sides emerge: One will agree with “the noted American poet” who said “it is the responsibility of readers to educate themselves … Read More
“The secret of all art, also of poetry, is, thus, distance.”
Czeslaw Milosz, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, continues, “Thanks to distance the past preserved in our memory is purified and embellished.” We can consider the past “without our former passions” so we can find “details that had escaped our attention.” Rather than creating art “in the moment,” … Read More
“My call is the call of battle, I nourish active rebellion.”
That the poet Walt Whitman was a rebel who celebrated democracy, nature, love and friendship is well known. What isn’t well known is that Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian Serb who assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, felt inspired by Whitman. Let’s think about that. Could it be that poetry played a … Read More
“The world is too much with us.”
Two-hundred years ago, when William Wordsworth published the poem that begins with the line quoted above, critics were not impressed. In fact, they ridiculed him for using the words “of the common man” instead of using a scholar’s proper poetic diction. Wordsworth sparked a revolution. It took many years, … Read More
“To look closely with the attention of questioning changes everything.”
“It is,” Jane Hirshfield writes in this collection of essays about poetry, “if undertaken fully, revolutionary.” More stimulating than a triple-shot of espresso, these essays show what can happen when a great poet sets out to describe how poetry is primarily “an instrument of investigation and a mode of perception.” … Read More
“If we are not fragile, we don’t deserve the world.”
The poet Naomi Shihab Nye is an expert on how fragile the world can be. She is an Arab-American who grew up in Ferguson, Missouri and Palestine. Perhaps she has never taken “safety” for granted. She describes how knowing “how desolate the landscape can be” has heightened her appreciation … Read More
“We should expect no one will understand this.”
“I raise my chin and say nothing.”
This is the final line in the poem “When Are You Coming Back? I’m Getting Tired of Waiting” from a collection of poems about grieving titled The Widow’s House by Sharon Chmielarz. It is one example of how the poet has achieved a “mastery of tone.” Tone is a slippery … Read More
“Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end.”
Adrienne Rich was a revolutionary. As Margalit Fox wrote in the New York Times, Rich “accomplished in verse what Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, did in prose. In describing the stifling minutiae that had defined women’s lives for generations, both argued persuasively that women’s disenfranchisement at … Read More