How important is music to your poetry?
My poems used to be far more flowery and abstract and their music was louder. Lately, I go for more subtle sounds, but the sonic quality is always something that separates prose from poetry to me. I will choose a word for its ping within the poem as well as its meaning. People always say poems can be like little spells or chants if the music is hit upon well. But like anything, it can be slight or heavy. Playing with that dynamic is half the fun of being a poet.
Friday, 31 January 2020
Thursday, 30 January 2020
emilie kneifel : part three
How important is music to your poetry?
i learned to speak french phonetically, so i am always noticing inflection, sonic overlap, so-called puns (though i think there’s more to wordplay than kitsch), etc. because my brain is still attuned to their significance. i think it’s still waiting to learn something from them.
let me explain. a phoneme is the smallest perceptible unit of sound that distinguishes word A from word B in a particular language. e.g. my mom often says (and okay i also sometimes say) “hate” instead of “eight.” in english, that h sound is a phoneme — see how lil “h” changes the meaning of an entire word? — but in french it isn’t. my mom can’t really hear the difference (this is because when hearing babies acquire language, they have to begin to ignore insignificant sounds to be able to hear the juicy important ones) but, being bilingual from birth, i can. being able to notice this kind of minutiae is probably a clue as to why incremental sound is so important to me. not because i’m trying to be cutesy, but because, at the level of the word, minute sonic differences actually create entire identity shifts. just a huh! just a huh.
i learned to speak french phonetically, so i am always noticing inflection, sonic overlap, so-called puns (though i think there’s more to wordplay than kitsch), etc. because my brain is still attuned to their significance. i think it’s still waiting to learn something from them.
let me explain. a phoneme is the smallest perceptible unit of sound that distinguishes word A from word B in a particular language. e.g. my mom often says (and okay i also sometimes say) “hate” instead of “eight.” in english, that h sound is a phoneme — see how lil “h” changes the meaning of an entire word? — but in french it isn’t. my mom can’t really hear the difference (this is because when hearing babies acquire language, they have to begin to ignore insignificant sounds to be able to hear the juicy important ones) but, being bilingual from birth, i can. being able to notice this kind of minutiae is probably a clue as to why incremental sound is so important to me. not because i’m trying to be cutesy, but because, at the level of the word, minute sonic differences actually create entire identity shifts. just a huh! just a huh.
Wednesday, 29 January 2020
James Dunnigan : part four
What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
I have to admit, few poets have. There are many novelists: Balzac, Faulkner, Sebald, Tolstoy. I think a poet is better served reading other kinds of writing, novels, nonfiction, encyclopedia etc, and viewing other media, painting, film, sculpture, installations, so on so forth. This is finding what poetry can do by understanding first what other art forms can do; finding your way to the edges of poetry from the outside rather than the opposite. This I think is what Anne Carson does and what makes her work so boundlessly appealing to so many people. From Eros the Bittersweet onward, she often sources the form and tone of her work outside of what is generally thought to be ‘poetic’, even when she draws it from philology which while it studies ancient poetry is hardly a ‘poetic’ business. In a world where many people think of a poem as a kind of little clockwork machine, the pleasure of which is in figuring out the mechanism, formal, ideological or otherwise, she has not only electrified and digitized the machine, but, in fact, seems to be getting rid of the machine altogether in favour of the raw current or electrical signal.
Otherwise as was the case with Dr. Carson I think the most important poetic encounter of my life so far has been with the ancients: in my case not with the Greeks but with one particular Roman poet, Virgil, whose Aeneid single-handedly convinced me to start studying Latin, woefully belatedly, in my undergrad years. Virgil’s epic is an electrifying treatise on the concept of ideology in the Althusserian sense, operatic, tragic, brutal as iron and told in lines as heavy and ductile as gold. It also saved my life.
I have to admit, few poets have. There are many novelists: Balzac, Faulkner, Sebald, Tolstoy. I think a poet is better served reading other kinds of writing, novels, nonfiction, encyclopedia etc, and viewing other media, painting, film, sculpture, installations, so on so forth. This is finding what poetry can do by understanding first what other art forms can do; finding your way to the edges of poetry from the outside rather than the opposite. This I think is what Anne Carson does and what makes her work so boundlessly appealing to so many people. From Eros the Bittersweet onward, she often sources the form and tone of her work outside of what is generally thought to be ‘poetic’, even when she draws it from philology which while it studies ancient poetry is hardly a ‘poetic’ business. In a world where many people think of a poem as a kind of little clockwork machine, the pleasure of which is in figuring out the mechanism, formal, ideological or otherwise, she has not only electrified and digitized the machine, but, in fact, seems to be getting rid of the machine altogether in favour of the raw current or electrical signal.
Otherwise as was the case with Dr. Carson I think the most important poetic encounter of my life so far has been with the ancients: in my case not with the Greeks but with one particular Roman poet, Virgil, whose Aeneid single-handedly convinced me to start studying Latin, woefully belatedly, in my undergrad years. Virgil’s epic is an electrifying treatise on the concept of ideology in the Althusserian sense, operatic, tragic, brutal as iron and told in lines as heavy and ductile as gold. It also saved my life.
Tuesday, 28 January 2020
Chris Banks : part two
Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?
This is a great question. I feel like I understood more about poetry fifteen years ago than I do now. I started out as a deeply lyric, meditational poet who used narrative as the pilot-light of every poem. Now, I like poems that do not mine memory so much as the imagination. The imagination is much more important to me now. Every poet after the first few books has to ask themselves: what do I do when I run out of the past? Out of childhood experiences? It can become a crisis of voice and some people never get past it. My answer, of course, is when you run out of the past you are left with the goods. My poems have become much more surreal, more associational, more mischievous, more wondrous. I love all my books and I am very proud of them. However, I am much more interested in creating a surprising experience, one less rooted in a particular time or place, for a reader nowawdays. Who knows where my poems will lead me next? I just follow where my imagination leads me.
This is a great question. I feel like I understood more about poetry fifteen years ago than I do now. I started out as a deeply lyric, meditational poet who used narrative as the pilot-light of every poem. Now, I like poems that do not mine memory so much as the imagination. The imagination is much more important to me now. Every poet after the first few books has to ask themselves: what do I do when I run out of the past? Out of childhood experiences? It can become a crisis of voice and some people never get past it. My answer, of course, is when you run out of the past you are left with the goods. My poems have become much more surreal, more associational, more mischievous, more wondrous. I love all my books and I am very proud of them. However, I am much more interested in creating a surprising experience, one less rooted in a particular time or place, for a reader nowawdays. Who knows where my poems will lead me next? I just follow where my imagination leads me.
Evelína Kolářová : part five
What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?
The absolutely most banal thing – finding time to work on my writing. Escaping the real life and finding time and place to write.
The absolutely most banal thing – finding time to work on my writing. Escaping the real life and finding time and place to write.
Monday, 27 January 2020
katie o’brien : part two
How does a poem begin?
a turn of phrase, wonky spelling, or clever pronunciation gets stuck in my head and won’t let me forget about it. I play.
a turn of phrase, wonky spelling, or clever pronunciation gets stuck in my head and won’t let me forget about it. I play.
Priscilla Green : part two
What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?
The vulnerability it entails. A lot of myself goes into my prose, but it’s all mixed in with the other stuff – the people in my life, society, etc. A poem, however, is all me, in the most genuine and undisguised form I can ever exist.
The vulnerability it entails. A lot of myself goes into my prose, but it’s all mixed in with the other stuff – the people in my life, society, etc. A poem, however, is all me, in the most genuine and undisguised form I can ever exist.
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