SUMMARY OF COURSE CONTENT
Every musician has a story like this. For years they hunched over the piano, or held the violin at their chin and the crick of their shoulders. They practiced scales, perfected arpeggio leaps, studied the theory of music and composition, memorized suites and torch songs, standards, interludes, and timed to the metronome their stamping feet. Before they really began to play, they had to learn the tradition and the physicality of their instruments; they had to learn to make a reed; to hear the sharps and flats; to change broken strings. They had to be mechanics and maestros. Then, they made music.
Why do we assume it isn’t the same for us? Even at the graduate level, far too many poets work selectively in safe parameters, reading the same writers over and over, and writing the same kind of poem. What is the poet’s instrument? It is as much the ear as it is the imagination. While I do not write exclusively formal poetry, I learned a love for it long after graduate school was over. While I have never written an epic, my favorite poems are epics: Gilgamesh, Gawain and the Green Knight, The Divine Comedy, The Iliad, and Song of Myself. I found out, particularly late (because I, like many poets, came to poetry first by writing it, not reading it) that I am a portion of a tradition out of which anything I write or think must come. By responding to it, I echo it. By departing it, I evoke it. I can’t escape my tradition; I embody it in words, lines, ideas, sentiments, and tone.
To manipulate and/or converse with the common assumptions and concerns of our readers, we have to learn tradition. We have to turn and look at what we are, before we write out into far-flung space. Even to reject tradition, we have to write our letter to the King and make the break; and we have to use the King’s language. Or, if we don’t feel so diplomatic, we have to learn about the King’s defenses and his weapons, when we use our weapons on the King.
As a model of a poet who understands all this, I look to Seamus Heaney, who writes today in free verse and in traditional forms when it suits him. All his forms are organic – they rise from the subject matter, and the subject matter rises from them. As a jazz trumpeter, Winton Marsalis does the same: he plays classical and jazz, never limiting himself to one view musically. He finds a vehicle for beauty in the strict and in the open-ended. In this course we will spend about 2/3 of every class workshopping poems; the other third will go to digging deep into the roots of our tradition. My hope is that you’ll leave the course with enough background to make informed decisions on the sounds and sense of your poems. My hope is that you’ll walk away with more materials; a more developed ear. Louis Armstrong once said, “My hobby...is using a lot of scotch tape... [I] pick out different things...and piece them together and make a little story of my own.”