Great poems are innocent of neither ideas nor technique. But poetry which becomes ideas or techniques has diluted to the danger point the process of poetry. As a poet advances in sophistication and technique, this danger dogs him.
—Josephine Jacobsen, The Instant of Knowing (The Library of Congress lecture, undated pamphlet)
Showing posts with label ideas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ideas. Show all posts
how does a poem mean
For WHAT DOES THE POEM MEAN? is too often a self-destroying approach to poetry. A more useful way of asking the question is HOW DOES A POEM MEAN? Why does it build itself into a form out of images, ideas, rhythms? How do these elements become the meaning? How are they inseparable from the meaning? As Yeats wrote:
body swayed to music, O quickening glance,
How shall I tell the dancer from the dance?
What the poem is, is inseparable from its own performance of itself.
—John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean? (Houghton Mifflin, 1960)
body swayed to music, O quickening glance,
How shall I tell the dancer from the dance?
What the poem is, is inseparable from its own performance of itself.
—John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean? (Houghton Mifflin, 1960)
not luxury
I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean—in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.
For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
—Audre Lorde, “Mapping,” Lofty Dogmas (U. of Arkansas Press, 2005), edited by Deborah Brown, Annie Finch and Maxim Kumin
For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
—Audre Lorde, “Mapping,” Lofty Dogmas (U. of Arkansas Press, 2005), edited by Deborah Brown, Annie Finch and Maxim Kumin
destiny of speech
Poetry is one of the destinies of speech. In trying to sharpen the awareness of language at the level of poems, we get the impression that we are touching the man whose speech is new in that it is not limited to expressing ideas or sensations, but tries to have a future. One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.
—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie (1969)
—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie (1969)
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