
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?
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

I’m heading to Oregon tomorrow, and I can’t get Bob Kaufman out of my head.
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.)
The big poetry news this week (besides the bizarre “poetry jam” over at the White House) is Derek Walcott’s withdrawal from the Oxford poetry race due to an anonymous letter-writing campaign detailing sexual harassment claims against him.
The campaign brought to light allegations from the Nobel-laureate’s time at Harvard. According to the New York Times:
The charges of sexual harassment date back nearly 30 years and were detailed in the book ‘The Lecherous Professor: Sexual Harassment on Campus,’ by Billie Wright Dziech and Linda Weiner — excerpts of which were sent in the anonymous packages. They describe how, in 1982, Mr. Walcott was accused of saying a number of provocative things to a woman who was a student in his poetry workshop at Harvard, including ‘Would you make love to me if I asked you?’
When she rebuffed him, the student said, he gave her a C grade.
Concluding in 1982 that the complaint had merit, Harvard reprimanded Mr. Walcott and changed the student’s grade from C to ‘Pass.’”
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:
My thoughts re John Updike’s non-poetry bear some relation to Jason’s accidental and deliberate poetry meditations. I had problems w both those distinction because all poetry seems to me to be in the John Ashbery sense “managed chance” and so gets subsumed into “poetry” pretty quick. I mean it to seem accidental. And the problem with the deliberate poetry category was August’s relationship to content. Not only did it bug me that he talked about the little professor but when a poem has a rhetorical quest it seems you are really hanging a kick me sign on your butt. One can agree or disagree, basically do everything but experience the poem. I don’t think a poem has a point. It felt like both August and the little professor do. That’s a big difference, to me
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?
Today I went to visit my mother, Margaret Rockwell Finch, who turned 88 a few weeks ago. As always lately, she showed me a new poem. Maggie was my first model of a

Margaret Rockwell Finch, 1961
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Cathy Halley
Michael Marcinkowski
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