The excesses of the world are summed up in poetry. There are times when I am listening to poets and thinking, do you honestly believe that you are better than me because you write poems? They say things like poetry is what prose wishes it was. I loved Josh Poteat, after a round of this kind of talk he says, "soccer and poetry are not revered here (America)." Cheryl turns to him and says, "you just lumped those two together," as if this were something bad.
Someone brought up some famous poet who won all kinds of prizes and was offered a professorship at Harvard etc. and how when he died a reporter went to interview a colleague of this man and asked about his poetry. The colleague was shocked, "The man wrote poetry?"
Josh says, "It's not a thing you want to admit to other people." If he had been asked what he was doing tonight, "I'm giving a panel discussion on poetry, but I don't know how impressive that is."
David Wojan said when people are doing the small talk thing and ask him what he does he says, "I've written poetry." That's a conversation stopper.
The interviews went on in this vein for a while before moving onto to how difficult it is to write poetry. David said that most of the time it is like standing in the rain hoping for lighting. You only get it once but you're standing out there for months waiting for that moment. All of them said you have to write, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite... Prose writers say the same thing. Anything you want to be good at requires work, practice, and some talent, but mostly work.
They didn't discuss the one thing I wanted to hear about which was poems as short stories. I enjoy reading this type of poetry. This overly emotional stuff --my thoughts are in the clouds, let me bring you there too, oh the sun, the water, the tears upon my cheeks, do you hear the gentle whisper of the bluebird's wings-- to me this is just too much. I like the story poems, you know the one Ron wrote about this son who took his mother to the beach because she had had a stroke and hated the beach and he told her horror stories because she couldn't talk back. Then later Ron's mother has a stroke and people think he wrote this poem because that's what he did to his mother and really hate him for this, but he didn't do this to her. The poem was written and published before she ever had a stroke.
So poetry is not where I am at. It is not what I will write because in all honesty language is not what I am passionate about. I like stories but the words used to tell them? I'm fine with everyday language. Opine, who opines upon a subject? Say, tell me what you think, not can you opine about...
Cheryl, "Because we use words every day there's a curtain of complacency about them and we forget that they are art."
David quoting Jeffery Hill, "public toilets should accessible not poems."
Josh, "poems can be like junk mail-- I like old things, crumbling things, so it's good I like Richmond."
Ron, "one good thing about poetry -- usually you don't have deadlines."
