The habits of poetry - daily reading (2.13.20)

I was sweating bullets in my MFA Poetry seminar one afternoon.  

(This would have been in 1974.)  

Our guest author, Prof. Willis Barnestone, a well-respected and widely published scholar and poet on the Comparative Literature faculty at my university, had just asked a crucial question of us would-be professional poets: Which poets are you reading regularly?  He meant "professionally," as part of our training.

And each of us, in front of our assembled cohort, was expected to answer, in turn, around the seminar table.  About a dozen of us were enrolled in the program and, since the first to respond sat more than half way around the table from me, I had time to listen to my classmates' lists of read-worthy poets, but also time for my stomach to work its way up my throat.

You see, I hadn't been reading any "poets."  Of course, I read poems by those required in the syllabus of my other graduate courses (and not even all that many of them!).  But I didn't read "the poets."  I had enrolled in the MFA Poetry program to write poems, not read bodies of work.  The thought, until Prof. Barnestone asked that question, hadn't even occurred to me.

My classmates were "reading" Ginsberg and Corso, Adrienne Rich and Sonia Sanchez, the New York Poets and Amiri Baraka and Clarence Major and Anne Waldman and Derek Walcott and Donald Junkins and Robert Bly and Maxine Kumin and French poets (in French) and South American poets (in Spanish).  As the show & tell proceeded around the table toward me, it became clear that my classmates had been studying the careers of these writers, how they'd begun, how they'd learned and developed their art, how they'd become the successful writers they were at the time.  My classmates were mapping careers.

And so, I sat there sweating bullets, because my turn was coming inexorably round the table and I was going to have to reveal my slacker self, my clueless self.  Who was I going to say I'm reading as part of my poetic-artistic training?  Robert Frost?  T. S. Eliot?  John Crowe Ransom?  The dead writers in my Norton Anthology.  And not even "them," really, but highly edited and proscribed samples of their work.  I was going to have to show my ignorance and admit that I had no idea what I was doing in a graduate level creative writing program at a major midwestern university, that somebody had made a mistake letting me in the program.

Prof. Barnestone's question was a good one, all right.  No better question has ever been asked, I don't think, of any poet-in-training, or of anyone who takes the writing of poetry seriously.

DAILY OR FREQUENT READING OF POEMS IS VITAL TO YOUR OWN WRITING.

This statement seems obvious, doesn't it?  But I wonder how often how many of us make it a habit.  And I wonder whether we make it a studied habit: this week, I'm going to read lyric free verse poems so I can get a sense for voicings and rhythmical qualities that I might use in my own work; today I'm reading poems in translation so I can understand better the unique difficulties of diction; this month, I plan to read everything by this poet, in chronological order, to get a sense of how a poet develops.

But you might argue, Those classmates of yours read "for work," not for pleasure, which qualifies the experience.  That might be true.  Once you've begun to think about poems as something other than personal expression, it's harder to read others' work uncritically.  You keep a mind, an eye and an ear open for topics that resonate through poetry, for music and rhythm, for detail, for voice . . . and yes, for innovation, the off-note, the clashing image, the surprise tonic, the predictable finish, the thematic error, the weakness, the triumph . . . all things that make up a style and a voice that in turn make each poem and each reading an education.  Once you commit to Poetry, you approach poems not just to learn about life but about how to make better poems.

The habit I am describing is two-fold.  One, read often, read repetitively, and read critically, looking out for craft and technique as well as content.  Look for all the things we touch on in our Wednesday salon (you'll find the various elements in the blog entries here).  Ask yourself how the poems you're reading came to be--not what the writer experienced, necessarily, but what kinds of choices the writer likely made to bring the poem to the finished piece you're reading.  Two, read widely.  Read your W@1 mates' poems.  Read or re-read your Norton Anthology for historical perspectives (Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Bradstreet, Dickinson, Dryden, Milton, Baudelaire, Hughes, Brooks, Morrison).  Read "schools" and "movements" like the New York School, the Newyorican Poets, the Beats, the Southern Agrarians.  Read Feminist poetry from the '70s and Black poetry from the decade we just departed.  Read New Yorker poetry and the poetry of The American Poetry Review, and Poetry Magazine.  Read issues of Jubilat, Prairie Schooner, Field, Boulevard.

I have on a shelf several decades' worth of back issues of Sewanee Review that I take down from time to time and leaf through.  I forget how I came by these.  I find there poems by, yes, T.S. Eliot and H.D. and Marianne Moore and others written and published during their prime; as well as poems representing the conservative "Fugitive" school of the '40s and '50s.  And I find in these issues poems by people I've never heard of, who never made it in the poetry world--academics, probably--but whose poems are an education to read at this three-quarter century remove, if not always a pleasure.

My point can be stated more directly, I guess.  You write only as well and as widely as you read.

So get to it.  :-)