Robert Hogg : part three

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

Poetry is unique. It has an incisiveness that prose seldom attains. I have never abandoned the lyric, despite the battering it has had over the past several decades. I have written numerous narrative poems as well, but in essence, the lyric underpins even these poems, and hopefully gives them their immediacy. And that, perhaps, immediacy, is the second thing poetry can accomplish. We owe much to Pound and his Imagist accomplices for their recognition of this great value in poetry, and particularly the short, imagistic poem. It is no accident, I don’t think, that Imagism had its heyday not long after the invention of photography, and the two, along with motion pictures, rose to prominence coincidentally. When Pound ‘invented’ what he called the Ideogrammic method of composition, he set the stage for a poetics which would try to capture not just a vivid picture of life, but the leaps and bounds of activity which we might now, since Whitehead, subsume under the term Event. Olson, of course, sought to take this processual approach to nature a step further with his Projective Verse, a perspective which placed the poet not outside, but smack in the middle of the physical world, participant, player, and recorder all at once. When poetry is that engaged in the moment—however long a duration that may span—then there is an urgency to find a language commensurate with that world in flux. We can of course revert to more comfortable modalities. But there is now and forever that pressure of reality, to steal a phrase from Wallace Stevens, which demands our recognition. By adhering to that the poet can, as Olson says, be “contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share.” To me, that is the most profound statement in Olson’s Projective Verse essay, and points unequivocally to what poetry alone can achieve.