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the palate of available actions
For Xmas, K. got me the new issue of Ploughshares, which features Jorie Graham as guest poetry editor.
I've been slowly (over breakfasts) reading the poems she's selected. They are strange, and good, like much of her own poetry.
In her introduction to the issue, she sets down some of her thoughts about poetry in general, and it is worthy reading.
"I like ... to render the process of 'reading' as some version of 'being allowed and enabled by the craft of the poet to do the emotional and intellectual work the poem is asking me to do.' If there are images being used, for example—not just objects or pictures, but those mysterious chambers of deepening emotive resonance, those meaning-charged clusters that, if undertaken by the senses of the reader, do yield sensorial 'content'—for example—then I want to be made able, by the formal virtues of the poem, to undergo them. If I find myself unable to do the work the poet asks for, I can’t proceed with the poem, and it will remain private to the poet. The same applies to the whole rest of the palate of available actions in the poem: the architecture of rhetoric, the ideas, the musical modulation that invokes story, the turns of mind, the acoustic activity—how it generates its own chambers of echoing meaning—and so on. I love poems where I can do what the poet asks. Doing what I am asked to do is deeply different from interpreting what the poet means."
Six of the poems that Graham has written for Ploughshares, dating from 1979 to 1995, are linked at this archive. Labels: poetics, poetry_commentary |
Wednesday, February 06, 2002
11:11 AM
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