Response to Another Lecture

I love poetry of all sorts--from Homer to Wordsworth to Roethke to Mary Oliver--and I often compose poems of my own: often enigmatic things recording the emotional detritus of various mashed-up events. My poems are usually written in a stampede of feeling; personal and cathartic, meant really just for my sanity. This semester, however, I am taking a creative writing class in which my poetry is read and critiqued by a less intimate audience. These poems cannot meander through allusions to personal jokes, experiences, or motifs--they cannot be dense with the shorthand of intimate understanding. Susan Howe, in her February 21st lecture, “Billy Collins and the House of American Poetry,” touched upon this topic. She related some of the words of former Poet Laureate Billy Collins: an accessible poem has a clear entrance, a welcome mat. Poetry is written to a reader, rather than to the writer. A poem must guide a reader along and try to interrupt some silence in readers’ lives. I found this advice particularly apropos as a poet-to-other-readers this semester, and will guide future poetry writing and editing with Collins' and Howe’s advice. There is little good in poetry that simply masquerades around issues--metaphor has its place, but not metaphor incognito. My poetry will no longer (as far as I am dressing it) attempt to prance around in black cape and hourglass eye-mask underneath a cumbersome Warhol-esque tomato soup can costume. That is not a lazy statement. This conviction will not evanesce! I type this confidently, not only because of the statement’s inherent worthiness, but also for the grade it’s follow-through will give me in my creative writing class.