A Poetics (54 through 59)
54. Difficulty
There are many truths we don't want to learn, and that is because there are many truths we don't want to believe. One of these is that difficulty of production does not equal value. We want hard and diligent work to produce great poems, but sometimes that is exactly what it takes to produce an execrable poem. We want a poem dashed off as if a piece of automatic writing to be without merit, but sometimes those are the poems that capture something about the magic of being human and full of words. The truth is that the manner of production only matters to the poet. The poem is a result, not a process. What ends up existing is what ends up being, and that may be good or bad.
55. Pietics
Believing in one's own narrow poetics is an empty act of rigor. Poetry is not religion. It is not a set of rules to hold you in place and sinless. It is not a chastity belt or a tourniquet. The poetics of exclusion are poetics that avoid the terrors of inspiration for the safe comfort of the rut.
56. Project
Poetry is a project. Every poet is a set of potential poems, and it is the poet's project to find those poems and to save the good ones. Some poets examine a certain set of tropes or live by a certain set of rules to produce the poetry of their projects, and they must, for all poets have to be the poets they are and make the poems they must make, seriously and joyfully. Poetry is a project, and we project ourselves and values through this project.
57. Numbering
Part of organizing a project of poems is considering how they fit together and how they are held together by the number of them there are. Numbers are always significant in a set of my poems. The number might be 365 or 366 or 52 or 50 or 25 or 101, but the number helps organize the poems, gives them additional contextual meaning, and (and this is important) tells me when to stop making them. When reviewing a chapbook of poems of mine about thirty years after it was written, I discovered it had 17 poems, and I knew immediately why. It was to increase the uncomfortable weirdness of the poems by using such an unlikely prime number. These poems were numbered, and I noticed later that there was no poem numbered 13, which was easy to explain. In a life as confused as was that of the subject of those poems, all possible extra unluckiness had to be removed. But this left the book with 16 poems, which is not at all a prime, actually an even number, and, even more strangely, a square number. So the book of uneven prime numbers became a cubic ordered structure, undermining its own apparent message.
58. Size
Size matters. Some poems are hundreds of pages long, and that length is important to make the poems mean. Some poems are no longer than a single word, and that brevity is essential to their effects. To work with size is to work with the possibilities of poetry, which are most of the possibilities we have.
59. Living
Poetry = Living. We live for the word, for the experience of the word, for the word allowed to do what the word can do. We do this even though poetry cannot be a living. We do this out of love. We poets, so obsessed with words, seem incapable of love, but we love the words we use, the words others use, the words of the air, the words of the page, the words that make it possible for us to live.
ecr. l'inf.
There are many truths we don't want to learn, and that is because there are many truths we don't want to believe. One of these is that difficulty of production does not equal value. We want hard and diligent work to produce great poems, but sometimes that is exactly what it takes to produce an execrable poem. We want a poem dashed off as if a piece of automatic writing to be without merit, but sometimes those are the poems that capture something about the magic of being human and full of words. The truth is that the manner of production only matters to the poet. The poem is a result, not a process. What ends up existing is what ends up being, and that may be good or bad.
55. Pietics
Believing in one's own narrow poetics is an empty act of rigor. Poetry is not religion. It is not a set of rules to hold you in place and sinless. It is not a chastity belt or a tourniquet. The poetics of exclusion are poetics that avoid the terrors of inspiration for the safe comfort of the rut.
56. Project
Poetry is a project. Every poet is a set of potential poems, and it is the poet's project to find those poems and to save the good ones. Some poets examine a certain set of tropes or live by a certain set of rules to produce the poetry of their projects, and they must, for all poets have to be the poets they are and make the poems they must make, seriously and joyfully. Poetry is a project, and we project ourselves and values through this project.
57. Numbering
Part of organizing a project of poems is considering how they fit together and how they are held together by the number of them there are. Numbers are always significant in a set of my poems. The number might be 365 or 366 or 52 or 50 or 25 or 101, but the number helps organize the poems, gives them additional contextual meaning, and (and this is important) tells me when to stop making them. When reviewing a chapbook of poems of mine about thirty years after it was written, I discovered it had 17 poems, and I knew immediately why. It was to increase the uncomfortable weirdness of the poems by using such an unlikely prime number. These poems were numbered, and I noticed later that there was no poem numbered 13, which was easy to explain. In a life as confused as was that of the subject of those poems, all possible extra unluckiness had to be removed. But this left the book with 16 poems, which is not at all a prime, actually an even number, and, even more strangely, a square number. So the book of uneven prime numbers became a cubic ordered structure, undermining its own apparent message.
58. Size
Size matters. Some poems are hundreds of pages long, and that length is important to make the poems mean. Some poems are no longer than a single word, and that brevity is essential to their effects. To work with size is to work with the possibilities of poetry, which are most of the possibilities we have.
59. Living
Poetry = Living. We live for the word, for the experience of the word, for the word allowed to do what the word can do. We do this even though poetry cannot be a living. We do this out of love. We poets, so obsessed with words, seem incapable of love, but we love the words we use, the words others use, the words of the air, the words of the page, the words that make it possible for us to live.
ecr. l'inf.
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