David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: From the Earth to the Stars Part One
When you’re a diver, you’re only a tourist of the air.
...moreWhen you’re a diver, you’re only a tourist of the air.
...moreAll that floated there was the mystery. In the presence of all that, I discovered too that there are mysteries residing in the consciousness of my own mind that I don’t want to get out of the way of.
...moreI was becoming awed by the wide horizon of the speech that arose out of an individual life lived in a single era and generation. I was becoming attracted to the writer’s creativity.
...moreJust as a body, like water, retains no constant shape, so in memory there are no constant conditions.
...more[Boston] was a map out of the damage of my self-awareness and into some new evidence of beauty.
...moreThis was the first pure poetry I ever knew. Sung out loud more or less to no one on a theme of longing. Wife. Sons. Rags. Snow. Stalks of corn.
...moreThe only way I can put it is, no American poet I have ever met regardless of disposition or poetics has disliked Frank Stanford’s poems.
...moreA poet lives through the writing of poems inside his or her animal or sexual sides as a way to honor that aspect of our humanity.
...more…today’s poetry apologists for the Iraq war just keep repeating their intelligence error odes. Wouldn’t it be better, however, if they would address the horror of the failed effort in Iraq?
...moreWriting requires sustained attention to what figures, disfigures, and refigures our imaginations and includes a vision that takes every experience into account.
...moreIsn’t it worth wondering, then, where does a poem take you after it calls you in, calls you from your life into your creative psyche?
...moreMy friends, I’m deeply humbled by the opportunity to speak before the most important poetic body in the world, the Internet.
Every once in a while over a period of a few weeks or more I compile some objectives for poetry in the form of a list, something I call one-sentence lectures.
...moreAnyone writing a poem knows that you first open yourself and then a poem builds from what you yield. As a poet, you are the carrier of life.
...morePoetry is an art spoken, as if sung, in relation to other human beings.
...moreDavid Biespiel’s Poetry Wire returns with a powerful take on fascism and violence and postmodernism.
...moreAs a poet, you seek to blend your imagination with what you are both witnessing and imagining: “The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person.”
...moreBecoming a poet means to think about delight and distress with equal poise. Becoming a poet means to embrace the child of your imagination where resentment is understood.
...moreBecoming a poet means locating what images and symbols, what argument and figuration, are best suited to convey the aspects of change you most want to reveal through your writing.
...moreBecoming a poet means writing past the danger each and every time you feel that you’re struggling with writing a poem.
...moreWhen you trust the wisdom from the art of poetry as a guide to writing your new poems, you put your writing in service of something larger than your own ambitions and impulses.
...moreWhen you do not allow yourself to follow your impulses, it’s not that you are eluding or destroying those impulses. Instead, you’re converting what was potentially necessary to your imagination into something darker, less stable, and more insidious.
...moreAs a poet you are called to be absorbed and aroused and enchanted and intoxicated and beguiled. You embrace occasions that leave you seduced and transfixed, overpowered and enraptured.
...moreThere’s a unitary circulation between poet and reader. The poet dwells in the gap between dream and waking, and the reader is offered entryway to become alive and enlivened.
...moreWhile poetry reveals what is fantastic and dangerous, a poem is not a fairytale escape. The triumphs in a poem are foremost triumphs of the imagination more so than the soul.
...moreThe ritual of poetic discovery is a reanimation of the whole metaphor of human dream and reason, irrationality and rationality, the ancient and the contemporary, the organic and the artifice.
...moreEvery time you write a poem, you’re learning to become a poet once again. Your writing imitates not the banal sequence from life to death, but instead imitates a descent into and out of a new womb of clarity.
...morePoetry Wire continues its exploration of how one might become a poet in the modern world, how one traverses between the creative realm and daily experience.
...moreWith this column, Poetry Wire begins a multi-part exploration of how you might become a poet in the modern world.
...moreThis past Sunday Teju Cole reviewed in the New York Times Derek Walcott’s The Poetry of Derek Walcott: 1948-2013, selected by Glyn Maxwell and published by FSG. The book is over 600 pages and traverses more than 50 years with one of the world’s great living poets. I can see why the Times asked Cole […]
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