James Arthur : part five

Why is poetry important? 

Writing a good poem means capturing truth through language. To do that, you have to avoid cliché and you need to pry open your unexamined habits of thought -- so writing a poem, or interpreting one, involves analytical thinking and the precise control of language. The arts in general encourage empathy, curiosity, and imagination.

It’s easy to undervalue those things because their benefits are hard to quantify, but Donald Trump could not have been elected President of the United States if there hadn’t been a widespread failure of empathy, analytical thought, and attention to the nuances of language. In my life as a creative writing professor, I sometimes get students to read George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” in which he writes, “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible … Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” Orwell wrote that in 1945, but it remains true.

James Arthur : part four

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

It depends on what I’m correcting against -- I feel that I’m always correcting against something -- but mostly I go back to the books and poems that remind me to bring generosity, spontaneity, and vulnerability into my own writing. One poem I love is Heather McHugh’s “What He Thought” and another is “Train to Dublin” by Louis MacNeice. Reading Kenneth Koch’s “To Life” always makes me want to write. Same with “All Creation Wept” by Melissa Range.

James Arthur : part three

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

For me, one of the challenges of writing poetry is that a poet needs to use language in a way that’s counterintuitive. Outside of art, in a non-literary context, people use words to dispel ambiguity, to articulate opinions, to explain abstract ideas, and to summarize. Even when we’re children, much of our language education trains us to do these things. But poems are successful only if they appeal to the reader’s imagination, so a poet usually needs to resist the urge to summarize, and often needs to withhold judgment, especially if that judgment would reduce a poem’s range of implication or would come in place of the raw sensory data that helps readers imagine whatever is being described. That’s why students in creative writing workshops are always being told to avoid abstractions: to show, not tell.

At the same time, the most skillful poets do find ways to use the full resources of their language, including abstractions such as “soul,” “heavens,” and “world”: all three of those words appear in Dickinson’s “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” but the context around them (“Then Space - began to toll, / As all the Heavens were a Bell”) makes them strange and vivid. John Ashbery’s “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name” defies almost every workshop maxim that exists, but it’s a brilliant piece of writing.

James Arthur : part two

How important is music to your poetry?

Very! When I first began writing I wanted to be a novelist, maybe because I wrongly believed that writing fiction would come more naturally to me than writing poetry, but after a few years I realized that what I really love are not characters and narrative, but the sound of language itself. Rhythmical speech has a hypnotic power, something that even young children experience when they encounter it in nursery rhymes, children’s books, and lullabies, and that same power acts on us when we hear a great poem read out loud. A few poems that I especially enjoy hearing are Hopkins’ “The Windhover,” Millay’s “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,” and Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West.”

But it’s never just a matter of working each line up into maximum aural richness: the point is to make the poem’s aurality expressive, so that sound and semantic meaning operate in meaningful relationship to one another, sometimes drawing together, sometimes pulling apart.

James Arthur : part one

Canadian-American poet James Arthur is the author of The Suicide’s Son (Véhicule Press 2019) and Charms Against Lightning (Copper Canyon Press, 2012.) His poems have also appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Review of Books, The American Poetry Review, The New Republic, and The London Review of Books. He has received the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, a Hodder Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship, a Discovery/The Nation Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship to Northern Ireland, and a Visiting Fellowship at Exeter College, Oxford. Arthur lives in Baltimore, where he teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Photo credit: Summer Greer

How does a poem begin?

My poems usually begin in a word or a phrase whose sound I like, but whose full significance becomes clear to me only as I write the poem. Occasionally I begin by wanting to express a particular theme or idea, but not often, and when I do, the process of making the poem usually involves letting go of that first idea so the poem can grow in directions I haven’t anticipated. That’s part of the pleasure of writing: being surprised by what emerges on the page.