Roethke used to mumble:
"Jesus, you don't want to say THAT." And you didn't but
you hadn't yet become ruthless
enough to create. You still felt some moral obligation to
"reality" and "truth," and of course it
wasn't moral
obligation at all but fear of yourself and your inner life.
Poets who fail (and by fail I mean fail themselves and never
write a poem as good as they know they are
capable of) are often poets who fail to accept feelings of
personal worthlessness. They lack the self-criticism
necessary to perfect the poem. They resist the role of a wrong
thing in a right world and proclaim themselves
the right thing in a wrong world.... In a sense they are not
honest and lack the impulse (or fight it) to revise
and perfect.
-- Richard Hugo, from his book The Triggering Town
I came to appreciate how working within formal
constraints liberates you and gives depth to your poetry.
It gives wings to your work. Being able to write in a
disciplined way using traditional metrical structures can also
enable you to create your own poetic forms, to achieve
fluidity because you have a sense of underlying order.
-- Yehudit Heller
Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.
-- Adrian Mitchell
When I gave up writing poetry I was very sad, for I had devoted 15 years to the study of how the structures of poems carry meaning. But I was delighted to find that nonfiction prose can also carry meaning in its structures, can tolerate all sorts of figurative language, as well as alliteration and even rhyme. The range of rhythms in prose is larger and grander than it is in poetry, and it can handle discursive ideas and plain information as well as character and story. It can do everything. I felt as though I had switched from a single reed instrument to a full orchestra.
-- Annie Dillard
http://enfrancais.home.att.net
11/27/2008 02:20 PM
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