Thursday, October 14, 2010
Pedagogy Post Week 10
I've been considering a question that Dr. Davidson raised during our last class. Why is it that we have a division between those whose writing/drafting etc resembles some stretching Ginsberg ramble, or something out of Whitman? Why is it that others craft poems with very curt and compact stanzas resembling William Carlos Williams? What does this mean in terms of a draft as a whole? I have a tendency to align with the latter camp. I would speculate that this stems partly from the fact that very early on in my poetry studies I uncounted WCW's "The Red Wheelbarrow." I was, and still am astounded that such minuscule works are capable of bearing such a hefty amount of weight, as it were. This isn't to say that approach adopted in "Howl" is less valid, but I do think that it naturally carries this weight easier, and perhaps with a bit of a veil of sorts given its staggering length. It's my impression that poem's such as Williams' must carry this weight "raw" and "openly". I hope this idea makes sense. Surprisingly though, in high school years before I knew the first thing about poetry, I found myself favoring very tight and controlled pieces when I would dabble in what I thought was poetry at the time. Is this distinction something innate in every student of poetry? Is it a learned practice? What role might my early exposure to haiku play in all of this?
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I wonder if it has something to do with the point of view of the individual writing.
ReplyDeleteI am not a careful talker from my point of view words spill easily in all directions.
Some writers who are more guarded in what may be equally guarded in what they say.
i admire those who can do both. Write in a concise manner and speak with great clarity of thought, but it still disturbs my point of view, this silence.
it is not at all surprising that the Haiku is a poem particularly aligned with eastern thought, where silence in conversation and long contemplation before speaking is valued more that in western cultures.
This may be something that forms much earlier than we can imagine.
I agree that William's poem is amazing in all that it has to say, as a sprawling writer I chose the wheelbarrow as my improve for the week. it was very difficult to stop at that and not say more.
I too began with a great deal of tightness and what I thought was control. I was drawn to the musical aspects of poems, the "difficult thing made to look easy," the forms, the math, the precision. Whatever first attracts you, however--for Jeff it's this wild abandon and the freedom to throw everything into the mix--we all have to learn to counter our natural tendencies, to grow as writers who are capable of deploying a range of methods and testing out myriad possibilities. In other words, you have to be able to let the writing be rangy and wild, but you also have to be possessed of the fortitude to edit closely. Frost said something like "Anyone can write a good line. It takes a poet," he continues, "to know when to axe one."
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