Don Share

Standing and waving

The idea that poets and novelists possess separate and incompatible temperaments, like fortune-tellers and pharmacists, that poets are preoccupied with language (“for the life of the language”) while novelists are engrossed by society (“for the betterment of the world”), is a commonplace—perhaps also a consequence—of the paced battlements of the contemporary literary world. In this account, poets and novelists are not merely working at different kinds of writing. Their minds also work differently. Poets are introspective, miniature, and self-fascinating (“I am the personal,” Wallace Stevens declares in “Bantams in Pine-Woods”). Novelists are expansive, systematic, prone to looking through other people’s mail. Novelists are hardy gossips, bred to realism. Poets are post-Romantic waifs of imagination. Poets’ thoughts move cyclically, in rich depths of metaphor, while novelists’ thoughts accumulate in a straight line. The two are unsuited to each other’s work, because—as a commenter writes on the literary blog “Ward Six”—poets “don’t think in terms of story, they think in rhythmic images and symbols, just as novelists, when they try to write poetry, are plodding and linear.”

Is there any reason to believe that this is true?

05.18.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (53)

Annie Finch

Eileen and Me (1982)

Annie Finch and Alix Baer 1980 ( photo: J. Miller)

05.18.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

Eileen Myles

Me & Annie & AC (1982)

I think David Rattray introduced Annie Finch & I and I already knew AC Chubb, a saxophone player who I had a crush on. And I had received a grant that year for poetry so naturally I bought an electric bass. It was kind of hot for poets at that moment to be in a band. I had one lesson with Mark a guy I generally got very drunk with and the lesson went well and that was the end of my tutelage. It was a noise band moment in the East Village so not being able to play was not a liability. It was a state of nature and an aesthetic statement. I think Annie got us this gig and I think Annie

05.18.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (8)

Jason Guriel

Canadian Content on Harriet Plummets

With this post, I reach the end of my run at Harriet. Many thanks to the Poetry Foundation for the invitation to blog and to the other bloggers for their comments and to all of the readers. I hope to find more Canadians on Harriet sooner rather than later – or perhaps a portfolio committed to Canadian poetry in some future issue of the print magazine. (At the very least, I predict a good year for Canadians; there are many good collections of poems being published this year, up here, and the Toronto Blue Jays, who are first in the A.L. East, trounced the Yankees soundly last night.)

05.13.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (13)

Jason Guriel

Talismans

Some time ago, in the spirit of good fun, I asked the denizens of Harriet what was on their desks and – perhaps understandably – reaped few responses. What does it matter, the cluttered context in which a writer gets her writing done? Who wants to confess to the favourite Troll doll that stands watch over a keyboard? Nevertheless, I was happy to read the note that trailed a Geoffrey Brock translation, in the April issue of the print magazine:

05.13.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (48)

Jason Guriel

Poetry Is

Recently, over at Slate, John Dickerson posed a challenge to readers: define the game of baseball in 150 words or less. Dickerson had been trying to figure out how to explain baseball to his six year-old son, without losing the son’s attention. He got many responses, which got me thinking: how would one (e.g. a teacher or a parent) define poetry to a six year-old, quickly, without losing the six year-old’s attention?

05.11.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (28)