Conversation and Poetry. Kay Ryan.

Home to Roost - Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More


In her comments yesterday, Brenda casually wondered here about the conversation and poetry, which led me to think about the whole issue once again. There are rumors of a whole "school" of thought about a kind of poetry called "ultra talk." I don't completely understand it, but I think I have enough of an inkling to launch this response.

About conversation and poetry, I guess I'm one of those bombastic old farts who think poetry chisels language, thought, emotion, and experience in ways that even the best conversation cannot accomplish. Sometimes prose has occasional passages that are "poetic," but that's hardly required of the prose writer. So I have to wonder why any poet would want or expect his "poetry" to sound like prose or conversation. If you want that, why not write fiction or memoir? Are they inferior genres?

For survival, I suppose we should preserve conversation; we should keep on talking—well, some people should cut back. Some should buy duct tape. There are many arenas in which we need to be willing to say A is not B; one of those is the poetry business, and this includes the fact that conversation is not poetry.

Yet "conversational poetry," as a category or description, makes perfect sense and is not inherently negative, as much of Frost—mostly the blank verse Frost—should prove, along with hundreds of skillfully wrought free verse poems by dozens of different poets. (Billy Collins, Tony Hoagland, Dorianne Laux, Thomas Lux, Sharon Olds, to name only a few). Of course, the skillful poets are the ones who put the lie to the label "free" in free verse, but that's another treatise.

Look at today’s poem, “Home to Roost,” by current U.S. poet laureate, Kay Ryan. Is conversation ever that terse, that mysterious? What conversation shows such economy of language? And doesn't economy translate to respect for language? Like money, we don’t throw it around. We make it count.

(Unless we’re high up at AIG or GM or Enron; apparently, they talk a lot, mostly in multisyllabic words, for they confuse words with money, so multi is always a good thing. At the top floors, they never say what they mean; that way, they can sneak off with the loot. So are they speaking poems? For those who think poetry is circumlocution, remember that every institution has a secret language. The question is, what is its intent? To deceive? That’s not poetry. It might be law and the corporate world, or even medicine, or the military, or the CIA, or educational jargon, even the jargon about poetry. But it’s not poetry. When good poetry gets dense, it wants us to feel full, not tricked and not broke).

So, back to Kay Ryan. Look at the layers of meaning, beginning with literal chickens, but suggesting and then demanding we notice larger darkness and craziness. This feels a little like Dickinson to me (again), but maybe that’s only because we’ve been talking about her recently.

Also, notice that Ryan does use rhyme, but it’s internal rhyme, not end rhyme. There’s music here; it’s spare, it’s tight, it’s tough, it’s not messing around. But it is music.

I get consternated—that’s my word; don’t touch it—when people want everything they say or do to have great meaning and beauty. It’s something like the art dealer who says, “Well, if you like it, it’s good.” Liar. Although we’ll never reach mathematical precision or universal agreement about what’s good in the arts, simply avoiding the . . . conversation . . . amounts to laziness or deception or cowardice. Our conversation won't be poetry, but would you say we have something better to talk about?

Home to Roost - Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More

Father Poem: Bob Hicok's "O my pa-pa"

O my pa-pa by Bob Hicok : Poetry Magazine [poem/magazine] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

Like Maurice Manning (Banjo52, Nov. 15), Bob Hicok is a relatively young poet who takes chances that would fail in lesser hands. There's a bit of wiseacre in his language and content--a tone that keeps many irony-loving poets too detached to trust. Brain castrates heart. I suspect that these poets are apparently so worried about sentimentality that they overcompensate and eviscerate their poems. Overly academic poets can do the same thing, yet I wouldn't be surprised if those two schools of poetry feel contempt for each other.

But Bob Hicok is not an excessively self-defended irony-robot. He keeps on being human and soulful, even as he relies on wit and irony in everything from subject matter to word choice to decisions about line breaks. Of the Hicok poems I've read, "O my pa-pa" is his greatest achievement, and it is simply a fine poem in any context.

You may have heard about writers' conferences or the writing workshop scene. The teacher, who is usually a writer-dignitary (with real or imagined celebrity),  guides less experienced writers as they sit in a circle and critique each other's work.

Naturally, the bad mom and the bad dad are frequent subjects. And why not? There is no shortage of bad moms and bad dads. However, beginning writers don't seem to realize that they need to bring something new to the table--a new kind of bad mom or bad dad, or at least a fresh perspective and invigorated language on a well-worn subject.

And now there's Hicok's strategy: why not turn the tables entirely? What if there were a workshop of dads writing about bad sons, or just disappointing sons, indifferent sons, self-centered sons, sons who broke their fathers' hearts, sons who maybe deserve to have critical poems written about them, even if the poems are bad. Bad dad, bad son, bad poem. Dumb males, distant males, longing males . . . . Writing Workshop, anyone?

O my pa-pa by Bob Hicok : Poetry Magazine [poem/magazine] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

Poem for a Day: "Keeping Things Whole" by Mark Strand

Field




















and things in fields






http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177001



One of the most youthful, most basic of our philosophical ponderings is, "Who am I?" For most of us, it probably remains relevant for a lifetime, though we might blush to admit it.

But maybe our most sophisticated add-on makes it just a bit less narcissistic: "What am I?" -- as if we can know. But we should want to; we should be Sisyphus rolling our rocks up that hill.

I don't know Mark Strand's poetry as well as I intend to, but I stumbled onto "Keeping Things Whole" a couple of years ago, and this or that cue keeps me coming back to it. The poem strikes me as simple and playful on the one hand, but as profound as subatomic particles on the other. It is as self-important as its conclusion, "I move to keep things whole." But it's also humble--literally self-effacing: "I am the absence" . . . . That is, absence of field. And who doesn't like a field? A field is an intuitively good thing unless added information convinces us this is one of those rare malevolent fields.

The other day (Dec. 9), in talking about Grace Paley's "Walking in the Woods," I mentioned the uses of white space in poems. In "Keeping Things Whole," notice the way Mark Strand's trail of words is much thinner than the white space surrounding it, as if the poem is a thing like its speaker, moving into and out of spaces in a mysterious, ineffable way. And the inked words are not loud or bellicose or imperialistic; they are not bombs, but small, soft-spoken shapes, wondering about themselves and space and matter, as they wind and sneak along.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177001

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Poem for a Day, Grace Paley, "Here"

For the Grace Paley poem, click on this link:

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/here-2/