What is a poem trying to do?

The Page gleans the quippable, quotable of poets and reviews. Recently:

Daisy Fried remarked in the NYT: “Leibowitz seems to think that poets deploy their poems primarily as evidence for biography.”

Heh. It’s my pet peeve — that search for the “real story” of the poet’s life, assuming verbatim non-fiction in poetry.

Alice Oswald at The Guardian said: “I think it’s often assumed that the role of poetry is to comfort, but for me, poetry is the great unsettler. It questions the established order of the mind. It is radical, by which I don’t mean that it is either leftwing or rightwing, but that it works at the roots of thinking. It goes lower than rhetoric, lower than conversation, lower than logic, right down to the very faint honest voice at the bottom of the skull.”

Something deeper than thought, an instinctual movement thru sound to rearrange perceptions, past and future. Now, that’s more like it.

Robert McCrum at the Guardian said, “45. Writing can’t be taught; better reading can.”

That implies that romantic essentialism that a writer just is. I don’t think so. Yes, better writing can be taught but given the best exemplars the dull mind will still notice only the similar to dullness within it. It’s an incremental movement always.

Thinking can be taught and better thinking can be taught but it progresses slowly. Insect who have shorter lives perhaps get up to speed faster on how to perceive and filter but humans in slo-mo infancy take decades to go the short distance over the longest routes.

P.S. Advent Book Blog has posted the book I recommended.

Related posts:

1. Why Not Preface a Poem with This Really Happened? When a poet prefaces a poem with “this really happened” a few things are in motion. The poet often breaks his or her flat tone pattern, or poet’s voice, and...
2. Poem Shuffler What ends up cheek by jowl is fascinating. Like books in a rummage sale, some book on the Grand Ole Opry ends up between a dummy’s guide to rock climbing...
3. Contriving, Deriving and Arriving at a Poem You can’t help but frame a scene in words or in art. Something is included. Something is left out. Whether that is a scene of order or disorder, narrative or...