notes

Some stuff from the notebook:

Poetry things that bug me:

-- the idea that a poem does not exist until it is published -- and its existence is greater when published in a magazine like The New Yorker or Poetry

-- the idea that there are great poets

-- the idea that there are too many poets and too many poems

-- the anger at poets over their (a) not buying enough poetry / not subscribing to poetry magazines (especially the ones to which they send their poems), (b) teaching people to write poetry, thus creating more poets and more poems

-- the idea that more is worse, the best Collected Poems is the slimmest


I can see the seeming disconnect: there is a lot of poetry, there are a lot of people writing it, shouldn't there be at least as many buying it?

I'm not 100% convinced there aren't people buying poetry. After all, if there are ten zillion books of poems out there the same ten people haven't picked up all of them.

But I also resist the notion that market defines value.

Whether or not it was (is?) really true I like the idea that tribal people take for granted the fact that each of us is an artist, artist as a role not being divisible from basketmaker or dancer or hunter. I'm, I must admit to myself, insistent on originality, on novelty, experimentation. Tribal people, it seems to me, tend to be limited to traditions that make the variety of human experience relatively homogeneous.

Then again, as I like to note when reading lamentations over the discarding of poetic form (sonnet, iambs, whatever), English itself is a form.

I like also the idea that making poems is a spiritual activity. Like meditation. Or a form of meditation. I might say prayer. Though prayer has such a "gimme this, God" connotation that I hesitate before that comparison.