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Jack Foley
New member
Username: Foley
Post Number: 1
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 05, 2010 - 11:53 am: | 
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Glad to be back. |
Staff Christine Potter
Board Administrator
Username: Staff_christine_potter
Post Number: 39
Registered: 12-2009
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 05, 2010 - 03:15 pm: |
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Welcome home, Jack!
Chris
Christine Potter,
head moderator, The Gazebo
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Jack Foley
New member
Username: Foley
Post Number: 2
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 05, 2010 - 10:39 pm: |
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Thank you, Chris. Here is a short piece "on poetry"--just to get things started.
Since 1996, April has been designated as National Poetry Month. The Academy of American Poets announced that their goal was to “increase the visibility, presence, and accessibility of poetry in our culture.” That word “accessibility” is problematical when applied to poetry. Many people find poetry “inaccessible”—difficult to understand, at times perhaps infuriatingly “obscure,” full of things which some people may understand but which are opaque to many. Why can’t poets just say what’s on their mind? Gertrude Stein—no paragon of “accessibility”—gave this as an answer. She was lecturing at the University of Chicago and she was asked about her notorious line, “rose is a rose is a rose.” She replied,
"Now listen. Can’t you see that when the language was new—as it was with Chaucer and Homer—the poet could use the name of a thing and the thing was really there. He could say ‘O moon,’ ‘O sea,’ ‘O love,’ and the moon and the sea and love were really there. And can’t you see that after hundreds of years had gone by and thousands of poems had been written, he could call on those words and find that they were just wornout literary words. The excitingness of pure being had withdrawn from them; they were just rather stale literary words. Now the poet has to work in the excitingness of pure being; he has to get back that intensity into the language. We all know that it’s hard to write poetry in a late age; and we know that you have to put some strangeness, as something unexpected, into the structure of the sentence in order to bring back vitality to the noun. Now it’s not enough to be bizarre; the strangeness in the sentence structure has to come from the poetic gift, too. That’s why it’s doubly hard to be a poet in a late age. Now you all have seen hundreds of poems about roses and you know in your bones that the rose is not there. All those songs that sopranos sing as encores about ‘I have a garden! oh, what a garden!’ Now I don’t want to put too much emphasis on that line, because it’s just one line in a longer poem. But I notice that you all know it; you make fun of it, but you know it. Now listen! I’m no fool. I know that in daily life we don’t go around saying ‘…is a…is a…is a…’. Yes, I’m no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years."
That was Gertrude Stein on "obscurity." Now, there’s another problem we need to deal with as well. If we’re going to celebrate poetry, wouldn’t it be a good idea to tell people what poetry is? Surely everyone knows at least more or less what poetry is—but what is it exactly? What is its essence—what are those qualities we absolutely need to see if we’re going to call something a poem? There are “poetry sections” in book stores. What is in them? I have been writing poetry in one form or another since 1955, and I have written many articles and even books about poetry. You’d think I’d have at least a glimmer of what poetry is. But, to tell you the truth, I don’t. If we ask exactly what an automobile is, we can come up with some elements which might apply to any automobile—and without which you would have something other than an automobile. It has to move, for example. But poetry? The problem is that there have been a number of activities over the centuries and they have all been called “poetry.” But very often they are quite distant from one another. Does poetry have to rhyme? In some periods, yes, but in others no. Classical poetry didn’t rhyme. Can poetry be its diametrical opposite—prose? Yes. There exists a creature called the “prose poem.” Does a poem have to have some sort of “form” which can be reproduced by other people?—the form of a sonnet, for example. Yes, but not always. And people have produced 14-line poems which they have called “sonnets” but which have no regular meter and no rhyme—usually defining characteristics of sonnets. The fact is that poetry has no essence. It can be—almost—anything. But if it has no essence, it does have a history. It is a name that has been given to a number of highly disparate activities which are in some ways related but in others not. Rhyme can be one aspect of poetry—but it doesn’t apply to all forms of the art. Further: poetry is created for different reasons and purposes. There are poems which are self-expressive—this is what I feel—but there are also poems which have very little to do with self-expression. (For years people have been trying to figure out exactly who Shakespeare was by reading his poems and plays. Their efforts haven’t been particularly successful. It may be that Shakespeare’s poems and plays aren’t especially “self-expressive.”) Poetry can be used for idealistic purposes; it can be the conveyer of uplifting thoughts: “Life is real, life is earnest, / And the grave is not its goal,” wrote Longfellow. But it can also be immensely cynical, satirical, like the work of Alexander Pope or certain lines by T.S. Eliot. There have been critics who believed that poetry was essentially irony—saying something like the opposite of what you mean.
So what are we celebrating? An ancient art form with an immensely complicated history which cannot be reduced to any particular definition. The minute you define poetry, poetry slips away from the definition and tells you, “I’m not that because I’m this.” But to say this about poetry is also to say that poetry is free—not only free-floating but free. Any individual poem is a momentary definition of poetry, but the definition belongs only to that moment. The next moment, poetry will be something else. We poets are always trying to catch at the reins of Pegasus, which has its own kind of horse sense and will go wherever it wishes.
honor the fire
which holds us—
sweet
talk,
light
that
flashes—
in the east,
mind
in the west,
mind:
nowhere
is
home |
Staff Sherry OKeefe
Moderator
Username: Staff_sherry_okeefe
Post Number: 79
Registered: 12-2009
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 06, 2010 - 09:46 am: |
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stopping by to say hi jack! april became my favorite month two years ago. i'll be back to read this more thoroughly.
good to see this here!
best,
sherry
Sherry O'Keefe
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Jack Foley
New member
Username: Foley
Post Number: 3
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 06, 2010 - 10:49 am: |
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Thanks for the greeting, Sherry.
May April be the "favorite" rather than "the cruelest month," as Mr. Eliot wrote--perhaps "coolest" rather than "cruelest"!
Seeing my column back in action, a friend commented, "Ah, it's a grand day for the Irish."
I may go on to explain a bit more about "essence" vs. "history."
Jack |
Mike Harrell
New member
Username: Marrell
Post Number: 2
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 06, 2010 - 01:08 pm: |
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Gertrude Stein on "obscurity," and also, on "conjuring," that is, the ability to convey, with words, the essence of a thing--the red in the rose. As you quote her here:
"Now listen! I’m no fool. I know that in daily life we don’t go around saying ‘…is a…is a…is a…’. Yes, I’m no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years."
Yes to that kind of reach.
Thanks for the piece, Jack.
Enjoyed.
Mike |
Melanie L Huber
New member
Username: Melanie_l_huber
Post Number: 7
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 06, 2010 - 02:26 pm: |
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Thanks for sharing. Really enjoyed reading this today. Steins insights were interesting. And I Esp. liked this:
"The minute you define poetry, poetry slips away from the definition and tells you,
“I’m not that because I’m this.” But to say this about poetry is also to say that poetry is free—not only free-floating but free. Any individual poem is a momentary definition of poetry, but the definition belongs only to that moment. The next moment..."
Thanks |
Jack Foley
New member
Username: Foley
Post Number: 4
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 06, 2010 - 03:07 pm: |
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Thanks, Mike and Melanie. Very nice to read your comments.
I have some problems with the notion of "essence"--I'll try to explain that in a future column--but isn't that a wonderful statement by Gertrude Stein!
In a funny way, fuzzy definitions are preferable to "precise" ones: precise definitions leave out stuff--stuff that is relevant to the thing being defined but perhaps not in all instances. If the notion of "beat" ever had a precise definition, it would have been long dead as a movement; as it happened, no single definition ever worked, and people are still talking about it. |
Mike Harrell
New member
Username: Marrell
Post Number: 3
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 06, 2010 - 04:56 pm: |
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Man, when you say "notion of essence" it nearly floats away. "essence" is probably a little airy. I admire Stein's striving for a charged language, though, and the way her statement advances the idea. |
Melanie L Huber
New member
Username: Melanie_l_huber
Post Number: 8
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 06, 2010 - 06:37 pm: |
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I admire Stein a lot and her Tender Buttons collection is one that forced me to look at words in more ways than I cared to, in fact the minute I felt I had a handle on any one of her poems that's the minute they scooted along outside of my grasp. Yet while admiring her and enjoying her play with language and absolute fearlessness I tend to get...what? thinking of the word...frustrated? annoyed? Hmmm...jealous? I'm not sure, it seems she broke new ground and then bulldozed it, erected a new shrine, bulldozed that--and then blew up the bulldozer.
No one can write poetry now without becoming aware of her, and once you are aware of her how can you NOT be affected, do you know know you know what, what you know you know you know what I know you I mean??? what? |
Mike Harrell
New member
Username: Marrell
Post Number: 4
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 06, 2010 - 09:25 pm: |
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I don't argue that "essence" is immutable, or a monolithic truth. I use the term referring to Stein's conveyance of the vivid rose, flush with color by the unique arrangement of words. |
Mary-Marcia Casoly
New member
Username: Casoly
Post Number: 1
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Thursday, January 14, 2010 - 03:41 pm: |
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I am a fan of your writing Jack, and the quotes from Gertrude Stein I think excellent examples.
Does something happens when language or an idea attracts and yet seems inaccessible, obscure, other - a "vitality" comes knocking and knocking keeps knocking, and one day you open the door. And it seems to say "what took you so long?"
Some people are quite afraid of poetry; what is that they are afraid of? I wish that National Poetry Month celebrated the challenge of poetry.
Honor that "strange inexplicable unpredictable" fire. |
Jack Foley
New member
Username: Foley
Post Number: 27
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Thursday, January 14, 2010 - 04:00 pm: |
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No one does more of such "honoring" than you do, Mary-Marcia, with your wonderful work.
Thank you.
"When language or an idea attracts and yet seems inaccessible, obscure, other"--yes. It's a constant confrontation with something out there, not "me" (or "not yet me"). The poet as Hamlet looking out into the darkness, wondering "Who goes there?" And then, when you find out, wondering even more!
Welcome to The Alsop Review! |
Mike Lane
New member
Username: Mike_lane
Post Number: 28
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 09, 2010 - 12:56 pm: |
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Thanks for the thread Jack.
Mike |
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