It is a misconception that poets should be able to be just poets. As poets we read, or at least should be reading, a lot. We analyze and critique other people's poems which makes our critical eye toward our own developing poems sharper-- scalpel sharp, "your mom wanting only the best for you so sometimes she's hard on you" sharp. Another thing that we do is write about the work that most influences and/or inspires us.
Alex Lemon's book Mosquito, winner of the 2006 Tin House New Voice contest is a triumph... though I still don't quite understand how section 2 moves the book along, maybe that's just my failing... they're beautiful poems nontheless.
But what was most striking to me about the book was the introduction written by Mark Doty. Of course, it's Mark Doty and wouldn't anyone want an introduction by him. However, the thing that was wonderful about it was that it was something that addressed everyone-- not just Alex's writing, not just poets in general-- everyone, calling into play the ways that we use language and the ways that we don't.
Here's a little piece of that:

"Physical pain," Elaine Scarry writes in The Body in Pain, her brilliant examination of the intersection of suffering, language, and power, "does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned."
How does pain erase speech? First, of course, because the one doing the hurting is too englobed in the experience of hurt to make any words: hit your thumb with a hammer and it's as if the bone-deep intensity of that experience hijacks all energy from the mind; nothing can be seen or felt but the throbbing, blinding "this-ness" of that experience. As if there were nothing in the world but ache.
Throbbing, blinding, ache: the relative paucity of the words themselves point to the second reason why pain eludes the saying. We don't have the vocabulary for it. English, which has an endless supply of terms for, say, getting drunk, offers the barest scraps to help us name the way we're ailing. Pain can be throbbing, stabbing, shooting, piercing, or burning, and that's about it. Is this because intoxication is primarily a social experience, whereas pain is the opposite, always experienced alone? Words exist for the realm of the shared. Our poverty of terms for pain may indicate that we've given up on creating a lexicon, understanding that the solitary, suffering subject remains solitary. When we are wordless, we tend to be world-less as well. What cannot be conveyed about the self and the body lodges stubbornly in either silence or "sounds and cries."
But poetry is unlike other language, and its difference from daily speech lies in part in its relationship to those wordless utterances. Poetry bases itself in the sheer expressive power of vowel and consonant; rhythmic, bodily sound-making; moan and exhalation; the outcry that shades into song. Stanley Kunitz says that his poems begin in sound, and "sense has to fight its way in." The music that lies beneath speech is a vehicle of feeling.
Perhaps it's this grounding in the physicality of language that gives poetry its courage to wrestle with the difficult, if not downright impossible, work of getting the barely sayable onto the page. Poetry's power exists in exact proportion to this attempt; the harder it tries to do what can't be done, the more beautiful and engaging its failure. Or perhaps better to say that its failure--the inability of words to be commensurate with the power of experience--begins to come out the other side, and somehow or other, through some feat of linguistic legerdemain, a poem is made that does what speech shouldn't be able to do. A miraculous poem approximates the character of subjectivity, how it is to be in the world.
~
Style, that amalgam of the found and the made, the improvised and the adapted, can be the meeting ground between self and world. A means of self-presentation is forged, and in doing so the contents of individual experience can be signaled, given shape. The pain of others--just like their joy or pleasure or wit or desire--can remain entirely invisible to us unless it is given utterance, but plainspoken language generally fails to carry much of a depth charge. Not long ago, at a university in the north of England, a reader asked me if I couldn't just come out and say things; did I need the appurtenances of metaphor, the fancy dress of linguistic performance? No matter that to state how I'm feeling or thinking might take me a sentence or three, and not necessitate the several books of poetry and prose that she had neatly stacked on the desk in front of her, their pages marked with colored Post-it notes.
No, the crucial thing was that I couldn't say "it," because when named directly, abstractly, "it" vanishes. The subjective world can't be rendered in a summation: "I nearly lost my life but now I am better," Alex Lemon might say, but so what? That statement might move us in conversation, but on the page it's empty. It is the made machinery of style that manages to replicate how it feels to be alive, and that's why we require it.


If you can, I highly recommend this book to anyone who has an hour to give to poetry.

it's the benadryl. definitely.

From Sharon Olds to Laura Bush

Dear Mrs. Bush,

I am writing to let you know why I am not able to accept your kind invitation to give a presentation at the National Book Festival on September 24, or to attend your dinner at the Library of Congress or the breakfast at the White House.

In one way, it's a very appealing invitation. The idea of speaking at a festival attended by 85,000 people is inspiring! The possibility of finding new readers is exciting for a poet in personal terms, and in terms of the desire that poetry serve its constituents--all of us who need the pleasure, and the inner and outer news, it delivers.

And the concept of a community of readers and writers has long been dear to my heart. As a professor of creative writing in the graduate school of a major university, I have had the chance to be a part of some magnificent outreach writing workshops in which our students have become teachers. Over the years, they have taught in a variety of settings: a women's prison, several New York City public high schools, an oncology ward for children. Our initial program, at a 900-bed state hospital for the severely physically challenged, has been running now for twenty years, creating along the way lasting friendships between young MFA candidates and their students--long-term residents at the hospital who, in their humor, courage and wisdom, become our teachers.

When you have witnessed someone nonspeaking and almost nonmoving spell out, with a toe, on a big plastic alphabet chart, letter by letter, his new poem, you have experienced, close up, the passion and essentialness of writing. When you have held up a small cardboard alphabet card for a writer who is completely nonspeaking and nonmoving (except for the eyes), and pointed first to the A, then the B, then C, then D, until you get to the first letter of the first word of the first line of the poem she has been composing in her head all week, and she lifts her eyes when that letter is touched to say yes, you feel with a fresh immediacy the human drive for creation, self-expression, accuracy, honesty and wit--and the importance of writing, which celebrates the value of each person's unique story and song.

So the prospect of a festival of books seemed wonderful to me. I thought of the opportunity to talk about how to start up an outreach program. I thought of the chance to sell some books, sign some books and meet some of the citizens of Washington, DC. I thought that I could try to find a way, even as your guest, with respect, to speak about my deep feeling that we should not have invaded Iraq, and to declare my belief that the wish to invade another culture and another country--with the resultant loss of life and limb for our brave soldiers, and for the noncombatants in their home terrain--did not come out of our democracy but was instead a decision made "at the top" and forced on the people by distorted language, and by untruths. I hoped to express the fear that we have begun to live in the shadows of tyranny and religious chauvinism--the opposites of the liberty, tolerance and diversity our nation aspires to.

I tried to see my way clear to attend the festival in order to bear witness--as an American who loves her country and its principles and its writing--against this undeclared and devastating war.

But I could not face the idea of breaking bread with you. I knew that if I sat down to eat with you, it would feel to me as if I were condoning what I see to be the wild, highhanded actions of the Bush Administration.

What kept coming to the fore of my mind was that I would be taking food from the hand of the First Lady who represents the Administration that unleashed this war and that wills its continuation, even to the extent of permitting "extraordinary rendition": flying people to other countries where they will be tortured for us.

So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.

Sincerely,
SHARON OLDS

but, does Laura Bush really read Sharon Olds? I mean, I don't think of Sharon's brand of so sexually centered writing as really tickling Laura's feathers, if you know what I mean. I think of what Laura Bush may like to read poetry-wise and I don't think of something as brash and up front as Sharon Olds.

Derrick Brown, a wonderful person and very talented poet, is in financial trouble due to medical bills. please visit his website, look around and buy something. if you can't afford that, send him a few bucks if you can, he's promised 3 poems out of his new book (which is due out on Valentines Day 2008) to anyone who makes a donation.

[link]

Derrick Brown, a wonderful person and very talented poet, is in financial trouble due to medical bills. please visit his website, look around and buy something. if you can't afford that, send him a few bucks if you can, he's promised 3 poems out of his new book (which is due out on Valentines Day 2008) to anyone who makes a donation.

[link]