Why is poetry important?
The world needs—people need—the work of the imagination, in all forms. There’s no other way to adequately understand our lives; certainly not through financial market values, the dominant mode of the times I find myself in. The language of poetry invites us to think openly, to allow uncertainty, to accept multiplicity. It asks us to bring attention instead of to pay attention, to give (it, ourselves, ideas) time instead of to spend it. Matthew Zapruder writes about poetry as a “constructed conversation on the frontier of dreaming” in his great essay on, among other things, a John Ashbery poem, in Why Poetry. He notes that poetry can deepen not only our understanding of our lives but our very experience of life, and I think he’s right.
Showing posts with label Susan Gillis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Susan Gillis. Show all posts
Friday, 10 August 2018
Friday, 3 August 2018
Susan Gillis : part five
How does a poem begin?
In mystery, in observation, and in words. If I’m lucky, if I don’t try to pin it down too soon, if I’ve slept well, or badly, if I’m a little hungry, a little curious, a little patient, it may continue to emerge—it’s like we work together, poem and me, to coax it into being. So much can go wrong!
In mystery, in observation, and in words. If I’m lucky, if I don’t try to pin it down too soon, if I’ve slept well, or badly, if I’m a little hungry, a little curious, a little patient, it may continue to emerge—it’s like we work together, poem and me, to coax it into being. So much can go wrong!
Friday, 27 July 2018
Susan Gillis : part four
When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?
In a sense, yes, in that going back to certain poems and voices is a consistently reliable form of renewal. The specific poems and poets I go back change, though I always find things to confound me in Miłosz and things to waken my sense of mystery in Louise Glück. I went over and over the sonnets of Henry Howard Earl of Surrey for my second book, Volta, trying to imagine what they might be talking about if they were transposed to my time and place. This kind of renewal is also a habit; there’s usually some poet I sit down with over morning coffee, notebook at hand for moments of elation and argument. And there’s always something that isn’t poetry—essays or photographs or paintings or music or a walk or etc—but if I accidentally look at the news or social media, then the opposite of renewal happens: pressure sets in and my writing day is in jeopardy.
In a sense, yes, in that going back to certain poems and voices is a consistently reliable form of renewal. The specific poems and poets I go back change, though I always find things to confound me in Miłosz and things to waken my sense of mystery in Louise Glück. I went over and over the sonnets of Henry Howard Earl of Surrey for my second book, Volta, trying to imagine what they might be talking about if they were transposed to my time and place. This kind of renewal is also a habit; there’s usually some poet I sit down with over morning coffee, notebook at hand for moments of elation and argument. And there’s always something that isn’t poetry—essays or photographs or paintings or music or a walk or etc—but if I accidentally look at the news or social media, then the opposite of renewal happens: pressure sets in and my writing day is in jeopardy.
Friday, 20 July 2018
Susan Gillis : part three
How do you know when a poem is finished?
This is tricky! So often I think a poem is finished, or I’m finished with it, when really it’s just beginning. It’s very easy to know when a poem isn’t finished: reading it makes me itchy. Or maybe that’s when it is finished? One thing for sure, I know when a thing I hope might become a poem is spent, when it just fizzles out to nothing, like realizing suddenly I’m not obsessed anymore by some ordinary thing I’d been obsessing about, because it just doesn’t matter. But for a poem, knowing when it’s finished is almost as hard as knowing when it’s a poem.
This is tricky! So often I think a poem is finished, or I’m finished with it, when really it’s just beginning. It’s very easy to know when a poem isn’t finished: reading it makes me itchy. Or maybe that’s when it is finished? One thing for sure, I know when a thing I hope might become a poem is spent, when it just fizzles out to nothing, like realizing suddenly I’m not obsessed anymore by some ordinary thing I’d been obsessing about, because it just doesn’t matter. But for a poem, knowing when it’s finished is almost as hard as knowing when it’s a poem.
Friday, 13 July 2018
Susan Gillis : part two
How did you first engage with poetry?
I’m told that as a baby I gurgled to the figures on the toile-covered sofa in the house I grew up in, probably re-telling the legends and folk tales that were read to me by my mother and aunties and grandmothers. My mother saved an early document, “Mrs. Gillis’s Birthday Poem”—so formal!—and in high school and college I would hand in “essays” that were written as poem sequences. (I could only get away with this once in each class, though.) Being accused of plagiarism in high school when I wrote a decent-enough actual essay on The Rape of the Lock, because my essays up to then, on short stories, had been very middling, forced me to recognize (and articulate) that there was something I really, really liked about poetry, even if I didn’t love certain poems. The key that unlocked poetry as something I might write myself was my tenth-grade teacher Tony Johnstone’s mid-term note on my “daily creative writing” assignment: “I think you need a bigger notebook.”
I’m told that as a baby I gurgled to the figures on the toile-covered sofa in the house I grew up in, probably re-telling the legends and folk tales that were read to me by my mother and aunties and grandmothers. My mother saved an early document, “Mrs. Gillis’s Birthday Poem”—so formal!—and in high school and college I would hand in “essays” that were written as poem sequences. (I could only get away with this once in each class, though.) Being accused of plagiarism in high school when I wrote a decent-enough actual essay on The Rape of the Lock, because my essays up to then, on short stories, had been very middling, forced me to recognize (and articulate) that there was something I really, really liked about poetry, even if I didn’t love certain poems. The key that unlocked poetry as something I might write myself was my tenth-grade teacher Tony Johnstone’s mid-term note on my “daily creative writing” assignment: “I think you need a bigger notebook.”
Friday, 6 July 2018
Susan Gillis : part one
Photo credit: John Steffler
What are you working on?
Right now I’m in that strange yet familiar space of betweenness: waiting for a book that’s finished to come out (Yellow Crane, due Fall 2018 from Brick) and a thin folder of scratchings, false starts, chopped up nothing salad, and a few outtakes that may or may not lead somewhere. It’s uncomfortable space, and whatever I say about it -- “I want to write the distant haze!” or “I’m writing about childhood friendships” or “I’m trying to turn words into acrobats” – is a lie. So basically I’m working on being attentively receptive.
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