Reading Responses 2/13/10

1.

Chasing poems—“Bishop was famous for not rushing her poems into print, and for cobbling together her texts, She would arrive at an image here, happen on a phrase there, and patiently search for ways to bring her gatherings of sound, image, and idea into subject-visible poetic form” (pg 71).

This was so inspiring to me, and at the same time disheartening. I feel like I don’t have the time to let my poems develop; I crank them out as fast as I get the idea and then abandon them because I usually don’t like what the turn into. If I took more time (or HAD) more time to let my thoughts fully develop and maybe play a little more with my words, I think I would be more satisfied with my poetry.  I gave this advice to a student I was tutoring and I think I need to actually take it myself—I told her to spend at least 15-30 minutes per day on some certain work she was struggling with. I know (or…at least I think) I can carve out at least 15 minutes a day to sit down and just free write.  Another point made in this section: “many writers believe that poems are created line by line in a sequence”. All I have to say is….guilty. And that I actually did this recently (shame on me). The book says that learning poetry means “unlearning” some ideas we learned in high school. Long process—but I think I can learn a lot by chasing poems.

2.
  

Negations and Reversals—and my brain goes why? I am too much of a logical thinker sometimes, especially when it comes to writing poetry. I don’t like making things weird because I am one of those people who want everything about anything to make sense—so this is out of my comfort zone for sure, but I believe it’s a key to good poetry. Even I don’t have any desire to read the boring every day “roses are red” spiel.  The book says “Negating, simply put, offers a technique for radically re-conceptualizing one’s subjects” (73). It also says that negating helps a poet find their subject—which is so awesome.  After writing several pieces on something that is really interesting at the time can become boring. I find that all of my poems sound the same to me. I am definitely going to try the negating method when I’m searching for a new subject. However, I think for myself I may have to work backwards—with a reversal.  Like the example “I have no word for this” was totally transformed by changing it to “I have a word for this”. If I have some words on the paper, I can more easily redefine their meaning and logic than coming up with something unobvious from midair.