I really like the instruction to write out the poem by hand. There is something divorced from your own presence, and presentness in this immediate moment, in the mechanics of how type appears on the screen. Handwiritng is some sort of mind map, I assume the act which takes place with the dominant hand sets up different neural pathways from the very repetitive act of typing.
WRITING a poem down feels more like speaking a poem aloud, somehow the poem seems as if it will enter into the physical life of the reader, be bound in with the muscular movements needed to form particular letters, whereas typing is just a matter of shifting the fingers across the keys, otherwise the act is the same whichever combination of letters is produced.
I love your description of writing. I have house company currently, and was just talking about copying poems to one of our guests—and trying to explain the sensation of writing a poem, making it your own. You said it in just the right words. I was only so-so on this book. I really liked the parts where Pinsky talked about poetry and reading poetry. I too started a personal poetry anthology because of this book. What I was disappointed in was that most of the book was poems without comment or analysis.
I wanted more of his prose sections and less of his poetry selection. I liked the idea of it. And maybe use my old high school Esterbrook pen, too. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Skip to content. Home About Subscribe. Bookmark the permalink. March 12, at pm. Stefanie says:.
Back in the days before and just after print publishing was invented, it seemed that every reader of poetry was an anthologist, the compiler of a fat commonplace book and folders stuffed with hand-copied verses. Pinsky gets this: practically the first thing he tells the reader to do is to get busy picking their own favorite blooms. A master teacher invites his pupils to attend to objects that embody irresolvable tensions. Then he stands by—near enough to query, not close enough to crowd.
Throughout Singing School we see Pinsky the master teacher at work. The lineaments of satisfied desire. What is it women in men require? The better thing is to memorize the poem so that you might abide with its tensions and they in you. But a master teacher can use the energy bound in such tensions to hold his curriculum together, as Pinsky does. Here he is playing Janus at the opening bell: There are no rules. Or, you can modify that rule by observing that each work of art generates its own unique rules….
In sentence one Pinsky is forward-looking, saying what would-be poets presently most want to hear, something that might be true for them when they have studied the art for a time.
But bedrock is something you build on or push off from. The implication that there are at least as many rules as there are beautiful poems points to an abiding mystery of poetic composition. For Pinsky, when a poet rises to an occasion, he transforms the ordinary and conventional into the counterfactual, the vivid, the unforgettable.
The same trick sometimes works for a best man, too. When a poet conjures the opposition of the odds or gods he speaks metonymically of the difficulty of finding words which rise from dead language into permanent life.
Did I say AWP? I meant the eighth circle of Hell, where Dante makes three poets literarily present Bertran de Born, the beheaded shade; Dante, himself, as speaker; and Virgil, who stands by; and a fourth, Robert Pinsky, is figured by his translation.
And some time not long after they move out, poets trained by universities to teach at a distance, no longer linked to payroll but logged on to PayPal, will post virtual shingles and set up shops of their own, which offer neither credits nor credentials. Norton, his publisher, which has made a lot of money providing phone-book sized anthologies in support of the union of poetry and the academy, has heard the mermaids tweeting. Singing School makes me feel very optimistic about post-break up poetry pedagogy.
Pfeiler, Martina. Sounds of Poetry. Contemporary American Performance Poets. By Martina Pfeiler. By Ricco Siasoco.
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